Quand les associations font office de street-level bureaucracy. Le travail quotidien en faveur de l’accès au droit au logement opposable

This article looks at the contribution of non-profit organisations to public action. It employs a conceptual arsenal usually applied to the analysis of street-level bureaucracy to depict day-to-day work in the field of access to justice for disadvantaged individuals. A case study on the implementation of a legal right to housing shows how non-profit actors play a policy-making role through their participation in the process of selecting the beneficiaries of public action. This entails the exercise of discretionary power in the legal characterisation of individual situations and the selection of cases to support or reasons to adduce in dealings with the administration, with the result that the outcomes for clients who receive social and legal support appear strongly improved.