Territorial Intelligence and Governance
International audience ; As with European experiments, in various regions in France, territorial intelligence projects have been initiated since 2003. (see the regions of Lower Normandy, Lorraine, Réunion Island, the Aquitaine region, etc.).The objective of these is to gather and exploit information which is not confined to particular sectors and the collective processing of which can contribute to durable development. Apart from institutions, civil society and the inhabitants of the territory, it is observed that companies and in particular small and medium sized enterprises are natural partners who show interest in such initiatives. Both the different economic chains and the participating organizations thus derive considerable benefit in terms of the anticipation of threats and in the reaffirmation of the territory as a common resource worth defending. Above and beyond the information processing systems operating within these organizations or economic chains, the articulation of internal actions to generate informational capital in terms of local territorial intelligence, produces a leverage effect with visibility of European or even worldwide visibility (Herbaux, 2007)52. Nonetheless these experiments lead to widely differing results, of which the progressive abandonment of the project by the companies involved is one of the most commonly observed. To support a theoretical contribution as a thread for this communication, we report on the results of a Delphi type survey completed in 2006 and covering 53 companies in the Nord- Pas de Calais region involved in a process of territorial intelligence since 2003. This revealed that 43 companies out of the 53 concerned had not followed through on their internal information sharing project and contented themselves, by default, with the results by economic sector derived from public regional surveillance Beyond this apparent disengagement from the process initiated, we may be curious about this apparent discretion of a group of actors concerning local government. This ...