Strategic Intelligence for the Future 1

5 Regional Competitive Intelligence

“The local area, from which everything starts and towards which everything returns, is not the enemy of the universal. […] Globality can only be sustained if local development remains open and supported.” [MOH 10]

In a recent book of worldwide prospective intelligence [RAI 16], the geographer Virginie Raisson and her team present us with a utilitarian and globalized future of territories. “Now that the origins of a territory, its ancestral traditions, its historical memory, or its ethno-linguistic division” matter, it is trapped in an economic model of endless growth and an “ever greater and more insatiable humanity”, as a devourer of resources. It is as if it were on the brink of complete evaporation. Globalization, international trade and finance, but also migration flows and megacities: all phenomena of the world economy that “gradually aggregates territories” and tends to remove their collective dimension and identity.

In the end, a globalized economy gives territories their strategic value: earth, oil and shale gas, as well as desert and the ability to produce solar energy. They also have fertile land, water, rare land, and just as many imminent wars of resources. This particular analysis brings with it geopolitical and geo-economic factors when considering the development of territories, as well as making us reconsider the representation of territories, local development strategies and the tools and necessary steps for diagnosis and ...