This chapter aims to provide an element missing from my approach hitherto by contextualizing it within the scientific literature that uses identical or similar dimensions to characterize the power of actors involved in public policies. The conceptualization developed with my colleagues in 2001 was initially based on the studies carried out by the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CSO) in the 1970s and in particular, the key contributions of Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg entitled Actors and systems (1981) and of Fritz Scharpf entitled Games real actors play: Actor-centered institutionalism in public policy research of 1997. For an analysis of these studies, I refer to our basic textbook (Knoepfel et al, 2006: 13ff, 69ff).

Hence the real purpose of this chapter is not to revisit the literature relating to the historical origins of our approach, but to examine other (complementary, competing or similar) conceptualizations of public policy actors’ resources.

To do this I carried out a documentary survey with the help of the Google search engine using the terms ‘resources’ combined with the 10 qualifiers (force, law, personnel, money etc) and ‘public policies’ as keywords. This relatively time-consuming process, which was carried out twice – in 2013 and 2015 – enabled me to find a large number of documents and to identify around 500 that deal with phenomena that could be considered as public action resources in the sense of the definition used here of the power available to actors. With the help of further research, I sorted these documents on the basis of their relevance for the topic (elimination of around 450 irrelevant ones), and classified the remaining contributions in two groups based on whether they deal with an isolated resource (often: Time, Property, Money) or whether they cover all of the resources ranked on the basis of a given typology. Only the latter were ultimately included in the survey. Given that I wish to focus on more recent texts or texts explicitly dedicated to the question of resources, the classical contributions by Fritz Scharpf (1997) and Crozier and Friedberg (1981), which were already referred to in our basic textbook, are also excluded, as are those by Dahl (1957, 1961).