Logic behind the chapter presentations: possession, modalities of use and exchange

In terms of volume alone, this third part of the book is its pièce de résistance. Its aim is essentially illustrative in that it serves to apply the concept of public action resources presented and developed in the first two parts of this book with the help of a wide range of practical examples. The logic on which its presentation is based is simple: each chapter is dedicated to one of the 10 public action resources, which the text aims to illustrate by presenting their mobilization by each of the three main actors that feature in public policy analysis, that is, the political-administrative actors, the target groups and the beneficiaries.

The majority of the examples provided are taken from the Swiss context in the period 2012 to 2015; however, they are intended to be generic in that they could also come from other countries, in particular, European ones. Despite trying to avoid it, the fact that my work tends to be focused on environmental policies and natural resources probably results in a bias in the selection of examples. For educational reasons, sources are not documented as they have been simplified with a view to highlighting the main characteristics. A large proportion of the examples come from practical studies carried out as part of our courses at the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration (IDHEAP) and other universities, both in Switzerland and abroad, and this enabled me to cover a relatively broad field of substantive public policies. Furthermore, the reader will realise that the detailed structure of the following chapters sometimes forces me to supplement these wide-ranging examples from real life with some stylized and extrapolated ones. The structure also gives rise to some redundancies as observations of one particular social phenomenon served as an illustration for several resources and/or to illustrate the mobilization activities of two or even three actors. These overlaps clearly reflect the variety of the world of resource mobilization, particularly at the level of public policy implementation processes.

The relatively rigid basic structure necessitates processes of definition that are not always obvious but that prove productive due to their systematic limits.