For more than ten years, France has developed cooperation programmes in the field of territorial development with North African countries. In these developing countries, the construction of territorial resources is supposed to be a mode of economic adaptation to the consequences of globalisation, as it is the case in occidental countries. The description of the contexts of the transfer of this development model and the analysis of its contents allows us to question the French concept of project of territory and its transferability from Occident towards the Global South. Its transferability seems to be strongly limited by the weak degree of decentralization of these countries. In fact, this paper argues that the autonomy of the public sector at subnational level is an essential precondition for the revelation and the development of specific territorial resources. The capitalization of practises and experiments through the construction of territorialised knowledge could allow overcoming these constraints. This, however, would require deep modifications in the design and the implementation of international cooperation projects.