Searching for a macro cognitive approach to explain policy change. The “referentiel“ debate

Résumé 0

This article examines how the article penned by Pierre Muller, “Les approches cognitives des politiques publiques“ ( Revue française de science politique, 50 (2), April 2000, p. 189-208), has been at the forefront of the struggle to establish public policy analysis as an essential subfield of political science. We shall look at the major issues of the socio-political order, on the one hand, and of the autonomy of public policy, on the other, that underpin his research problematic centered around the idea of the référentiel, or cognitive and normative macro frame of reference. We shall also revisit certain dimensions of this analysis, including how it differs from other competing theories, and provide an overview of the debate about the référentiel which, unlike some other ideas spearheaded by Muller, has largely lost its central position in the political sociology of public policy. The paper shows how rescaling processes and the multiplications of actors and policies have made less relevant the search for a macro cognitive and normative framework within a national settings. This has led to the development of approaches in terms of discourses, ideas argumentations, more limited and situations. However, the climate crisis might bring back the question of the “global“.