Territoire et gouvernance locale : le cas de Sophia-Antipolis

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.