Relations between Associations and Territories. Towards a new Paradigm? – ASSTER

Successive crises (financial, health, ecological) and the growing expression of a need for democratic renewal are reshaping our relationship with territories. Associations are one of the key actors in territorial transitions: through citizen and volunteer commitments, social connections and inter-actor listening, local solidarity, and the local anchoring of jobs and activities they enable. However, the understanding of the relations between associations and territories remains too often limited: in the literature as well as in the discourses of the associative leaders/officials, who depend in many points of view on their relations with local authorities.

The project ASSTER aims to explore, from various angles, how to move from a territory supporting associative action to territories built by associations? It is led by an emerging consortium of researchers and community actors who have participated in the working group “Associations (or Civil Society Organizations) and Territories” leaded by IFMA (one of the pilots of this project with the University of Angers, “Espaces et Sociétés” -Spaces and Societies- research unit). The ambition of this participatory research is to build a shared conceptual framework to understand the contributions of associations to territorial development and to test the fields for future research.

Co-managed by researchers and associative actors, the project will document and test locally four knowledge issues, using quantitative and qualitative methods: (1) to qualify and compare the knowledge needs of public and associative agents/stakeholders; (2) to co-build a typology of relations between territories and associations; (3) to characterize local co-production arrangements on associative life (or community life) and projects. In addition to the exploitation of results through scientific and professional publications, and a symposium between researchers and associative agents, the main objective is to create a common conceptual and methodological framework which will be proposed at the end of this emerging project, in view of organizing field studies and prospecting funding opportunities for further research.