Due to their colonial and post-colonial histories, political or humanitarian crises, and the fall of the Berlin wall, an increasing number of countries can be considered “under an aid regime” in the sense that international aid holds a prominent place within national budgets, institutions, and the circulation of ideas. For 30 years, such aid reliance goes hand in hand with policies of state disengagement, liberalization and privatization, as well as the proliferation of NGOs and international and national foundations. These reforms have resulted in a multiplication of stakeholders involved in defining and implementing public policies. This raises important questions about their efficiency and impact on the state, such as: circumvention and weakening of the administration, a strong dependency on imported models, the heterogeneity of the strategies implemented by different aid institutions, a lack of coordination across sectors and at local levels, spatial and temporal heterogeneities due to “project” funding, and so on. Persistently submitted to processes of reform, and with difficulties institutionalizing their actions, states are therefore constantly “at work” and “under construction”. While the state’s role was largely questioned throughout the 1980s and 1990s – resulting in its circumvention by international agencies – it has been placed again at the forefront over the last decade. The Paris Declaration, signed in 2005, promotes state ownership of sectoral policies, alignment of aid with national policies, and coordination between donors. However, this pendulum swing occurred at a time when administrations had been weakened and when strategies of aid extraversion and instrumentalization were at their highest. Therefore, the notion of ownership is ambiguous in itself.

The sociology of the state has long focused on power struggles aiming at conquest and control of the state, and on the question of domination over a territory and its populations. The recent work of social anthropology of public or collective services highlights an alternative structural dimension of the state: the production of services for citizens. This work also shows the magnitude of successive reforms and their impact on administrations, or on the ability of the state to perform that function. If states are “under construction” or “at work”, an historical analysis of the emergence of different sectors of public action reveals progressive processes of differentiation and sedimentation of state intervention, of the construction of institutional mechanisms, and of increasing state presence. Paper presentations focusing on this theme could focus on the political and institutional history of the different sectors of public action, taking into consideration the plurality of norms and the stakes between polity and politics underlying the choice of policy and institutional mechanisms. They may also question the links between sectoral policies and the interest of political and economic elites; the way sectoral policies are contributing to strengthening the local presence of the state, its ability to influence social relations and local economic and political dynamics.