LIST OF PANELS

One of the key methods used to understand the policy process is to first identify a configuration of policy makers from several organisations that have an influence on the government decision. Whether called "iron triangle", "subgovernment", "policy subsystem", "policy network", "policy community", "policy stream" or "whirlpool", this configuration is generally considered as "the primary unit of analysis for understanding the policy process" (Sabatier and Weible 2007, 189), more or less autonomous and also part of a fragmented political system (Freeman and Stevens 1987). These concepts allow the researcher to focus on a "cluster of individuals who effectively make most of the routine decisions in a given substantive policy area" (Ripley and Franklin 1980, 8). As Charles Jones suggested, "the precise label is not important (...) what is important is the frequent observation that the politics of policy making is characterised by inter-institutional communication within a particular policy or issue area" (Jones, 1982)[1].

If these concepts are heuristics to develop most of the main classical positivist theories of the policy process, they have been met with many criticisms about their limitations, their framing and the bias they generate, even by authors who have used them and considered them "increasingly inadequate" to understand the complexity of the policy processes (McGee et Jones 2019) and, more precisely, the fragmentation of the bureaucracy, between the department, the offices, but also the conflictual dimension associated with this fragmentation, between ministries, departments, offices. The aim of this panel is to interrogate the relevant level of fragmentation of the policy field.

The aim of this panel is to question the relevant level of fragmentation of the policy field that the researcher needs to take into account in order to understand the policy process. We invite empirical, methodological and/or theoretical papers that propose to rethink these concepts of the 'policy subsystem' and, more specifically, to discuss how the complexity of the division of labour between the administration, key stakeholders and expert groups can be better integrated to understand the policy process.