The present paper analyses the staring out of local partnerships focused on the mutualisation of the information and the territorial diagnosis. It discusses the potentialities and the limits of these partnerships as the basis for the development of shared actions by the entities involved. It's specifically questioned the role of this type of observatories for the development of the intelligence and the territorial governance. The work rises from the comparative analysis of the processes of starting out and development of three main territorial observatories of ACCEM in the last decade. As these observatories are organizations in permanent evolution it will be stress the analysis of these kind of processes in such a changing diverse institutional and socioeconomic contexts.