This paper offers a reflective feedback on the research project BBRISE, carried out within the framework of the French research-action program PSDR IV (Programme Sur et Pour le Développement Régional) ant the European partnership of the European agricultural fund for rural development (EAFRD). The research and experimental fields are located in the “Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes” region in France. The project BRRISE put the well-being of the populations into the center of the research. Well-being is defined as a combination between individual aspirations, their talents and what their living spaces can offer. This research project produces shared knowledge on rural and urban territories as well as it introduces new ways to engage research on these territories. The partnership modalities take several forms we want to discuss: action-research, partnership-research, participatory research, involved research. This paper shows how the project unfolded and was built around hybrid partnership procedures, with local stakeholders and inhabitants. This paper also reveals how normative, constructivist and experimental approaches to well-being have been mobilized into three lines of research. It highlights the different tools that have been developed to carry out territorial diagnoses at several scales of living (housing, neighborhood, town-center, territory). It combines a multidimensional and spatialized analysis of well-being. These different tools serve as a support to establish an initial diagnosis of the needs and expectations of inhabitants. They also reveal the strengths, potentials and weaknesses perceived or experienced in relation to well-being. It underlines that these diagnoses become supports and objects of territorial governance with the territorial players and inhabitants.