Governing by incentive to territorialize public action?

As part of what the French government presented as its ‘digital inclusion strategy’, it recently set up a scheme to fund 4,000 digital advisor positions, to meet the digital support needs of the French population. The scheme was intended to encourage local players (local authorities and non-profits), to address the issue of digital inclusion. Based on the results of two waves of research consisting of questionnaire surveys (at national level) and interviews (in five territories), this article describes the conditions of the deployment of the scheme and analyses the effects of this incentive lever. We show that the scheme reached actors with widely diverse levels of preparation, responding to very different local needs, but without any real coordination at territorial level. Although it generated major inequalities between regions, without clarifying the target audience, it did enable the French government to initiate the territorialization of its digital inclusion policy.