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Local authorities first asserted their international role through decentralized cooperation in solidarity. Today, new forms of international action such as innovation, or attracting business investment, as local economic development (LED) has become their priority. However, is the use of the term “paradigm” – meaning a change in vision, standards, and competences – appropriate? While one would be hard-pressed to identify such a transformation, there has been an increasing level of change for the past twenty years, turning the international action of local authorities into a tool for LED. This phenomenon might be due to four causes: the transfer of legal economic competences from the state to the local authorities, the integration of LED in a globalized system, the compliance of local leaders with this evolution, and finally the limits of decentralized cooperation, which brings out the need for new international action criteria.