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Territorial intelligence is an emerging concept highly polysemous. This article does not give a comprehensive definition and consensus. Our subject is to take stock of the evolution of our concept of territorial intelligence at the end of the Coordination Action European Network of Territorial Intelligence (caENTI) to present a definition that supports ambition, the research directions and activities of the European Network Territorial Intelligence (ENTI). Our goal is to position the territorial intelligence as an alternative to development models based on economic efficiency in the short term or the central policy authority.Our concept of territorial intelligence was forged in ENTI, which was formed in two steps:1. The dissemination of the Catalyse method, starting with 1989, in about forty territories from the centre, the south and the east of Europe set the empirical foundations of the territorial intelligence.2. The concept of territorial intelligence has been defined since 1998 on these basis, within REIT - Réseau Européen d’Intelligence Territoriale - then within caENTI - coordination action of the European Network of Territorial Intelligence - supported by the 6th framework programme of research et technological development “Integrate and Strengthen the European Space of Research” of the European Union, in the thematic priority 7 “Citizens and governance in a society of knowledge”.From its very conception, Catalyse has been a scientific method, which is respectful of the sustainable development, of people’s participation and of the actors’ partnership. It suggested cheap and easy to use tools appropriated to territorial actors’ uses.By broadcasting in Europe, it built connections between the actors and the researchers who collaborated in carrying out territory diagnosis, local projects evaluation and territorial observation within transnational programmes supported by European funds (Equal, Leader, Interreg…).The REIT network was first developed in order to organize transnational seminars so as to develop experience exchanges, to organize methodological training and to share the costs of tools development. It was officially created in 2002, in order to develop research activities in territorial intelligence concerning the development of multidisciplinary knowledge on the dynamics of the territories, the spreading of the multicriteria scientific methods and of the generic tools of spatial analysis, as well as the governance ways which are appropriate to sustainable development.From March 2006 to February 2009, caENTI began the creation of a virtual laboratory comprising eight universities and seven actors, belonging to seven European countries (Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia), then Taiwan. Among other results, the caENTI allowed defining the fields of territorial intelligence, as well as the conjunction of crisis, which prove the emergency of a coordination of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of the sustainable development.This is a goal of the ENTI network, which knew how to attract new partners and which is shown interest today by other territories in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Quebec, as certified by the new creation of the laboratory TAG “Territories, Actors, Governances” at the University of La Plata (Argentina), that coordinates the network “territorios posibles” at the scale of Mercosur and of the laboratory “Modelling and Territorial Intelligence” at the University of Quebec in Ottawa.The Catalyse method has been developed at the request of actors organized as partnerships, who wanted to understand the complexity and diversity of the needs and the situations of the persons they were in charge with, so as to act together at the territorial scale in order to improve individuals’ well-being.Catalyse has been conceived for and with the actors of Mosaïque “concerted action” from 1989 to 1993 in Franche-Comté within the framework of the third European programme of fight against poverty, afterwards of the programme of social and economic insertion “Horizon”.It was spread starting with 1994 in about forty territories at the request of multi-sectors partnerships of actors in territories affected by industrial recession and in vulnerable territories from the Southern and Eastern Europe previously governed by authoritarian states. In Seraing (Belgium), old finial of industry, in Huelva in Andalusia (Spain), in the region of Ormanság (Hungary) or that of Alba Iulia (Romania) - in all these territories the situation was very degraded at the social and environmental level: unemployment rate over 30% in certain areas, lack of employment for young people and immigrants, precariousness and social and economic exclusion, highly degraded health condition because of the work conditions and of the environment, many outdated or makeshift accommodations, people without social protection, without accommodation, unsanitary environment…The actors of Catalyse usually form «development partnerships». These partnerships are territorial, temporal networks, connecting remote members working in different organisations. They are multi-sector in two ways:They are reunited by a common project so as to achieve together a concrete objective of sustainable development. The diagnosis, the evaluation and the observation are for them useful tools to evaluate the pertinence, the efficiency and impact of their actions.Catalyse enables these « development partnerships » to answer three questions :In order to answer these questions, Catalyse suggests three tools:The neighbouring universities have always been associated to partnerships, in order to bring the training and the scientific, methodological and technical ground useful in issuing diagnosis, evaluations and observations by the actors.Since its origin, Catalyse refers to three key concepts: sustainable development, territory and the information society.Considering information as the new vector of development after agriculture and industry, the Catalyse tools widely make use of the information and communication technologies, the multicriteria statistic methods and the spatial analysis, as well as project and evaluation management. It is aware however that the computerization of society has had a strong impact on the economic and social crisis.Catalyse method is based on a global, multidimensional and balanced approach of the territory, geographic space and human community, without eclipsing the people. It comes out of the people’s needs and not only of the actors’ skills, being based on an individualized accompaniment.The originality of Catalyse is also based on the respect of the ethical principles of sustainable development and of democratic governance. The territorial diagnosis contributes to the inventory of Agenda 21 of the sustainable development. Catalyse is based on the multidimensional partnership of the actors from the territory. It is a participative approach aiming at integrating the actors and the people in the decision-making process. These ethical principles supervise the use of scientific protocol, of the technologies of information and communication and of the tools of statistic and spatial analysis.The emergence of the concept of territorial intelligence corresponds to the ambition to organize ENTI around a research project.We suggested the term of “territorial intelligence” in 1998 to illustrate an approach of development of territories based on a scientific, systematic and multidisciplinary approach, which uses technologies of information and communication, integrates multicriteria methods and spatial analysis that involves practitioners in the observation process and interpretation of results.The first definition given in 1999 is strongly connected to action: “The territorial intelligence is a means for the researchers, actors and territorial community to acquire a better knowledge of the territory, but also to better handle its development. The appropriation of technologies of information and communication and of information itself is an essential step for the actors to accede to a training process, which will allow them acting in a pertinent and efficient way. The territorial intelligence is particularly useful in helping territorial actors to plan, define, animate and evaluate the policies and the actions of sustainable territorial development”. This definition clearly connects the territorial intelligence to the sustainable development at the territory level.This definition became more accurate in 2002 with the intention to develop a research project that would still stay connected to the action: “The concept of territorial intelligence represents the set of multidisciplinary knowledge which on the one hand contribute to the comprehension of structures and territorial dynamics and on the other hand aims at being an instrument for the actors of sustainable development of the territory” . It created a research action of the project of the Institute of Human Sciences, which gathers multidisciplinary actions in the field of human and social sciences, become today Institute of Human and Environmental Sciences Claude Nicolas LEDOUX .The state of art of the caENTI project clarified the activity field of the territorial intelligence, which requires the whole range of multidisciplinary knowledge in the field of territory knowledge, territorial governance and territorial engineering.The territorial intelligence lived on economic sciences and geography, but also on sciences and technologies of information and communication (STIC) and on knowledge management. The connections with the economic intelligence and the STIC are often at the core of common definitions of the territorial intelligence.The systems of territorial intelligence make use of the traditional means of spreading information and use the technologies of information and communication through Intranet and Internet sites, documentation, systems of geographic information and data analysis. In this way, Philippe DUMAS brought together “the intelligence as a cognitive process and organization of information and the territory as place of significant relations” and Yann BERTACCHINI suggested that the territorial intelligence “can be assimilated to the territoriality resulted from the phenomenon of appropriation of resources of a territory then to the transfer of competences among categories of local actors of different culture” .The general objective of the caENTI was to integrate the present research projects on territorial intelligence tools, so as to give them a European dimension.The pertinence of this objective was based on the fact that, since the 80s, the European Union had introduced the project management, the evaluation practice, the partnership and the participation criteria in its calls for project. The scientific instruments adapted to these principles were available for experts, but the territorial actors rarely benefited from simple and economic tools to elaborate, administrate, observe and evaluate their projects.CaENTI specified the areas of territorial intelligence and clarified its ambitions in order to propose a definition that constitutes the uniqueness of the field and research areas of ENTI.In the scientific field, the territorial intelligence integrates and develops the multi-disciplinary knowledge and the scientific protocols essential to the understanding of territorial structures, territorial systems and territories’ dynamics.The caENTI proved the usefulness of the comparative analysis, at European and world scale, of the intercultural approaches and of the representations of territory. It initiated a reflection upon the ontology of the concept of territory, which was a constant theme of the annual international conference of territorial intelligence. It opened, together with the Latin- American network “territorios posibles” the inquiry “What do you mean by territory?” among scientists in all fields and actors from various sectors at international scale.For the methodology, the territorial intelligence adapts the fundamental scientific methods, the research protocols and the generic tools with a wide application useful to analyse territories and territorial information. It uses the technologies of the information and communication (TIC) to share and widely spread the territorial information and to cooperate.The caENTI listed the methods and the scientific tools used for the analysis of the territory dynamics and of the information and of territorial information. It conducted a study on the spreading of the exploratory, inferential and multi-criteria statistic methods, of the spatial analysis and modelling, of the geographic information systems and of the territorial observation and within human and social sciences .A database of research teams on the territory in Europe (420) specifies their thematic, their approaches and the methods they use. This database is being expanded and analysed.The caENTI has progressively proved that the information, the information systems, are more important than methods and tools. The reflection upon information available at European scale has established however, with the drafting of a web mapping of European scale, the absence of homogeneity, the diversity of spatial references and the shortage in updating available territorial indicators.These are generally economic indicators non-adapted to the sustainable development, because of the lack of social and environmental indicators. Generally published at the town level, the available indicators are not accessible to the territorial actors that usually perform on territories of infra-town scale that often include several towns.The territorial intelligence evaluates the governance principles, which guarantee a balanced consideration of needs, a fair distribution and the perpetuity of resources thanks to partnership and participation. The governance is different from the government in that it represents a temporary framework allowing assembling public, private and associations’ actors, who cooperate in order to define concrete common objectives and who coordinate their resources in order to fulfil these objectives in a reasonable and functional way.The caENTI looked for the best practices in the scientific production that could inspire the territorial governance while respecting the sustainable development. It proposed a «European letter of quality» that specifies the ethical principles, standards and protocols which should be respected by the research action and by the tools of territorial intelligence in a view of sustainable development . An assessment tool for development partnerships accompanies it. An internet directory of territorial intelligence projects has been designed on this basis .It studied deeper the issue of the use of technologies f information and communication, which are essential for sharing and spreading useful information for issuing territorial diagnosis, for evaluating the actions and for territorial observation, at the service of projects of sustainable development. This inquiry mainly dealt with the respect of private life and with the accessibility of information and of technologies to all the actors and to the entire territorial community, without affecting the quality of the information. Conversely, a study dealt more particularly with the participative methods .Finally, the territorial intelligence designs and realizes tools for, with and by the territorial actors that aim at developing their territories in the respect of the principles of sustainable development and of democratic governance.The caENTI modelled and coordinated the Catalyse tools starting from the actors’ experience and ensuring the compliance of the indicators to the European standards. The detailed descriptions useful to tools actualization were defined. The computer development of new cross platform and cross language versions was set; as well as online versions that pilot a unique database and that authorize processing in real time .Several experiments were conducted in Spain , Belgium and France in order to improve the choice of indicators, their formulation and their definition and to describe the processing protocol of each indicator .The analysis and the modelling of the integration of these tools within the territorial information systems started. Designed starting from the needs of actors and of territorial community, they were named “territorial intelligence community systems”.“Catalyse community” will allow downloading updated versions of the tols from the portal of territorial intelligence http://www.territorial-intelligence.eu. Access will also be allowed to online help and to processing protocols.As emphasized by Jean-Marc BLANCHERIE in 2002, the territorial intelligence is born «from the conjunction of major and interdependent changes at economic and social level». The caENTI went into the analysis of environmental, economic and social crisis that showed the limits and the risks of a way of developing based on the imagination of the consumerism.During the seventies the oil crisis and the emergence of the information society will question the way of development of the “thirty glorious”. Their effects will be intensified by the financial crisis starting with the eighties.Our way of development does not correspond anymore to the imagination of the consumerism that the industrialized countries believed to create from 1945, after the World War II, to 1974. During this period of the “thirty glorious”, the countries OECD knew an important economic growth characterized by an increased industrial production by about 5%, by the demographic growth connected to the «baby boom», the development of urban industrial areas, full employment, the regular growth of the purchasing power and the improvement of the social protection guaranteed by the state.Since 1973 the first oil crisis shows the limits of a development pattern based on the waste of natural resources and on the unfair exchange with countries from the “third world” which development is still based on natural resources and on agriculture.Since 1947 these countries gathered at international conferences to claim the ownership of the resources of their soil, more fairness in exchanges and their part of development “because finally this third world ignored, exploited, despised as a Tiers État also wants to be something”.During the war in Kippur, in October 1973, the Arabic countries members of OPEP jeopardise to put an embargo on the oil deliveries. They claim increasing four times the part that goes to the producing country and decide a production control in order to keep the gross price high. The barrel price goes up from 3$ to 12$. In September 1980, at the beginning of the war Iran-Iraq, it goes to 39$. It reaches 145$ in June 2008, after having doubled each year since September.The oil crisis caused an international employment crisis and an aggravation of poverty that a foreseeing management of the natural resources could have limited. The increase in energy costs slowed down the growth of industrialized countries, cut their capacity to invest and increased the unbalance in their balance of payment. It increases as well the natural handicap of the developing countries that do not own fossil resources, while the leading classes of the producing countries benefited from a situation income, which fuelled the world financial speculation.The oil crisis contributed to getting awareness on the exhaustion of natural resources and on the risks, such as the global warming, that human activities directed by the will of profit on short term impose to the planet and the humanity.In the late seventies, the computerization of the society connected to the emergence of the “information society” magnified the social damages of the energetic crisis.In 1977, Marc-Uri PORAT proved that the main part of the active population of the industrialized countries was employed in the sector of information to produce materials of informatics and telecommunication, to edit software and to produce and spread information. The “information society” is characterized by the massive spreading of computer and communication material at decreasing costs. Our society is defined at present mostly as a “knowledge society” that values knowledge, creativity and human and social capital. Since the conference in Lisbon in 2000, the first strategic objective of the European Union is to become the world’s most competitive and most dynamic knowledge economy, capable of a sustainable economic growth accompanied by a quantitative and qualitative improvement of employment and of a bigger social cohesion.The computerization of society, which was made in three steps starting with the second half of the seventies, increased the environmental, social and economic damages of the energetic crisis. The mechanization of the workshops, then the computerization of the commercial and financial services and, more recently, the digitalization of the information and its global spreading increased the mass unemployment, the weakness of the social protection, poverty, exclusion and precariousness.The energetic crisis and the development of the information society reduced purchasing power for the work force, including for the middle classes, to the benefit of the financial capital. The development of technologies of information considerably increased the financial speculation. It became possible to win - and to lose - huge amounts in little time.The development of financial capital has quickly become very unstable in the eighties. Since 1979, the increasing of the day-to-day rate of the American Federal Funds determines a severe recession and underlines the debt of the developing countries. Ever since, there were counted not less than twenty financial crises. If the “internet bubble” in 2000 is a classic crisis of overinvestment, the “subprime” crisis is particular because it shows that the regular man compensated the depreciation of his purchasing power by borrowing more money under riskier and riskier circumstances, encouraged by the consumerism and by the banks.The convergent effects of the energetic crisis, of the computerization of the society and of the financial crisis have in the end marginalized social groups and determined the recession of entire regions. They increased the vulnerability of many populations and regions in the world. These crises revealed the economic, social and environmental costs of the development that the citizen is constrained to compensate. They led as well to deep political changes.The concept of governance also is connected to the linked economic and political trends that lead to decentralization. The lack of capacity of the systems of social protection to protect citizens from poverty, precariousness and exclusion, resulted from the economic and social crisis (precariousness, exclusion) and from the lack of prediction of the environmental costs was reflected in a crisis of legitimacy of the United States that lead at the same time to the reaffirming of the local identities, to more administrative decentralization, to the delegation of political competences and to the transfer of public politics of the State to the territorial groups and to financial co-responsibility.However the governance is not a simple consequence of crises. It is not only specific to regions in crisis, but it comes out more largely from globalization. The analysis of the scientific and industrial park in Taichung, Taiwan, shows that if the economic interest of the scientific and industrial poles emblematic of the globalization is perceived by the investors and at a national level, the territories are confronted to their environmental and social costs.The accommodation and transport infrastructure were often not created to welcome the migrant workers that form the most important part of the employed workers. The accessibility to facilities implies highways, fast trains, airports, harbours built without consideration to the environment. These facilities often cause bankrupt to local companies and local economy with severe social consequences for their employees.The governance concerns both the transnational level and the territorial level that absorbs the social and environmental costs of the economic development. In order to face the social and environmental costs of the crisis, the territorial governance is based on the mobilization of multi- sector partners. “The local management strategies have to be expanded to include local governance that refers to a change in the way of governing integrating self- organized and inter- organized networks characterized by the interdependence of the resources exchanges in the game of autonomy from the State".The oil crises that initiated the awareness of the limited character of the natural resources, the economic and social consequences of the development of the information society supposed to bring innovation and progress, the repeated financial crisis have therefore questioned a way of development based on short-term economic results and on the central authority of the government.These crises that increase the vulnerability of populations and of territories and that increase in various ways the vulnerability of human groups and of particular territories represent a dimension of our way of development. They form the ambition of the concept of territorial intelligence to represent an alternative face up to their joint effects reproduced at the planet’s scale.In conclusion, we can now specify that «the territorial intelligence is the science whose object is the sustainable development of territories and whose subject is the territorial community».Since the conception of the Catalyse method we stated the sustainable development as the fundamental orientation of the territorial intelligence, having as corollaries global approach and a participative governance based on partnership.Resulted from the claims of the third world, the sustainable development which «attempts to solve the populations’ needs [in priority those of the most vulnerable groups] without compromising the capacity of the future generations to meet theirs» appeared gradually with the reproduction and the amplification of the economic, social and environmental crisis as an alternative to “economic” development.It is often objected that sustainable development has become an ambiguous concept. It is true that it is the object of oppositions that tend to reduce it to a reorientation of the economy or only to its environmental dimension. This is why we insist on the social dimension of a concept by mentioning “in priority those of the most vulnerable groups” so as to remind its origins.The sustainable development proposes a global approach taking into account jointly the economic, social and environmental dimensions. It cannot be reduced to only one of its dimensions without losing its meaning. It jointly involves a multidisciplinary cognitive process and a multi-sector action based on partnership. We support the idea of adding culture as a fourth objective . This proposal will be debated at the next international annual conference in Salerno (Italy) in November 2009.The territorial intelligence is also for a territorial approach by setting as objective the sustainable development of territories. It is based from the very beginning on development partnerships. In parallel to the trends of decentralization of the governance, the sustainable development proposes this territorial approach in «thinking globally to act locally».During the caENTI, we developed the definition of territorial intelligence in order to distinguish it better on the one hand from the economic intelligence by reference to sustainable development and on the other hand from the Anglo-Saxon concept of community development “which refers to voluntary changes in, by and for the community”, by a multidisciplinary scientific approach and by the use of technologies of information.The definition that we propose does not see territorial intelligence as a simple variant of the economic intelligence, it is more ambitious. It does not limit the territorial development to the economic growth, or to the economic competition. It does not consider the territory as a market, as a competition place.The partnership, which represents the instrument of global approach, goes against the competition principles as long as it is based on cooperation. It answers however to an economic logic since it aims at gathering available local resources before using new resources.The networks allow not only to private actors to take art in the decision-making process in the framework of the participative democracy, but also to provide common goods and services.The territorial intelligence does not aim at eliminating the market, the competition or the competitiveness. It wants at limiting and regulating the market pernicious effects through the development of cooperation spaces. It also suggests at integrating the social, environmental and cultural costs in the global budget of the development projects, being completely aware that this accounting is insufficient because the energetic stakes of the sustainable development are not only economic.Like the community development, the territorial intelligence respects two ethical principles resulted from the sustainable development: the citizens’ participation and the actors’ partnership.However, contrary to the concept of community development, the territorial intelligence is based on the use of technologies of information and uses the tools of territories knowledge and of analysis of territorial information in the context of the knowledge society. The originality of the methods and tools of territorial intelligence is to represent technological solutions that respect the principles of democratic governance and cooperation.Starting with scientific knowledge and methods, the territorial intelligence designs and creates tools together with the territorial actors who wish to cooperate within a process of research-action to align their projects to the orientations of the sustainable development. It represents at the same time intelligence “embedded” in these tools and it lives to develop a collective intelligence.It is an embedded intelligence that uses technologies of information and communication to integrate the territorial information and their tools of analysis within systems of shared and cooperative information. A web mapping tool allows for instance mapping an indicator through indicating the desired territory and information. In order to allow to an actor to get this result without reproducing the set of choices of an expert it is needed to automate the multi-criteria and spatial statistic analysis of the territorial information, describe and specify the processing protocols and integrate the expertise instead of the steps that would have involved expert choices.It is also a collective intelligence that associates the competences in a cooperative way so as to increase, to create and to evaluate innovative, adapted and long-lasting projects. It comes out of a transfer that enables the access on a larger scale to knowledge. For this, it involves training, covering, co-building of knowledge, sharing information. It rallies firstly the territorial actors, the development partners. In the end, it is intended to the entire territorial community.Territorial intelligence will help coordinate dimensions of sustainable development largely involving everyone in the development of its own well-being, of its community on its territory, and of the humanity on the planet.