“…They have essentially shown that in various national contexts (for a comparative summary, see Bherer et al., 2016), ‘professional groups’ (Petitjean, 2017) and even a ‘participation market’ (Hendriks and Carson, 2008; Lee, 2014; Mazeaud and Nonjon, 2018) have emerged. Some of these studies have looked into the nature of the profiles and practices of civil servants whose day-to-day task is to set up, facilitate, organise or even evaluate these experiments (on Switzerland, see Kübler et al., 2020; on the UK, see Escobar, 2015; on France, see Gourgues, 2012; on Brazil, see Sa Vilas Boas, 2020; on Belgium, see Bottin, 2020). We propose to focus here on the very process of administering participation through the prism of the ‘politics of organisation’, defined as ‘the distribution of tasks, roles and responsibilities within state administrations or, more generically, the modes of specialisation of public organisations’ (Bezes and Le Lidec, 2016: 407).…”