La 27e Région is a non-profit association supported by 40 French local governments created in 2008.
It conducts action-research programs to test new innovation methods for designing public policy involving all public stakeholders. To this end, it mobilizes the capabilities of multi-disciplinary teams composed of designers, idea generators, and social scientists from many fields (ethnography, sociology, participant observation) and engages in ground-level actions (do-it-yourself projects, adult education actions, etc.). Both these approaches prioritize the concrete experience of users, civil servants and citizens to serve as the starting point for re-examining public policy.