The territorial dimension has become a major issue in the last twenty years both at level of enterprises and institutions. For the first, territorial concerns lie mainly in the choice of locations of activities and forms of business cooperation. For the second, the recurring issue is that of regional planning that lean to the territorial governance. Thus, starting from the inherent idéology in this thesis, our main objective was to determine and assess the governance factors highlighting the role of territory and proximity to industrial development in Douala. The development of our ideas was structured in a lecture divided into two parts, each comprising two chapters. Before discussing the analytical framework for space management and industrial proliferation in Douala (part two), we reviewed the theoretical and empirical framework of industrial location and territorial dynamics (first part). The objective of the first part was to trace the outline of the evolution of the location of industrial activities such as they are set by certain works like those of A.MARSHALL (1890), P.KRUGMAN (1991), and territorial theories on the one hand, and to specify the theoretical analysis of the setting regulation on the other hand. The regulation approach (part two) challenges the rules of mutual coordination between government interventions and strategies of private actors in the process of industrial location and local development in Douala. This is usually made following the effective interaction and coordination conveyed between the local and territorial actors. The combination of coordination within the public sphere with coordination within the private sphere in a broader partnership probably constitutes the most effective mode of operation of territorial governance which is most indicated to address transversal problems across the city and CEMAC area.
