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This article analyses the consequences of government regulations in the care home sector, in particular for the 29.3% of care homes that are part of the social and solidarity economy (SSE). The article is based on a survey conducted in the Loire region and a review of government and independent reports. Founded on market principles, government regulations have introduced competition among care homes and the standardisation of their practices as they increasingly provide medicalised health care. These developments undermine the finances of SSE care homes and run counter to their traditional practices and values. SSE organisations have been driven to incorporate strategies from the private sector and even private finance. As a result, they have been forced into a process of consolidation and financialization.

Innovation policies grew in the last ten years, both towards a regional and a more indirect and infrastructural approach. Nevertheless, the question about their evaluation is still open, because of the several challenges and high costs linked to them. To clarify this problem, the present work analyzes two realities very similar : a French Competition Pole, localized in PACA, and the Canavese area, in Piedmont, Italy. A double, quantitative and qualitative, methodology has been applied in both of them to verify the relevance of some projects, sustaining the local SMEs growth, with the area development and their correlation with the considered SMEs performances. The results are highly varying because of the typology of projects, of services and of involved units, but they all underline the sure positive impact, on the involved SMEs, of the services realized, in the short time, and the more uncertain effects in the long period. These last depend on a lot of factors, related to the technological and economical status of the firms.

Keywords: Politiques pour l'innovation, Évaluation, Développement local, Performances d'entreprise

In recent years, strongly critical discourses of the Quiet Revolution's institutional legacy have appeared in Québec. This article undertakes a sustained examination of these discourses, grouped under the neoliberal and postmodern banners. Mainly preoccupied with the economic consequences of the statism inherited from the Quiet Revolution, the discourses with neoliberal tendencies are shown to rest on weak empirical foundations. The more post-modern discourses, for their part, often suffer from severe shortcomings in terms of theory. It is therefore argued that these discourses provide a weak premise for justifying a profound reform of the institutions that Québec inherited from the Quiet Revolution.

The debate surrounding the creation of the Société nationale de l'amiante (SNA) in 1978, the last major intervention in the natural resources sector at the time of the Quiet Revolution, took place in a particular context. While the Lévesque government was supportive of the principle of participatory democracy that transcended the large public hearings processes that had been in place since his election, it was reluctant to do the same for its all-new asbestos policy, which was the key component of Bill 70 that established the SNA. Why? The purpose of this article is to analyze the political debates surrounding the project to create the SNA and to study the opinion expressed by citizens during the process that was defined by public hearings before a parliamentary committee. If the article shows a deep division between the political leaders of the Lévesque government and those from the opposition parties, the latter even using the parliamentary tactic of filibuster to express their discomfort with the project of the partial nationalization of asbestos, it stresses, however, a relative consensus among the regional groups and bodies that intervened at the invitation of the Commission to give their limited or virtually unlimited support for the bill. In doing so, the article investigates the role played by citizens during the parliamentary debate on the nationalization of asbestos to explain how much it helped the Lévesque government in its state decision-making process.

This article focuses on governance, not in a mainstream sense but as the allocation of power according to the principles of participatory democracy that includes all stakeholders. Situating this kind of governance in local communities, the article questions the autonomy of the social and solidarity economy's experiences. Demanded by individuals and non-profit organizations, and recognized by the state, autonomy is a principle of democracy that entails the separation of civil society and state. The author shows, however, that it is under threat in forms of institutional governance, where conflicts are disappearing and the boundaries between actors blurred.

AbstactThis article considers issues of asylum in Great Britain and among undocumented aliens (“sans-papiers”) in France as comparable topics of study pertinent to “illegal” immigration. Our analysis is based on a large number of individuals in many organizations and at various levels acting in support of asylum seekers and the undocumented. Focusing on the complex dynamics that intersect the public space and public policies within and beyond the borders of the nation state, we examine a range of factors at the core of current discussions on the political process approach nd join the debate on the filiations and limits to the approach advanced in Charles Tilly's From Mobilization to Revolution (1978).