ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the territorial governance process that led to the Territorial Cohesion Plan (Schéma de Coherence Territoriale, or SCOT) of South Loire, an area in the Loire Department of the Rhône-Alpes region. The capital of the Loire Department is Saint-Étienne, a city of nearly 178,000 inhabitants, is located 60 km southwest of Lyon, the second largest metropolitan area in France and capital of Rhône-Alpes region. SaintÉtienne is the driving city for the whole surrounding region, and has been deeply connected to the region’s industrial growth since the nineteenth century, witnessing its decline and the following attempts to recover. Many efforts, in fact, were made in the 1990s and the early 2000s to mitigate the deep economic decline that occurred from the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s. Nevertheless, these efforts have been largely considered unsuccessful. According to a number of experts, this failure is due to the strong role played by the central state and its decentralised structures, which seems to have inhibited local institutional resources and their autonomy (Béal et al. 2010, Vant and Gay 1997). Thus, Saint-Étienne has inherited a structure of social, economic and political relations that still prove unable to build both a capacity for collective actions and shared strategies to face various crises.
