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The Primequal research program, aimed at studying air quality at the local scale, was initiated in 1995 by the Ministry in charge of the Environment and by ADEME (French Environment and Energy Management Agency). Designed as a multidisciplinary program, it centered chiefly on the physico-chemical and sanitary aspects of air pollution. Human and social sciences, though regularly invited to participate in the program, have remained little involved. To overcome this problem, a special call for research wholly dedicated to the field was set up in 2004. Eight projects, whose results are briefly summarized and discussed in this paper, were funded. For the authors, one of the main findings of this research is the remaining gap, due to poor governance, between the institutional approach to air quality based on monitoring and administrative overseeing and the population's lack of grasp and involvement regarding an issue to which they are, however, highly sensitive and whose sanitary implications they are strongly aware of. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author looks for to give a cross-sectional vision of the governance concept and to try to determine the logic that characterizes it, considering that is a notion that has been mainly the object of a critical literature. After remembering the origin of the governance concept, the author successively deals with the subject of the governance like new conception of the territories, of the crisis of the governance to the light of the crisis of the democracy and the principles of the governance, before concluding on the controversies relative to the governance. It makes a precise scan, as much of the "analytical uses" of the governance concept, these are those that try to develop with her a tool of understanding of changes in the art to govern, like of this "normative uses", in the sense to determine the conditions necessary for "good to govern" (good governance). This ambivalence of the use of the concept of governance and one reviews critic and rigorous of literature (classics, compilers, analysts and "practitioners ") it allows the author to develop the thesis according to which in political science, it is impossible to find an author who has structured the debate on the governance. Like conclusion, the author indicates that the governance shows the same imprecision that the democracy, because it does consensus on its necessity but not on which it is. It is by the way a "word suitcase" but that helps politicians as to investigators to be understood as much. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]