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The article compares legal reforms of the status of women in Morocco and Senegal in order to understand what can enlighten their enactment in the first country and not in the other. In these two countries (and regions), which are rarely compared, the analysis of the activists' itineraries and their interactions with those in government reveals striking similarities between the cases: the positioning of activists between the local and the global produced comparable effects, both on their relationship to feminism and on the choice of their modes of action, exposing them to similar challenges in the face of governments that tried at all costs to depoliticize the debates surrounding the reforms. However, the ability of Moroccan activists to step out of the field of expertise to protest in the streets allowed them to have much more weight in the arena of institutionalized politics. Moreover, the two regimes do not have the same religious resources with which to tackle the controversy. This also helps to explain the different outcomes of the mobilizations and its related paradox: an authoritarian situation may turn out to be more favorable to reform than a democracy.

Economic growth is a major part of representations of the economy. This article sets out the conditions under which this increasingly important figure was naturalized in France. In so doing, it provides a key example of the role of the state in the disembedding the economy. Specificially, the activities of the French administrations where the category was defined are closely examined in this article. Historically, the construction of the figure of economic growth and of its naturalization are distinct processes. After World War II, the category of economic growth was defined to plan the economy, and since the 1960s, figures on growth have been considered what most accurately represents the state of the economy. It therefore has become an entity independent from its measurement. We argue that this transformation is a by-product of the evolution of the sociology of the civil servants who actually measure economic growth and of the struggles between different professions, each claiming to possess expertise about growth.

Whilst the planning model of the Commissariat Général du Plan and the forecasting model of the DATAR both fell into disuse during the 1980s, over the period 1990-2000 notions of anticipation, planning and the spatial regulation of territorial development were resuscitated in France. Since the Pasqua (1995) and Voynet (1999) laws, Regional Councils are responsible for the forecasting of regional development, within the framework of the regional spatial planning scheme. We argue that, for a regional institution with weak political capacity, foresight has been institutionalized as a communication tool with which to pursue a broader strategy of territorial legitimation. The article highlights that “the future” is a genuine category of political action and that “foresight”, as a communication tool, is now part of a forward-looking narrative regarding the political capacity and legitimacy of what in Brittany has become an intermediate political power.

The placing of musculo-skeletal disorders (MSDs) for slaughterhouse inspectors on the political agenda is concomitant with reflections over the transformation of public action. This article aims at demonstrating how occupational health issues reveal and underline the “bankruptcy” of state action. It analyses actions implemented at local and national level in a context of a resetting of the occupational health agenda and sets out to show how the regulations related to the health at work of slaughterhouse inspectors have been integrated into food safety surveillance policy i.e. its implementation, legitimacy, and future prospects. In so doing, this reform has participated in a redefinition of the public service mission – a shift demonstrated by focusing upon the justifications, methods and powering deployed by the actors involved.