Relancer Saint-Étienne. Conditions institutionnelles et capacité d’action collective dans une ville en déclin

The objective of the article is to understand how a political capacity can emerge in a city characterised by an ancient process of industrialisation and, more recently, by an economic and demographic decline. The central thesis of the article is inspired by political economy and neo-institutionalism. One considers that the difficulties faced by a place of old industry to build up a political capacity can admittedly be explained by an unfavourable position in the international division of labour but also the institutional conditions generated by the industrial past and the economic and demographic crisis. In the case of the French city of Saint-Étienne, analysed in this article, the historical modalities in which industrialisation occurred and the way deindustrialisation has been managed have engendered institutional conditions –propensity to voice and cooperation, relations between different types of organisations (business milieus, local political class, central State representatives)- that have not been favourable to the emergence of a collective political capacity and to the building up of shared anti-decline strategies