Regular Institutional Work and Reforming Activity in National Parks: Institutional Change Issues

From a comparative ethnographic study of several years dedicated to the practical implementation of environmental policies reform applied to French national parks, this article aims at discussing the notion of institutional change. The objective is to highlight the difficulties of the heuristic use of this notion by questioning the terms of individual perception of the National Park institution and its dynamics. The plurality of relationships to institutions within the practice of reformers sheds light on the concrete nature of the institutional shaping. It highlights connections between "regular" institutional work and the "reforming activity". Thus, the recognition of institutional change is as much dependent on a more or less gradual evolution of individual perceptions as of an effective transformation of legal texts.