From instrument to public policy

In 2014, the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research launched the first ministerial open data portal, going beyond regulatory obligations. The article studies the implementation of this public policy, based on a documentary analysis and a series of interviews. It focuses on the strategies put in place to mobilize, in the digital transformation of government action, an administration that is protective of its data and particularly hierarchical. The technical potential of the system played a key role in driving the project, in an institutional and political context favorable to open data initiatives. The analysis is however not a techno-deterministic reading postulating the autonomy of technical change, as it highlights the driving role played by agents from a technical instrumentation department, that one might consider as far removed from the definition of a ministerial policy. Indeed, the agents shaped the identity of the innovation project by adapting their arguments to the relevant actors throughout the ministry’s hierarchy. The analysis thus highlights a configuration of heterogeneous elements, an assemblage of human and non-human actants, which contributed to the final adoption of this public policy.