Les Éclaireurs

How can we make public administration more attractive, more democratic, more efficient, better organised around citizens’ practices and needs, and more cost-effective? What if we were to take a creative and forward-looking fresh look at the traditional mechanisms of public policy-making?

Les Éclaireurs is an administrative foresight programme developed by La 27e Région between 2016 and 2019 to envisage the public administration of tomorrow. By focusing on an unconventional topic each time, Les Éclaireurs seek to highlight the tools, approaches and processes that will shape public administration in the 21st century.

Each episode of *Les Éclaireurs* begins with the selection of a topic, an initial review of the literature, and the formation of a group of 8 to 15 carefully selected participants – researchers, experts and practitioners in the relevant field. Supported by a team of designers and public policy specialists, they set about identifying the key controversies surrounding the chosen topic and then work together to devise new solutions and tools during a creative workshop (phase 1).

The team then refines these proposals over several weeks to develop an inspiring scenario, which is presented and further refined with the participants during a second workshop, in which they devise ways to test one of the scenario’s elements in a ‘beta version’ (phase 2).

The team and the partners involved in the episode jointly select the element they wish to test, after which the scenario is unveiled to a wider audience at a public presentation and shared on social media (Phase 3).

Finally, following a co-development phase lasting several months, a test kit for the selected element is provided to the partner organisations so that they can put it to the test in real-world conditions (stage 4).

Ten topics have been identified and deliberately phrased in a provocative manner, to spark debate and generate inspiring ideas. Each topic serves as a gateway to a broader theme (the evaluation of public policy, citizen participation, public procurement, etc.), but all challenge the current working methods of public sector stakeholders and their ability to modernise them. By the end of the Les Eclaireurs programme, five of the ten planned themes had been addressed.