French governmental policymaking operates by top-down processes of decision-making, jeopardizing all forms of power transfer and social transformation. The technocratic structure of public health promotes cost-effective, evidence-based curative and preventive strategies, focusing on individuals rather than on contexts. On the other hand, field workers, whose theoretical orientation is based mainly on psychoanalysis and individual clinical practices, are as reluctant as policymakers to move towards community practices and power sharing processes.
This paper is based on our work as a community psychologist, working in a French governmental agency, and as a sociologist of mental health studying the processes of political decision-making in regard to preventive public health policies. The objective is first to reflect on the distinctive aspects of governmental policymaking in our country, and second, to underline the obstacles to and facilitators of success in our social policy-related work.
In our context, we propose that community psychologists act in order to (1) apply social science knowledge and contextualize actions, with the intention to help political decision-making by including environmental, social and community variables in the definition of human processes and behaviors; 2) criticize the top-down decision-making process and the focus on the individual, by developing an interactionist model of knowledge evaluation, which would allow vertical understanding and decision-making to tilt horizontally, and 3) support people to create legitimate knowledge from their contexts rather than empowering them through psychological interventions.