L'évaluation des politiques de durabilité : un design basé sur les apprentissages et les cadres narratifs

The introduction of the concept of sustainability in public policies changes the methods of policy evaluation drastically. Sustainability appears as a general reference that transcends policy subsystems and operates through a discursive mode requiring rather voluntary behavioural changes. The sustainable development strategies developed in Europe are mainly procedural. They do not rely on command-and-control designs that prescribe compulsory changes to well-identified target groups. Rather they organise deliberative procedures between stakeholders. This lack of clear-cut objectives challenges policy evaluation because it jeopardizes the ability to measure and assess policy outcomes. A way to address this challenge consists in going back to the epistemological foundations of the sustainability strategies, related to social constructivism. This article suggests two evolutionary paths for evaluation designs, based on the literatures on policy learning and policy narratives that provide tools to assess the diffusion of discourse towards individuals and policy networks.