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Article Excerpt
The question of territorial governance has been dealt with extensively over the last decade, both in America and in Europe (Chaskin 1997, 1998, 2001, 2005; Fontan et al 2006; Glaser et al 1996; Glaser 1997; Khakee 2005; Leblanc 2006; Magnusson 2005; Moulaert and Nussbaumer 2005; Mcguire 2001; Norton 2005; Offner 2007; Proulx 2004; Reese 1993 a, 1993b, 1994; Reese and Rosenfeld 2001, 2004; Reese and Fasenfest 2003; Sanyal 2006; Selsky 1991, 2005; Shaffer and Marcouiller 2006; Thomas 2006; Visser 2002, 2004; Wrigley and Lewis 2002). (1) Despite this, and the obvious popularity of the topic, as an area of research it has not yet been covered in a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Regional Science. This special issue is innovative in that it presents--mainly in French--the results of research undertaken by Canadian researchers. The research profiles a number of different questions that have recently emerged as governance has been plied to territorial development processes. The synthesis we provide will allow the reader to appreciate whether this 'governance of proximity' is--or is not--a unique and original approach to thinking about and living in a territory.
Without having the pretension of examining the issues thoroughly in a single special issue, given current circumstances we felt it more pertinent than ever to present an intersecting perspective, through a series of articles, on innovative practices in territorial governance, particularly in relation to issues of education, natural resources, aboriginal peoples, the approaches to local development and the multiple initiatives of civil society.
Territorial development and the concepts generally associated with it (such as local development, regional development, community development, endogenous development, bottom-up development) comprise a similar range of multidisciplinary domains that cannot be dealt with from scratch. The same thing can be said for the extremely broad question of governance, a term with multiple ramifications and meanings. As Paiement puts it (2006: 9): governance 'can mean the definition of an efficient bureaucracy, measures to fight against corruption, citizen participation, and even the promotion of political and social rights' (translation). This is why it is important for us to situate governance in its historic context and to illustrate how it has come to be seen as an indispensable building--block for understanding local development. In short, our aim here is to better understand the scientific and ideological trajectory that has led us from governance to territorial governance.
Territorial Governance: What Is It All About?
Based on the historical synthesis produced by Patrick Le Gales (2004), the concept of governance was initially used in management sciences to designate complex forms of management in private organisations--commonly known as 'corporate governance' or 'business governance' as popularised by Williamson (1979)--and which was then picked up again at the beginning of the 1990s in order to study the renewal of different forms of collective action. In the latter case, social sciences called upon governance to better understand how collective action is organized in a context where public institutions are both in the process of losing their legitimacy (Juillet and Andrew 1999; Jouve 2004) and are no longer capable of responding on their own to contemporary social issues (Pal 2001; Paquet 2001; Andrew and Goldsmith 1998; Duchastel 2004).
This concept of governance attracted more and more attention from researchers and practitioners in the development field (Osmont 1998), particularly from those involved in regional development (Lafontaine and Jean 2005). The loss of legitimacy, and even efficiency, of broad public policies in relation to regional redistribution (Jean 1989; Chiasson 1997) that coincided with the crisis of the Welfare State (Rosanvallon 1981, 1995), gave way in regional science to a new perspective with more emphasis on local territories as a driving force for the development of regions (Jambes 2000). This new perspective provided by territorial development has brought regional science into the field of governance. Indeed, the regional approach based on the notion of territory considers that the capacity of local milieus to generate development depends upon the density of relationships or institutional thickness to borrow from Amin and Thrift's (1995) well-known term. It involves an essential contribution from local actors, whose origins are multiple: involved citizens, civil society, private corporations, public institutions (Le Gales 1998). Researchers have thus shifted their attention to the forms of collaboration and partnership that overlap the frontiers of private and public systems. The terminology associated with governance has been used by several researchers (Helmsing 2007; Carrier and Jean 2000; Simard and Mercier 2005; Gagnon 1999; Jeannier 2006) to refer to the different forms of collaboration.
From this perspective, territorial governance clearly designates the breadth of local public policies and the implementation of the projects that stem from them; but, in addition and perhaps above all else, it relates to the capacity of different local actors to exert a real influence on this same process of development. As Rhodes (1986) notes, this process can be part of a very time-delimited process--a special project developed for a particular occasion--or can relate to an intent to engage in action over the long term, by drawing together a set of actors with convergent development interests. As Kooiman (1993) expresses it, these practices are generally associated with social innovations in its broadest as Taylor (1970) defines it: innovative social practices responding to new social needs. In relation to this, Guillemot, Plante et Boisjoly demonstrate with a rare case study of insular governance how the territory 'reflects the capacity of actors to add value to local resources, by exploiting their historical, natural, economic and social dimensions.' (translation)
Furthermore, whether time-delimited or on-going, local governance underlies two theoretically antonymic, yet empirically hybrid, dynamics. To start with, it implies a consultative process, such as the paradigm of 'rational comprehensive planning' as Faludi (1996, c1973) calls it--a model of so-called concerted planning, but which in reality leads to a process of social persuasion, engineered by certain actors as a function of their own personal or corporatist interests. This is the social dynamic that is so brilliantly illustrated by Mercur Oison (1973) is his widely-acclaimed logic of collective action. From an epistemological point of view, this approach is in many respects different to the currently preponderant discourse on collaborative planning (Healey 2006) that proposes a form of planning resulting in a real and sincere willingness for mediation between civil society and the State. "Indeed, it is not only a question of asking actors for their views but rather--and more fundamentally--searching out their adhesion, participation and implication in an idea focussed on the collective construction of public action systems" (Leloup et al 2005:331) (translation). Joyal and El-Batal's text on rural governance seen through the implementation of the national policy on rurality, gives us a very good empirical example of the appropriation by civil society of public policy emanating from the central State. However, one has to be careful not to idealize such a process. As Marc-Urbain Proulx points out eloquently in his contribution in this special issue:
"institutional constraints limit the appropriation within territories which structure space (...) particularly the diversity of the multiple boundaries, the actual means are accessible, the fragmentation of functions, the wearing down of democracy and the difficulties of holistic territorial planning. We thus have to put into perspective what the real potential is for the collective appropriation of public territorial responsibilities and conclude by focussing on operational solutions." (translation)
The governance of territories (Carrier and Cote 2000) or, in other words, territorial governance (Pasquier et al 2007; Guesnier 2005) thus becomes more than ever a priviledged focus of attention for researchers in the regional development domain. This is all the more so given that the broad public policies (of Quebec) regarding regionalisation call more and more upon citizen participation and confers on the State a role of accompanying the process (Morin 2006). For Leloup et al (2005: 322)
"the question of territorial governance thus immediately raises the question of local development and can be placed in the historical context of the growing involvement of local actors--private, public and associative--in the dynamics of development, in their capacity to mobilize and to look after themselves. In this way, the virtues of the imagination, organization and coordination of these local actors are brought to the forefront" (translation).
Simard and Leclerc in their paper ground this way of looking at the world in Quebec's historical experience with local development, by proposing an original account of the first decade of existence of Local Development Centres (Centres locaux de developpement) (1998-2008).
Territorial Governance: The Actor's Indispensable Presence
Strongly coloured first by a Durkheimian influence, then by a Marxist one and today, by an ecological tradition, the analysis of development was until recently mainly embedded in a macro approach to things social that did not take sufficient account of the interrelationships between individual leadership and structural leadership within a given community. In the domain of regional science, the process of development of collectivities is often presented in an anonymous and abstract manner, relegating the political function of a project's proponent almost to a folkloric dimension to the point of being negligible. Fortunately, a new generation of researchers including Leroux (2006: 83) have shed
"light on the strategic content of territorial governance and on the challenges of negotiation that are an essential part of it. Indeed, in any project of territorial development, public, private or social actors are confronted with conflictual situations (...) Territorial governance thus depends largely upon the nature of the conflicts at stake (...) and the capacity of the actors to end up with acceptable compromises through their negotiations." (translation)
Not only is the actor--whether he or she is an individual, a business or an association--still relegated to a secondary position in development studies but our scientific discourse still insists all too often on conceptualizing (true) development as a process that operates outside of the central State, its apparatus and its political representatives, including at the municipal level.
In this search for an axiological neutrality, there is an oversimplification of reality which puts action above the ups and downs of everyday life, as if the implementation of a project can make abstraction of conflicts, questions of ethics, areas of uncertainty, the cumbersome nature of structures and the search for power. Most definitely, sometimes some models of scientific explanation place the system before man, and they do not do justice to the important question of personal involvement and of its importance in the management of social development. Furthermore, the literature is often silent on the question that stems from the analysis of a process of social development, i.e. "who possesses the power and authority in a community to decide and take important decisions relating to socioeconomic development?" (translation) This is what Jean and Bisson try to respond to in their case study that focuses on 'partnership-based governance' in the context of rural communities.
This perspective focused on a re-erthancement of the actor's role is what underlies the text presented by Chouinard, Plante and Martin. They present two participative research processes undertaken in two coastal communities in New Brunswick confronted by the effects of climatic change. At the same time, they show the limits of traditional municipal governance when confronted with the climate challenge and how...
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