The study analyzes the perceived benefits of Territorial Intelligence (TI) as a knowledge creation process in the context of food safety in Tunisia. The key territorial stakeholders were interviewed for their perceptions about the current and future situation of food safety. Other sources of information were used to analyze the current state. Research shows that ‘the culture of territoriality’ requires a collective learning process, a high level of integration between the health watch in its environmental and scientific aspects as an internal Information System (IS) for organizations and the warning IS as an inter-organizational one. This integration is considered necessary to control the Risk Analysis (RA) by various stakeholders. It allows a better coordination between risk assessors and risk managers. With the emergence of TI, IS is intended to lead to a unified communication policy targeting both consumers and producers.

Studies conducted since the inception of the National Agency of the Sanitary and Environmental Control of Products (ANCSEP) in 1999, including that of Demortain (2007) and of Kamoun et al. (2009), allowed establishing a knowledge base useful to diagnose the institution’s operational mode and understand its external environment, which is a key step to develop an Information System (IS) for founding the National Food Safety System (NFSS).

If NFSS is a complex multi-component system, warning is often the visible part of it or even better its mirror (if the warning system works, everything works). In fact, this system is the outcome of a health watch process whose stimulus is a weak signal. The amplification of this signal is the result of a collective sense making process which stands for the processing phase of information. It allows moving from intuition to action/decision to alert any health threat. The study of Kamoun (2009) showed that this learning process could only be built on a ‘territory’ where stakeholders hold complementary knowledge and expertise—researchers, governments, international organizations and associations, the fact that would allow them to co-construct coherent representations of their common interest object, the environment. Sociologically, “Territory is a space reordination whose order is to be found in the informational systems available to man as he belongs to a culture” (Raffestin, 1986). The development of Territorial Intelligence (TI) as knowledge creation based on trust, sharing tacit and explicit knowledge and skills, requires an understanding of culture as a set of pre-programed scripts presiding over the action.

Concerning the ANCSEP experience, one of the causes of failure would be the normative governance based on a formal structure ignoring the culture of the stakeholders. The problematic field is the difficulty of setting up an efficient network made up of real stakeholders from various origins (or even historically antagonistics) which is the source of our research. To do so, the agency has ‘built a consensus’ as an integral part of the project adjoining the preparation of food law, the fact that makes the experience of ANCSEP interesting (collective conception of a management model or food control) following an interactive and multiparty methodology1 called ‘step by step’ (test of representativeness)…but this action has been relatively unsuccessful in our point of view.

Knowledge Management Journal, Territorial Intelligence (TI), Knowledge creation, Food safety, Tunisia, Health watch,
Information System (IS), Risk Analysis (RA), Risk assessment.