Geographie Economie Societe最新文献

This contribution aims at characterising the different stages of local governance mechanisms in the case of a specific experiment : the international park of Sophia-Antipolis in the South of France. Two different periods are identified. The one, based on the dominance of public governance, consists in accumulating on site numerous external activities and in securing their location through usual public facilities and related physical infrastructures. The other is a still on-going transition towards a more technopolis-type of local development which is based on local interactions among companies and academics. However, this is mainly due to private initiative and consequently the park is now dominated by a private mode of local governance. However, a viable evolution of the Sophia-Antipolis experiment would require a mix-type of local governance. This is highly dependent from the ability of local public authorities to understand what is actually at stake from an economic viewpoint. To our opinion, unfortunately, this is currently not the case.

This short paper presents the institutional analysis which is retained by the Regulation School to characterise the new growth regime and the places of industrial sectors and local territories in its functioning. The part played by political debate in the development of new structural forms which govern the new growth regime is underlined. Changes in the forms of competition are assumed to be central in the transformation of the sectoral and local dimensions of economic activities.

In the last 10 years, backing decentralized management of land and renewable resources has been an increasing relevant concern. However, the fundamental objectives of the baking (increasing autonomy of actors, evolution of decision making processes, sustainable management of resources) are not easy to appraise, specially because the participatory concept seems to have some backgrounds too technocratic to be suitable for the specific purpose of the local empowerment in land use planning. Our approach comes back to a learning-by-doing process far away from the universal and ‘ready to apply’ approaches and tools that always dominate, even in participatory approaches. Face to variability and uncertainty of the ‘territory complex’, the Bottom-up Regional Planning only tries to promote an endogenous process of concerted negotiation. In this case, planning is not a collective choice between several possibly scenarios, but an accompanying approach of a local decision-making process which feels his own way, supported by specifics endogenous information systems, from GIS and Role Playing Game to new computer modeling systems.

A recent literature has described, on an empirical level, the mode of working of local industrial organizations, called “clusters”, strongly inserted within global industrial and commercial networks. Those studies have shown that space by itself doesn’t offer the sufficient conditions for co-ordination but can contribute to its efficiency, providing the existence of other sharing dimensions among agents: organic level, representations, projects… Such an approach can be usefully translated in the terms of proximity economics based on “situated agents” that are involved both in a local co-ordination game and in external complementarities and competition relations. For that purpose, “small-worlds” theory brings a very fruitful way to build models in which a substantial amount of local interconnections generate a high network cliquishness, whilst a more reduced proportion of global links (shortcuts) ensures an efficient access (path length) to any node of the network.

This text proposes a “régulationniste” framework to analyze the emergence of an “economy of quality” in the agrofood system, that is of a new productive model centered on the differentiation of the qualities. Methodological and analytical propositions of more general reach are confronted with the stylized facts which one can establish in this domain. The notion of productive model allows a joint analysis of the dynamics of the productive systems and of the institutional arrangements. The notion of “space of regulation” refers to the analysis of the “sector-based” and “territorial” dimensions of the mode of regulation. Sectors (agrofood chains considered both as productive and governance structures) and territories (considered in the same dimensions) are co-constructed. Transformation of the regime of accumulation integrating immaterial values modifies both nature and boundaries of sectors and territories. Two main lines of innovation appear, the one aiming at specifying always more in depth the functional characteristics of the food services by exploiting the scientific and technological developments, the other integrating identity attributes. Crisis of particular nature characterize this evolution.