This thesis deals whit the observation of the emerging dynamics of territorial economic development in the rural areas by the prism of the outdoor activities merchandising. It aims to understand the effects of the contractor in the outdoor sports on the territorial, the touristic and the rural systems. Those activities are emerging and they have established a new commercial dimension since a decade, which is now deeply printed in the rural areas. By then, the outdoor leisure activities constitute locally a vocational which the contractor uses to structure themselves, localise their activities or trade between them. This vocational would potentially provide territorial effects. However, the territorial impact of the outdoor sport activities are particularly difficult to measure or to localise because it diffuses or dissimulates following the socio-spatial characteristics of the commercial outdoor sports. Nevertheless, spatial then territorial logics appears within the outdoor sport tourism market if we observe the group of the contractors of sport framing in those activities which represent the entirety of the market of the outdoor sport activities in rural areas. Those logics can be compared to those who rules the distribution and the localisation of the sporting site or the tourism economics. The problem of this research is the following: how the outdoor sport tourism market interact with the rural territories? The merchandised outdoor sports participate to the constitution of a territorial resource, constructed then activated by cultural, environmental, politic, and economic factors. The rural areas are the support of a sport and tourism market whose effects on the local economy depends of the diversity of the activities forms and the vocational structuration. This social and geographic complexity leads this research to observe the local structuration modes of the outdoor sport and tourism market in rural areas, both by the productive systems, social systems and administrative systems. This work is based on the example of the Ardèche department for illustrating the presented socio-spatial mechanism. This space is an historic outdoor sport and tourism destination in France, where for one part the market of the sport tourism is developed enough for the repartition of its operator, its actors, its sport sites form a geographic object to be observed. For another part, the public and sport institution participates there, with the local actors, to the management and development of outdoor sport activities in rural areas through procedures of consultation. Those consultations underlined the existence of an economic and local system dealing with outdoor sport activities and especially vocational of sport framing in Ardèche. The use of cartographic studies, crossed with interviews of the vocational of outdoor sport framing would allowed us to examine the spatial logics of development for the outdoor sport economics, their territorial resource and after all to build a territorial model. This model, the economic and local outdoor sport system, will show the interaction between the operators of the outdoor sport market and their space, and particularly rural areas.
