Abstract
This paper examines how to mobilize the concept of territorial capital to renew geographic inquiry into the mechanisms of development of local territories. Borrowed from the trend of the territorial economy, this concept leads geographical analysis to consider the linkages between the different dimensions of territorial development: the appreciation of new resources, the establishment of networks of cooperation and the governance of project territories. The exercise of conceptual transposition applied here to the analysis of the European LEADER programme, as a public policy based on the constitutive paradigms of local development. The article first discusses the concepts mobilized by the social sciences to analyze the development of local territories. It then adopts a monographic approach and a case study in a Central European country, Hungary, to measure the activation of territorial capital by characterizing the forms of coordination of collective action for socio-economic development at a local level. In this, the geographical approach questions the social sciences on how to analyze territorial innovation.