Making Territories Inclusive. Which Actors Are Mobilized in the Process of Cross-Sector Collaboration for Sustainable Employment ?
Enabling people to access all the resources and systems they need is the main challenge of inclusive territories. One priority is access to sustainable employment. Public authorities have tried to support this priority by encouraging the development of partnerships between actors from a variety of sectors (private, public, hybrid and third sectors). Supporting sustainable employment is a complex societal problem that makes such projects necessary. These projects pose real challenges for collaborative work at the territorial level. It is thereby necessary to examine the nature and specificities of this collaborative work, which aims to create inclusive territories and which involves actors from different sectors. It is interesting to ask which actors are involved in this process of cross-sector collaboration for sustainable employment and what challenges are facing this CSC in creating an inclusive territory. Through an exploratory study of two projects that were launched as part of the call for “100 % inclusion projects,” we describe the efforts of cross-sector collaboration in two distinct French territories and examine their specific features. The results portray the concept of “inclusive territory” as a collaborative linear path and furthermore show divergent and revealing conceptions of tensions within the various sectors, some of which are under-represented. Summary For several years now, with the emergence of complex social issues, cross-sector collaborations (CSCs) have been formed to bring together actors from private, public and hybrid sectors, as well as from the third sector (the social economy). These collaborations can take the form of publicly funded territorial projects. In 2018, in France, a call was issued for “100 % inclusion projects” to encourage local organizations to try out new ways to integrate groups that have trouble finding employment. In this article, we examine the specific features of such collaboration, which we observed during participatory initiatives that had been organized in response to the call for projects. We show that the relationship problems within these consortiums were as much within sectors (between branches of the public sector) as between sectors.