Les chambres régionales des comptes

CONCLUSION.

What can one then say evolution of the examination of management towards the evaluation of the public policies, taking into account the elements structuring the interventions of the magistrates of the courses of the accounts ?

A system of action directed towards a marginal adjustment105(*)

Taking into account the elements which we evoked, the evaluation of the public policies seems well a process of adjustment of the system of action.

From the elements which we evoked and taking into account the characteristics of the system of action connecting directly the three principal actors, namely, the elected official, representative of the territory, the Prefect, representative of the State and person in charge for the control of the action of the State about the territory and, finally the financial magistrate, with whom it fall to track the dysfunctions, the companies screens, diversions of public money or debts disproportionate. These missions of public virtues are registered in the logic of the laws of decentralization.

But in fact the policies started again the process by determining texts of laws, at the beginning of the years 1990, which widened the possibilities of investigation of the regional rooms of the accounts. The heart of target : not the communes which do not have the means of following expensive policies, but cities or the agglomeration, such Angouleme, such Nice, such Limoges, fauteuses of disorders.

Vis-a-vis this tightening of the budgetary and financial constraints, the elected officials organized themselves and organized themselves their defense, whose report/ratio of the Senate is probably the most beautiful illustration.

This one given a progress report on decentralization and prescribed a certain number of measurements, in particular supported by the virtuous behavior of the immense majority of controlled, so as to eliminate the points which obstruct the territorial public action.

Vis-a-vis this regrouping of the territorial political request, the fragmentation of the administrative action, as in echo with the offensives of the local authorities, tends to reabsorb.

The answer of the magistrates

The Court of Auditors gradually sets up devices aiming to re-allocate and better coordinate the action of its magistrates, and this, under the impulse of the Presidents of regional rooms, all members of the Court of Auditors.

The answer is organisational (with the institution of meetings sets of themes or investigation inter-rooms) but it is also ideological.

The elected officials attack on the examination of management and worry about an intrusion without jurisdictional counterpart, which disturbs the local political market and which is added to the legal insecurity, concretely related on the joint application of the principle of legality exerted by the Prefect and to control carried out a posteriori exerted by the regional rooms of the accounts.

For as much, taking into account the positions of the actors, the possibilities offered by the networks and the weight of the institutions concerned, the process of adjustment cannot lead to the arrival of one to that realized according to Anglo-Saxon guns' on the matter. To check the regularity of the accounts, certainly, but the missions of public utility deserve perhaps more consideration than a simple certification, without to carry a value judgment on the objectives.

The evaluation of the public policies concern this logic and it is well the device which is to be set up by the magistrates. As underlines it Patrick Gibert and Marianne Andrault^106(*), the control of management would raise of an entrepreneurial approach, whereas the evaluation of the public policies, worries about the process of realization of the policy like its environmental impact.

As, knowing as the institutional groundwork can be modified only by the political center and that one needs certain exceptional circumstances to do it,

The setting in front of the evaluation of the public policies and the intensification of the horizontal and vertical bonds within the jurisdictional authority can be analyzed like the resultant of a process of adjustment primarily connecting the magistrates and the institutions in which they evolve/move on the one hand ; territorial elected officials and the interests which they assert in addition.

The evaluation thus seems a third relevant way within the process of regulation dynamic of the conflicts of interests connecting the involved parts.

* ¹⁰⁵ With the economic direction of the term.

* ¹⁰⁶ P. Gibert, Mr. Andrault, «  To control Management or to evaluate the policies  ? «, The Public action, under the direction of François Laced, ED. Harmattan, 1996.