Développement territorial soutenable: l'approche des libertés et ses conséquences pour les politiques d'attractivité

Moving from the concepts of territory as a social construct and of development as the progressive, dynamic fulfilment of self-established goals, the paper aims to show how a genuine strategy of development helps building up a sustainable attractiveness. To achieve this goal, the paper first investigates the accuracy of the Nation Brand Index as a signal of the territorial attractiveness, positive or negative, in a long term perspective. Second, the pertinence of the freedom approach to development in order to fully integrate the sustainability issues is enlightened. Finally, the two models are tied together, thus allowing the mutual links and synergies to appear and corroborating the idea that appropriate development strategies make a selective attractiveness, based on the territorial values and choices, to emerge.