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The influence of local actors on development policies remains limited, including in so-called participatory approaches. The distribution of power between technical expertise and civil society must be improved to avoid blockages, with drawal into identity groups and utopian ideas of the «global village». The geographer must integrate the political dimension of territories into his thinking and play a key role in the emergence of a new type of democratic process, from local to global. With bottom-up territorial planning, we propose a genuinely endogenous, inter-level dynamic. Setting up a local dynamic is based on three assumptions: local dynamics must be endogenous; the planning approach must be continuous; and this continuous planning must be mostly bottom-up.