La politique contractuelle de la Nouvelle-Aquitaine : entre coopération et intermédiation

The notion of territorial governance is used to describe the forms of regulation, interdependence and coordination of actors within a given territorial system. It puts forward a horizontal approach of the public action. It questions the relations between the actors involved in a territorial development process. In this article, we focus our attention on two organisational practices related to governance: intermediation and cooperation. This article examines the interplay of actors within the framework of the development and implementation of the contractual policy of Nouvelle-Aquitaine. This public policy is based on a logic of co-construction with the objective to build a territorial project with local actors from the upstream phase of diagnosis to the implementation of the contractual action plan. More specifically, we focus our attention on the regional «Datar» in charge of implementing this policy. We emphasise that the regional Datar alternates between a game of intermediation and cooperation. These roles are not, however, exclusive and can be shared with other actors, demonstrating the balances to be found during the governance process on the ground. We illustrate our statements with the cases of the Saintonge romane and the Grand Libournais, two sub-regional territories that are characterised by a positive demographic and economic dynamic but suffer from a lack of local governance.