L’expérimentation « Territoires Zéro Chômeur de Longue Durée » : un « projet de territoire » ?

The « Zero Long-Term Unemployment Territories » social experimentation offers to build, with long-term unemployed people, on a local scale and on a voluntary basis, activities according to what they can or wish to do and responding to local needs. A « job-purpose company » would hire them without any selection and with a permanent contract, funded by public authorities in proportion to the avoided public expenses due to their return to employment. This article aims to shed light on the territorial dimension of the « Zero Long-Term Unemployment Territories » social experimentation. Behind its association with the unifying qualification of « territory-based project » by its principal holders, this article shows that the « Zero Long-Term Unemployment Territories » social experimentation is characterized by a tension between a job-exclusion removal territorialized project and a territorial development project. This article proposes an analytical framework aiming to identify this territorial dimension not as the essence of the « Zero Long-Term Unemployment Territories » social experimentation, but as a possibility related to the way the local actors involved in its implementation seek to resolve this tension. This framework refers to the valuation mechanisms of the human resources owned or developed by the unemployed people involved in the project. By relying on the notion of « territorial resource » carried by economic geography, this article offers a typology of these unemployed human resources valuation mechanisms, distinguishing a properly territorial one.