Through the analysis of how a metropolitan governance issue, under the dynamics of public stakeholders, is addressed from the bottom up by local representatives and then redefined from a top-down perspective by the central State, this paper examines the territorial construction of a public problem in the Greater Paris area. The case of the Greater Paris area reveals deep rifts between the city centre and the outskirts with the central State’s difficulty to decentralize development authorities in the capital region, as well as the centrality of the institutional variable in the construction of the public problem.