From the 23 to 25 of June 2010 the city of Grenoble (following those of Birmingham, Amsterdam, Essex and Kassel) hosted the fifth edition of the IPA (International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis), entitled «Discourse and policy practices: politics, legitimacy, power». The conference was held at PACTE (Public Policies, Political Action, Territory) —a research center affiliated with the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research)— whose scientific project is organized around four main areas: Democracy Studies, Innovation Studies, Environmental Social Studies and Global Metropolitan Studies. For those unfamiliar with IPA, the conference can be placed into a stream of research challenging mainstream positivism in policy analysis, in the name of a methodological pluralism sensitive to meaning and historical and social context. Policy analysis is generally described as the need and the actions to be taken by public authorities to achieve a set of goals, and the practice of the analyst tends to emphasize comparisons between costs and benefits and the impact on targets. On the contrary, interpretive policy analysts focus mainly on the meanings of policies for policymakers, stakeholders and citizens, as revealed by the metaphors, narratives and framing adopted. Therefore, according to interpretive approaches, policy analysis aims at determining how a policy, together with the policy process, is framed or understood. As Dvora Yanow wrote: «Interpretive methods are based on the presupposition that we live in a social world characterized by the possibilities of multiple interpretations. In this world there are no «brute data» whose meaning is beyond dispute»