Fabriquer la gouvernance territoriale. Une analyse historico-institutionnaliste de l’action publique du logement en Wallonie

Research in economics and politics of territories doesn?t take the temporal dimension sufficiently into account in the making of modes of territorial governance. This article draws on historical institutionalism and formulates two complementary hypotheses on the effects of formal or informal, economic or socio-political institutions in the making of modes of territorial governance. First, contemporary actors are definitely dependant on inherited coordinations. Second, there is a capacity for endogenous change in modes of governance. These last ones have always the potential to generate new coordination problems. There is thus a permanent dynamic of governance redesign. The case study of the territorialisation of housing policy in Wallonia (Belgium) helps to verify these propositions. Place based and cross-sectoral, housing policy is a collective action, spanning more than a century, to produce this crucial territorial resource. The results show that the territorial governance of housing can be explained by a fertile sequence of phases in which coordination problems between public players, private operators and households are resolved or generated. Today, the sector benefits from alliances or resources exchanges (home ownership, social policy and private rental investment) at different scales that coexist without ever completely disappearing.