Caillosse, Jacques

Law and Assessment - 2010.


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This article focuses on the “mixed practices” of law and evaluation in the implementation of public actions that have been in place in France since the 1990s. For the past twenty years, public policy laws have been undergoing an identity change that is no stranger to developments in public administration, whereas evaluation practices have entered into an institutionalisation phase. Before examining eventual relationships between law and evaluation, the very conditions of the possibility of such an undertaking will be evoked. Once this preliminary work is accomplished, we shall address the transpositions operating between these two procedures: that of the Jurist and that of the Evaluator. This article depicts that which the law shows of evaluation (its status has evolved in legal texts), and that which evaluation shows of the law, which becomes, in turn, an assessable production. In the end, we observe a redistribution of roles in public action: more and more, jurists must become evaluators and evaluators must borrow a part of jurists’ identity.