Historical and methodological background

Scientific research practices involving non-scientific actors have run throughout the history of science. Certain fields of activity, such as astronomy, development economics, the natural sciences and all the pragmatic currents in the humanities and social sciences, particularly from the Anglo-Saxon world, to name but a few, have made a major contribution to their development. They can be observed in various more or less established forms (intervention research in the 1950s, community research in the 1970s), then intensified in the 1990s under the combined effect of several factors. First of all, science and technology were becoming increasingly involved in the knowledge economy, which was gradually giving rise to a demand for...