Governing as governance challenges core understandings of the traditional state-centric model, as the argument of the previous chapters has shown. Complex legal orders and interdependent relationships lay bare traditional beliefs about the supremacy of the state and the viability of a system of public law. Some interest groups have begun to shift the focus of their lobbying away from central government. The state itself now emphasises its own productivity as the key to future prosperity. Multi-level dynamics and the requirements of multi-actor coordination create new challenges for actors vested with public authority. The operation of the international political economy has produced metaphors of a hollow state that go to the very heart of the French statist model.

These various pressures are not simply accepted in a passive manner. This chapter shows how French academics and policy analysts have sought to understand and make sense of the changing environment in a way that is consistent with or builds upon accepted frameworks. It then argues that state officials view new management practices and organisational reforms through their own lenses as public servants and their own belief in the appropriate behaviour their professional status implies. Above all, the chapter suggests that the main national political parties and politicians attempt to make sense of their own activity and accord a pre-eminent role to politics and the state.