caENTI prospects after the conference success
The sixth international conference of territorial intelligence organised in Besançon by the Institute of Humanities, Social and Environmental sciences of the Université de Franche-Comté was very successful what underlines the caENTI success and implies a continuation.
It mobilised 248 participants with 22 nationalities, 218 European among whom 124 French people. 29 researchers were from North and South America, Asia and Africa. Organised within the framework of the caENTI (Coordination Action of the European Network of Territorial Intelligence), supported from March 2006 to February 2009 by the sixth framework programme of research and technological development of the European Union, it gathered 123 researchers and actors members of the caENTI, but also 115 other researchers and actors.
The conference blog had already received more than 600 visits at the end of the event and had received 2500 of them until now. We had also received many acceptance emails that praise the communications quality and the reception friendliness. They express the will to participate to the continuation of the territorial intelligence network, in particular by offering to receive meetings and seminars.
In accordance with its objective, the Coordination Action of the European Network of Territorial Intelligence (caENTI) integrated the research projects on territorial intelligence tools, so as to give them a European dimension. They homogenised the indicators and the tools designed by fourteen territorial observatories within the caENTI on the one hand and ensured their compatibility with the European standards in the other hand.
The caENTI worked with the Catalyse method and tools, used by more than thirty territorial observatories animated by multi-sector partnerships in Europe, from 1989 to 2005. From these observatories experience, the caENTI modelled the three types of information analysed by Catalyse: individual data, information on services and territorial indicators.
The individual data are gathered by the means of a multi-sector guide (employment, education, training, social autonomy, health, housing, mobility, etc.) so as to make diagnoses that allow understanding the needs complexity and diversity. Gathered at the individual level, they are useful to co-define a project according to the expressed needs in a participative way and to evaluate the action it generates according to these needs meetings. Gathered at the services level, they allow determining the relevance of projected development actions and evaluating these actions. Consolidated at the territorial scale they allow making diagnoses that allow understanding the needs complexity and diversity at the territorial community scale, evaluating and observing territorial development plans. Most of the observatories analyse target groups on which the partnership focuses its attention, some of the observatories follow a sample representative of the community.
The information on services and the development actions available on the territory, are shared in a repertory, a data base that is put on-line in an information objective. They can globally face the diagnoses results.
After each observatory defined its own information, the caENTI defined the specifications of a diagnosis and evaluation guide and of a services repertory at the European level. It determined the specifications to integrate this guide in the medico-social individual accompaniment files. It also selected some territorial indicators accessible at this level. It also aims to reinforce the coherence of the three information sources so as to be able to confront the data in the best conditions.
The scientific methods of statistic analysis, adapted to a multi-criteria approach and crossing the quantitative, qualitative and spatial processing, were studied so as to define the specifications of the tools accessible to the actors to make territorial diagnoses, to evaluate services and to observe territorial development. Multi-platform and online versions of these tools were made and experimented within the framework of several territorial partnerships in Europe, what allowed evaluating their technical accessibility and their adaptation to an integrated, partnership and participative approach. These tools will be soon available on the Catalyse Community website.
The thinking on the scientific methods of analysis shown the importance of territorial information and of conceptual thinking. A research on the territorial indicators accessible at the European scale, on Eurostat and on European portals, in particular competitiveness indicators, led to the execution of a web mapping portal that allows making on-line communal-level mapping of the available indicators. A research on the territory concept allowed making a data base on the European teams that make research on territory. It describes the thematic orientations and the used methods. A thematic bibliography was also made.
Territorial intelligence ambitions to lead research activities and actions that respect sustainable development. A quality letter was defined to establish the criteria that determine these orientations. A tool (Assessing action-research quality) allows researchers and actors evaluating if their research and action respect these orientations. Two debates were led on this basis. The first one aims to identify the opportunities the information and communication technologies offer to make progress in the sustainable development direction, especially as regards information sharing, collaborative work, citizen information and understanding of the territorial dynamics. It also pays attention to the limits to be put to these technologies use, as the individual liberties respect, so as they do not clash with the ethic of sustainable development. The second debate concerns the parallel development of participative methods within development partnerships.
The actuality of the financial crisis, with its risks in the economic, social, environmental and cultural fields, show the importance of the thinking started by territorial intelligence to understand together the territorial systems and their dynamics so as to act together at the territories scale, for sustainable development. This crisis illustrates the difference there is between territories governance and firms management, between people’s well-being improvement and search for financial profit in the short term. People who were liberal theorists in the past presently hope the supranational cooperation and the States intervention will limit the excesses of the economic competition. It is also at the territorial scale cooperation can play a regular role of the detrimental effects of economic competition. It is not new: the inter-sector partnership has developed in many territories since the mid 1970s to regulate the social, environmental and cultural costs of the crises and of globalisation in the territories. It is a pity not to react before there are crisis situations and a tensions exacerbation to become aware of this, as John Friedman encouraged us to do at the end of August at the time of the inauguration conference (PDF) of the XLVth conference of the association of regional science of French language “Territories and territorial public action: new resources for the regional development”: «It is now up to us to critically examine the path on which we are collectively embarked and point it in another, that is, a more sustainable direction ». It is the ambition of territorial intelligence to give to all the actors of the territories development and to territorial authorities knowledge, information, scientific methods, tools for action and ethic principles to reach it. Its reference concepts: sustainable development, access of every one to the information and communication technologies, to information and knowledge, partnerships and participation are now known and recognised. They are presently considered as incontrovertible. Now the priority is to implement them in an effective way at the knowledge and action level.
Besançon 2008 - Closing ceremony
