L’expérimentation de politique publique en réponse aux problèmes pernicieux vue comme une « mise en dispositif »

Public policy experimentation in response to wicked problems as a process of "dispositive formation". To address the "wicked problems" of public policy, experimentation is frequently used to understand and assess the value of organizational innovations. To better grasp the deployment of such experiments within a public governance context involving multiple stakeholders and diverse issues, this article draws on the Foucauldian framework of "dispositive" to study the implementation of the central measure of an experiment conducted in the field of elderly loss of autonomy: the Territorial Support Coordination (CTA in French) within the Paerpa experiment. Processes of "dispositive formation" are studied in two experimental territories. They highlight that the deployment of an experiment diverges from traditional project management, involving a continuous design process guided by the assemblage of heterogeneous elements. This process is distributed among various actors and unfolds across three levels (institutional, project, and operational). The use of this theoretical framework makes visible the role of spatial, discursive, and instrumental elements, as well as the critical importance of integrating the new dispositive with pre-existing ones.