Public policies, Evaluation, and Public participation, in the impact of Information technologies

CATHERINE GREMION

Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, CNRS, France

This paper would like to focus on the impact on participation of information technologies at two levels, in the case of France, the local and municipal level, and the National level. 1-Cities governance and information technologies. A major chance occurred in France in 1982, the Descentralisation laws, giving a new autonomy and more powers to cities and Mayors. This reform intended to increase democracy at local level, and tighten the links between elected officials and the people. The result was by many aspects disappointing, and many analysts could speak of a crisis of democracy. The newly elected mayors and councils took the opportunity to govern without consulting, and keep the main decisions and policies secret. The "communication" of the cities was a channel for publicity and selective information, in fact used to prevent any opposition to raise. The new information technologies, and more specifically access to Internet is a possible path to change in that field. Many cities start to organise interactive communication with their electorate, and citizens. The secrecy of decision making progress may be weakened by access to such channels of informations, and they might contribute to the revival of some kind of local democratic participacion. 2- National public policies, Evaluation, and participation Evaluation in France is a new trend of local as well as national administration. Some state Institutions did write reports which could appear as "evaluations" even if they were mainly control organs, the Cour des Comptes for instance. Such reports, as those written by the Conseil InterministÚriel and Conscil scientifique de L'Evaluation remained limited to inner circles of public administration, and political area. Their access to basic citizens remained unusual, and the relations of their content in National press or mass media extremely selective. The new tendency to give more publicity to the actions of such institutions may lead to a new capacity for the citizens to be active in the field of problems which remained hidden. The French Cour des Comptes recently has decided to open the public, through Internet, its reports. The new Conceil Nacional de L'Evaluation, created in 1999 in charge of evaluation of public policies (concerning environment, public health, housing or employment) will have as a major mission the communication to the public of the results of such analysis. The question of the complementarity of channels like internet, newspapers, radio and TV to create interaction between decision makers and the public is thus open, we will try to discuss it.




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