This book sets out to demystify the idea of public power as it can be observed through public policy analysis, and to demonstrate it at work in everyday contexts. As part of this process it shows that it is possible to observe policy actors close up, and to pinpoint their share of the responsibility for the results obtained through their use of public action resources. Although this process involving the monitoring and management of the activities of public authorities remains a central issue for political science, and ‘resources’ are the focus of considerable attention these days, it is worrisome to note that fewer than two dozen authors throughout the world have attempted to provide a precise definition of this phenomenon, to identify its different categories, and to provide a sufficiently robust and operational typology for analysis of the policy actors’ games that lead to everyday legislative decisions and the implementation of public policies.

This book proposes to fill this gap. I wrote it with my fellow citizens in mind who invest time and effort in public service. The text does not see itself as ‘political’ or as siding with one or other of the groups involved in the different public policy stages; rather, it aims to provide equal support to public sector collaborators and to the representatives of interest groups and policy beneficiaries to gain a better understanding of their own activities, and of the resource-related strategic and investment choices made by other actors involved in the public policy process.

The book reflects the fact that the ‘people’ are always more intelligent than the experts. For me, these ‘people’ include, among others, the communal council of my commune of Crissier (canton of Vaud), of which I was a member for 27 years, the hundreds of – doctoral and post-doctoral (habillants) – students I had the pleasure of supporting in the development of their empirical studies, and the thousands of actors from a large number of communal, cantonal, federal and international policy fields whom I had the pleasure to observe over the course of my academic career from my earliest research in the 1970s. I would also like to acknowledge here my former and current collaborators (in chronological order): Corinne Larrue, Frédéric Varone, Stéphane Nahrath, Jean-David Gerber, Stéphane Boisseaux, Johann Dupuis and many others.