From the Early Literature to Contemporary Approaches to Regional and Territorial Development

This chapter deals with the questions of regional or territorial development, introduced in researches undertaken from the end of World War II onwards, and in policies of regional and territorial development and management. The literature can be split between two main competing visions. The first one seeks, above all, to balance the interests and gains from the development process enjoyed by different local actors and to draw up principles that will enable the various stakeholders to obtain maximum satisfaction. The second group consists of approaches whereby the compromises reached among local actors are purely temporary and development processes generate interregional inequalities that are difficult to reduce. These approaches consider that development can increase disparities between regions or territories. They also highlight the existence of local systems with significant specificities at the institutional, economic and technical levels, and whose successes or failures lead to fundamentally uneven development processes, like clusters, districts or milieus. A third category of approaches is based on the idea that regional or territorial development is profoundly linked to the occurrence of dynamic shifts stemming from processes of innovation or creation, which result in varying paces and levels of development from one region or territory to the next.