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This article examines gerontological coordination, focusing on the work of local information and coordination centres (CLIC), set up to provide global and coordinated assistance to elderly people through a complementary range of actions and contributors. A CLIC aims to bring together different professional players – associations, institutions, professionals – without modifying the institutional organization of social and health services in any way. The use of coordination as a means to solve problems forms part of a changing trend in public and social policies which, over the last 25 years, have been progressively shifting from a logic based on planning to a more liberal approach. This review is based on the findings of an initial Inserm mission in 2001-2002 to assess five experimental CLICs. Three aspects are covered: administrative framework, territory and partnership. The assessment of these local centres reveals a broad diversity of project leaders, variable territorial delimitations, partnerships that are more advanced in the field than at institutional level, and a difficult relationship with health professionals. Though the informal network is dynamic, it must at some stage be normalized and give rise to formal compromises. It is at this precise point that coordination becomes necessary, to make a set of resources defined by a territorial project accessible to both professionals and the population. Coordination is thus a process of compromise between market values and republican values, enabling the CLIC to serve as a mediator and to guarantee the egalitarian principle that must always be defended in a network society, where the notion of accessis tending to replace the concept of integration.