Introduction: territorial governance: a new take on development/ Introduction: la gouvernance territoriale: un nouveau regard sur le developpement.

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)