Solidarity economy, co-construction, emerging public action – ESCAPE

The initiatives that have come to be gathered under the name of solidarity economy provide new forms of organization and solutions to ecological and social problems. Most of them take the status of non-profit organzations and are characterized by the emphasis placed on the purpose of production and by the fact that they encompass both economic and political dimensions. Indeed, the legitimacy of solidarity economy cannot emanate from the only virtue of economic practices ; it can only be conquered if its members express themselves forcefully, which they have begun to do by structuring political arenas and participating into debates. Above all, its future is linked to the echo encountered with its public partners.
This new generation of initiatives experience problems with the institutional framework, especially since there is a shift from tutelary regulation (subsidies to structures) to competitive regulation (call for tenders, call for projects). However, faced with the insufficiency of these two types of regulations an agreed regulation emerges whose criteria are co-developed between associations and public authorities. This is designated under the term of co-construction which appears in several legislative texts in the mid-2010s.
The growing presence of this notion leads to formulate the scientific and societal question of an in-depth assessment of the co-construction of public action in the field of social and solidarity economy by relying on the analysis of several experimentation in different territories. It is therefore a question of making this assessment paying a particular attention to solidarity innovations and associations and to proceed to a cross-sectional analysis with the three categories of actors involved: non-profit organizations, public authorities ad researchers.