Social and solidarity economy and the co-construction of a new field of local public policies in France

This paper proposes to come back to the construction of local policies in favour of social and solidarity economy (SSE) in France. It is first of all a question of demonstrating how coalitions of elected representatives, technicians, social entrepreneurs, heads of local networks and local managers of support and financing structures have participated in the consolidation of the "social and solidarity economy" which is a French terminological singularity. In the 2000s, when a national policy was lacking, it was at the level of local governments that a public action dedicated to SSE was experimented. New thematic and specific support instruments were then put in place without reference to the normative framework that has become since July 2014 the law on SSE. Then, SSE policies are implemented in tension between a policy of recognition through the implementation of specific instruments and the will to act transversally on the main challenges of the territory (housing, employment, mobility, social cohesion, culture, sustainable development, etc.). Finally, elected representatives and actors of local SSE policies have claimed and experimented processes of coconstruction of public action whose contexts, conditions and achievements we propose to highlight.