Experimentations, Evaluations, and Pluralism: An Editorial[Expérimentations, évaluations et pluralisme. Edito]

The reflections in this editorial highlight the value of cross-disciplinary use of the social sciences: institutionalist political economy research is useful for revealing critiques relating to the internal or external validity of evaluative studies, and for identifying the institutions that contribute, through their position, to valuation powers. The rich work of other social sciences, particularly sociology and political science, is essential for repopulating actor analyses and thus distancing ourselves from narratives that are seductive in logic (e.g., sequentialism) but often, de facto, detached from reality. The evaluation of a public policy can never be reduced to an exercise in measuring impact against objectives that are perfectly identified ex ante. This impossibility calls for a good dose of reflexivity on the coherence of the objectives set and on the entire normative framework and social representations that underpin them. However, this type of questioning can only be deployed in a process that hybridizes the social sciences and brings the elements of knowledge and intelligibility produced into a cross-cutting and pluralistic debate. It is a question of reconnecting with scientific pluralism and democracy.