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In France, efforts to strengthen the citizen-government nexus and their collaboration initially focused on service delivery. Recent initiatives, however, have emphasized policy design and online solutions targeting collaborative governance. This turn to e-participation for policy design is embedded in the context of support for an open government, with France joining the Open Government Partnership in 2014. Since then, e-participation platforms for policy design have flourished, mostly at the local level, but also at the national level. The highly covered Law for a Digital Republic in 2015, where citizens could directly participate in the drafting of the law through an online platform, is a clear, though one-off, instance of online collaborative policy design.This chapter takes on the task of contributing to the study of online collaborative policy design in France by investigating the sole longstanding e-participation platform for law-making that exists at the national level: Parlement & Citoyens -'Parliament and Citizens' (P&C) (see https:// parlement -et -citoyens .fr/ ). P&C is a platform connecting citizens and legislators to make them work together to draft policy proposals. Legislators are invited to upload draft laws on the online platform, which is open to the comments and votes of citizens and organizations. The case of P&C differs from most of the initiatives analysed in this volume in three ways. First, P&C is a private initiative. The platform was launched bottom up by individuals concerned with democratic issues. Second, P&C is intended to tackle national policy issues, not local or regional matters. And third, the platform aims to connect citizens with legislators, rather than with actors of the executive branch.In this chapter, a supply-side perspective on the e-participation platform is adopted. A wide range of studies have contributed to the study of the participants of online collaborative platforms and the process of participation as such, thereby exploring the demand side of online collaborative policy design (Gerl et al., 2018;Lutz and Hoffmann, 2017;Rasmussen and Carroll, 2013). Along with other chapters in this edited volume, the attention is shifted to the thus far mostly overlooked organization of e-participation platforms. Specifically, the chapter relies on an institutionalist perspective to analyse how the organizational features of P&C shape the participation of critical actors, the legislators themselves and citizens, as well as the outcomes of e-participation on the design of policies.

Recent scholarship has focused on how coordination mechanisms are implemented by public sector organizations, thereby paying attention to coordination as a process. This article studies the coordination process that resulted in the implementation of the interministerial financial information system of the French central state—named Chorus. Chorus is a case of an unlikely coordination process rolled out in the non-conducive context of the French Napoleonic Administration. Chorus aimed at connecting all ministries’ administrative services to a shared information system, while ministries were previously using their own systems and applications. Based on the literature on mechanisms of coordination, and focusing on the role of existing institutions and the actors involved in the coordination process, the analysis has two main results. First, AIFE—“Agence pour l’informatique financière de l’État”, the agency in charge of the implementation of Chorus—steered the process by developing a stepwise network-based interministerial strategy. Second, the coordination steered by AIFE resulted in a transformative change of the French state's financial and accounting structures through a layering process of change. Thereby, the article contributes to the empirical analysis of public administrations’ recent changes toward increased coordination at the central level by studying recent reforms in France and their outcomes. Points for practitioners This article shows that coordination processes within public sector organizations are context sensitive and depend on the behavior of the “agents of change” in charge of these processes. In contexts that are non-conducive to transformative change (e.g. siloed structures, presence of veto players), the set-up of agile, resourceful and autonomous change agents is key. When veto players may oppose structural change, the article suggests setting up network-based coordination processes aiming at incremental evolutions inducing transformative change.