In their 1989 Hunger and Public Action, Dreze e Sen made a claim for the public action perspective when noting the importance of the cooperative and adversarial action of the public in turning state actions effective.  For them the “reach of public action goes well beyond the doings of the state, and involves what is done by the public”. This theme has been developed in different ways ( Laborier, 2003;; Cantelli et al. 2006; Zittoun & Demongeot 2010) but the broad proposition has remained that “The State is far from being the Lord and Master and having exclusive control of public affairs, from the definition of what should be the object of action, to the design and implementation of the services themselves” (Thoenig, 2007). In many parts of the third world, it has usually been up to the public to provide for itself – building houses, creating services and sustaining communities – and the resulting state-public relations are far from simple.

If public action is a hybrid arena (Spink, Hossain & Best 2009) it follows that different versions of action are circulating, each located in social languages (Bakhtin 1986). Over time a number of such public action languages have appeared, gained and lost influence; but have rarely gone away. Policy may seem a natural expression but the major social changes of the 20th century took place without it;  the European Union emits directives, social movements are concerned with issues and rights, development agencies with participative governance, planners plan, judicial decisions are obeyed and somebody has to keep the budget. When these paths cross – often in different ways in different areas of action – the  results can be far from harmonious.  We welcome papers working with or discussing different aspects of these issues.

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