What values do to evaluation[L'évaluation à l'épreuve des valeurs]

In a context of growing hybridization of public action, public policy evaluation (Nioche, 2014) tends to increasingly become extended to non-public organizations, or at least to organizations whose degree of publicness (Bozeman 1987, 1994) differs from that of public administrations and local authorities. This article explores how the partners of public organizations perceive this extension of PPE to them. We do that through a case study involving a group of publicly subsidized third sector organizations. This communication relies on a corpus of interviews of members of said organizations to characterize the way actors of third sector organizations perceive the evaluation of their action, specifically when that evaluation is done by public organizations upon which they financially depend. We analyze the actors' discourse by combining the justification theory of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) with the work of Heinich (2017) on values. This article shows how the discourses on values and those on external evaluation form justification/critique strategies that combine to create what we analyze as a "compromise proposal" on the nature and role of evaluation in public-third sector relations.