Territorial Intelligence principles fostering governance

By Blanca MIEDES UGARTE, Universidad de Huelva, Spain

Slides of the presentation

The caENTI WP5 objective is to lead a reflexion about the ethical and methodological principles that the design and use of territorial intelligence methods and tools should respect to contribute to the territorial gobernance efficency of the problems linked to sustainable development.

The debate was based on the analysis of the research-action methodology the caENTI actors and researchers jointly developed during more than a decade to solve the problems of people of territories targeted by their projects.

Before presenting our conclusions on this point, two issues underlie our reflexion should be briefly presented here: the first one concerns the reasons why it is important to focus on the territory where we should deal with sustainable development problems and the second one concerns the concept of territorial governance we use itself.

As regards the first issue, a characteristic feature of the caENTI actors and research centers is the importance they give to the territory as an action and research space. This importance comes from the attention focuses on the costs associated to the economic growth processes and to its consequences on the people quality of life. The idea is although in the global capitalist system the benefits are portable, the social and environmental costs that are generated in concrete geographic spaces especially take root in some territories where the people have less negociation power to expel them from their environment. Thus, whereas the benefits linked to globalization are created and move towards the central places, the costs are created and remain where they are produced, including phenomena that have a worldwide scale like global warming, the negative effects are concentrated in some points of the Earth.

This way, the problems that more directly affect the people quality of life in the long-term, even when they have global explanations, have an important territorial dimension and the solutions to these problems should be found at the territorial level. Even when they require a global intervention, the territory dialogue power in this field is mainly defined by this last point, which always has a crucial importance.

In another hand, as regards the territorial governance issue with which the caENTI partners work, territory does not appear here as a mere context but as an active entity with its own dynamic modulated by the territorial actors projects set. Indeed, it is on territory where the economic, social, cultural, physic and environmental, global and local, dynamics cross and generate a territorial complex dynamic. In this dynamic, there are actors with different natures, with convergent and diverging interests and with different projects of various reach and can be antagonist, complementary or similar. The actors interaction generates a complex « intervention engineering » that modulates the territorial dynamic to generate a particular development model of the concerned territory. Within this context, the territorial governance context refers to the form the actors there are on the territory make decisions in relation with the content and scope of their projects, and consequently configure the « territorial intervention engineering ».

For the caENTI members, good territorial governance is the one that allow these decision-making processes on the one hand contribute to the democracy development and on the other hand materialize in plans and projects that meet the genuine territorial needs in an efficace and efficient way.

Here, the main issue concerns the sustainable development problems that impact on the ability of present and future generations to « have lives that worth it » (Sen, 1993), that are complex as they are usually generated by the addition of several reasons. Having a problems deep study requires a sectorial action, which implies the actions and actors specialization. Nevertheless, at the same time complexity requieres the devices of intervention on territory provide global answers and are coordinated in an efficient way. It makes cooperation and collaboration the main motors of sustainable development.

The objectives relevance, the actions set coherence and the resources optimization that good governance requires implies a global, multisectorial and knowledge-based vision of the evoked them, what wants having tools to understand territorial dynamics and the actors joint actions on the territory. Here, efficiency and efficacy demand a strong collaboration not only between actors, but also between actors networks and research groups specialized in the evoked themes.

The caENTI members have been reinforcing their relations for years through research-action projects, in which in a first step the researchers bring theoretical hypotheses and scientific methods and instruments to make territorial analysis and the actors their direct and inmediate knowledge about territorial problematics and its experience in the action field. The researchers and actors teams progressively transferred their knowledge to put it in common and eventually started working together as on the issues theorization or modellling as on the methods and tools design and experimentation of the kind of the ones that are developed by the caENTI WP6.

On the basis of this experience, the WP5 presented the nine principles (see deliverable 40) thet research-action should respect, which is the basis of the experimentation design of the territorial intelligence methods to effectively contribute to development territorial governance.

1. Transformation: this principle is the fundamental premise. It refers to the explicit approach considering these projects should transform a reality that is not satisfactory at all.
2. Multi-dimensionality: the problems should be tackled with a global approach.
3. Partnership: the project should involve all the concerned actors.
4. Participation: the projects should guarantee the participation of all the actors in an effective way and at all the levels, from the institutional stakeholders to the actors that more directly face the field needs and, of course, to the concerned people.
5. Sustainability: the processes should be implemented in the long-terme, in a form that can generate an ongoing knowledge of the problems that affect territories. The generated theories, modelos and databases will allow better understanding and monitoring the long-term dynamics and consequently the determining elements of the development model sustainability.
6. Transparency: the processes should aim to increase the results transparency, regarding as research as action, what makes the decision-making easier and contributes to make decisions in a more democratic way.
7. Co-responsability: in the process, the « actors-researchers » and the « researchers-actors » are both responsible for the project evolution and the reached results and it should be reflected in the work sharing.
8. Co-assessment: the research-action objectives should include a systematic assessment of the process that allows its feeding and the reorientation of the operational objectives in the course of the initial context transformation.
9. Co-learning: the processes should facilitate the cooperative learning of all the participants, by improving the ability of all the territorial actors system to find solutions to its systems whilst taking advantage as much as possible of all the current knowledge and of its past experience.

Formulating these principles is a mere declaration of intention without an additional analysis of the conditiones required to practically implement it. The conclusion about these determining elements within the WP5 is unanimous: the key-point, the sine qua non condition to implement these principles is the effective participation of the concerned actors. The synergies, transversality, knowledge transfer and shared learning these principles recommand depend on the participative process reach and quality.

The most important learning that it is possible to draw from the caENTI experience on this point is the awareness of the research-team teams that effective participation is not a mere circumstance, an element of the context where the projects are implemented, but an essential condition of its execution the project should built. The actors participation dynamic is not given and consequently it is an evident element. That is why, the WP5 drafted a Quality Letter (see: deliverable) of the participative processes of research-action where the means necessary to work on the key four considered aspects for its development are specified, that is to say: actors and territorial resources mobilization, mutualization of its knowledge and competences, delimitation of the participants and involved inestitutions responsibility and definition of rules concerning the common property of results of research-action.

The uses analysis the caENTI make of the methods and tools developed within the WP6 (see: video) shows their main potentiality consists in the fact they are especially designed to build a participative dynamic and so as the actors mutualize their information and jointely analyse them, and consequently efficiently contribute to generate territorial partnerships on the long term. The method intelligibility, the tools accessibility and the results relative facility of interpretation for a non-expert public in the data analysis field, are factors that contribute for the actors to have the impression to usefully invest time in the process. Indeed, participation requires actors resources, especially time, and there is an important risk of demobilization of the partnership if this investment does not lead to concrete results. The fact caENTI tools can offer significant results from the process first steps is a strong motivation factor.

Thus, focalizing on the participative process quality and the results relative immediacy make the two territorial intelligence methods designed by caENTI tools suitable tools to catalyse the territorial actors participation, what allows developing sustainable cooperative action channels that lead to an improvemen of territorial governance.

It is obvious that the technologies widening and use to transmit and analyse territorial information present risks linked to the safeguard of the statistic secret and, because of the use of this information is made, especially by public authories, to the possibility it can be a tool to control people. It emphasizes the special relevance of drafting a very strict Code of ethics and to control its rigorous performance in the development processes of territorial intelligence. Nevertheless, it is important to insist on the fact these processes overcome the territorial information logic as a people control instrument and introduce the information logic as a knowledge source that stimulates the individual abilities.

Despite the risks, these methods application has important advantages, firstly by integrating different prospects about territorial needs they allow generating a global vision of the studied problems. Besides, by focusing on the actors participation building to mobilize and analyse information in a sustainable process they allow generating an interpretation dynamic of reality on baes that are informed enough on the long-term. They are tools that allow identifying what is urgent, but its main advantage is the possibility they give to make a structural analysis of the main trends and of their evolution in the long term, the unique way to tackle risks, overflows and challenges generated by sustainable development.

A very important value added of these participative processes of research-action is they contribute to the collective intelligence development through the strenghtening of the actors individual abilities and competences on the territory. It is not a mere knowledge transfer exercice, it consists in the creation of mutual learning processes that contribute to the territorial actors, that are not mere field solicitors or operators anymore, and become able to make suggestions.

They are methods and tools designed to simultaneously improve the scientific-technic knowledge on the territory and the interventions quality in territorial engineering. An approach based on the idea to "know to act, act to know and know by acting".

A frequent critic to the traditional practices of research-action is the participants focus on "doing the right thing". These tools allow overcoming this critic, by introducing evaluation and quality criteria in the interventions supporting sustainable development, which contribute to the development of its efficace and efficient economic development in the long term.