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The Master's in Territorial Governance: a dual degree from the Faculty of Law and Sciences Po Grenoble

The Master's in Territorial Governance is a dual Master's program offered by the Faculty of Law and Sciences Po Grenoble. It allows students to obtain a dual degree based on the Master's in Local Government Law from the Faculty of Law and the Local Government Management track from Sciences Po Grenoble. It offers selected students dual expertise in law, management, and local government administration.

This is an innovative master's degree program aimed at training senior administrative executives in the state civil service and local government (attachés and administrators, contract staff, department heads), senior political executives (directors and chiefs of staff, political advisors) and high-level advisors (public law attorneys, consultants, audit firms) for tomorrow's public service. To a lesser extent, it also prepares students for careers in the administrative judiciary (advisors to administrative tribunals and administrative courts of appeal, advisors to regional chambers of accounts).

On video

Check out the live stream from the UGA's Career Guidance and Professional Integration Center, featuring the academic directors of the Master's in Territorial Governance program.

 

A professional master's degree aimed at high-level positions

Students acquire a particularly sought-after dual skill set in political science and public policy on the one hand, and law on the other, with a focus on local public action, combining cross-disciplinary management skills with technical legal expertise. Students are thus perfectly equipped for their future roles at the head of local authorities (e.g., general management of services, head of services, project manager in the context of a particular local policy, assistant to an elected official, etc.) and more generally within the civil service, consulting firms, associations, etc.

Professional scenarios are at the heart of this master's program, with two mandatory internships in the first and second years.

It also emphasizes collective reflection and debate, whether in working groups, participation in the Faculty of Law's regional legal clinic, or the Sciences Po Grenoble public action laboratory.

Applications, selection, and dual entry point for the degree

This highly selective degree (10 places per year, selection based on Mon Master application followed by an oral interview) is particularly aimed at students who wish to broaden their horizons in terms of subjects and methodology. Particular attention is paid to candidates' academic records, but also to their professional and personal projects. It is open to students from IEP, law, political science, public administration, etc.

Depending on their profile, students are primarily enrolled either at IEP or at the Faculty of Law, with courses adapted to each case. All students must register on Mon Master. If students have a legal background, this registration is sufficient. However, if students have a political science background, they will be required to apply for registration at the IEP in Grenoble in the 4th year of the Diploma in Local Government Management if they wish to enroll in the Master's program.

Intensive preparation for civil service examinations

Thanks to this dual expertise, students are particularly well prepared for civil service examinations. Students benefit from Science Po Grenoble's comprehensive civil service examination preparation program, which takes the form of labels.

This is evidenced by the fact that during their second year of master's studies or immediately thereafter, many students pass the competitive examinations for local government or state administration positions. It is even the strategy of the program to encourage students to take the competitive examinations during their master's studies rather than afterward.

A Master's degree of excellence for research and doctoral studies: the Steen Graduate School

In addition, the Master's in Territorial Governance is ideal for students wishing to write a thesis or even prepare for an academic career. Indeed, due to the multidisciplinary approaches offered by the Master's in Territorial Governance, this program allows students to prepare theses that meet the contemporary requirements of social science research, namely a high degree of interdisciplinarity.

In this regard, the Master's in Territorial Governance has developed a proactive approach by integrating the STEEN Graduate School (Societies in Economic, Ecological, and Digital Transition) at UGA. The Steen thematic program offers a comprehensive multidisciplinary cycle of graduate studies and research from master's to doctoral level at the crossroads of the social sciences (sociology, economics, management, law, political science): in the face of ecological, economic, and digital transitions, the STEEN research program aims to better understand and interpret these transitions through an interdisciplinary, innovative, and international approach to the humanities and social sciences. It is a research-based training program that gives students a decisive methodological and substantive advantage in obtaining thesis funding. The STEEN Graduate School itself has thesis funding contracts. The Master's in Territorial Governance can therefore also be chosen by students interested in academic research.

The Local Government Law Clinic

Since 2018, students enrolled in the Local Government Law program at the Grenoble Law School have been participating in the Local Government Law Clinic, a unique learning environment in France, both in terms of its focus (local public action) and its teaching methods (the "clinical" approach).

This clinic, the result of a partnership between the Faculty of Law and the Grenoble Bar Association, aims to strengthen the legal training of students at the Faculty of Law in Grenoble, in particular through rigorous and supervised practical application of their knowledge in areas relating to local government law in the broadest sense, i.e., all areas of law that local authorities need to be familiar with in practice. It allows the students involved to familiarize themselves with the practical issues faced by local authorities and to examine real requests, documents, and files, with the aim of providing reasoned legal responses to the problems raised. The challenge for students is to find themselves in a situation as close as possible to their actual work in their future professional lives. The work carried out by students as part of the clinic does not constitute legal advice within the meaning of Law No. 71-1130 of December 31, 1971, but is an educational exercise.

The clinic consists of an educational team comprising the clinic director, Professor Romain Rambaud, the head of the Grenoble Bar Association's Administrative Law Committee, Sandrine Fiat, lawyers wishing to offer students past or current cases, and, where applicable, teacher-researchers wishing to participate in the clinic's activities.

Lawyers are responsible for providing clinical training to students, following an adaptable three-session model:

1. Preparation and presentation of the case file to the students in the clinic: facts of the case, requests to be processed, main legal issues, expectations regarding proposed responses;
2. Monitoring students in the processing of their files, answering questions, providing updates;
3. Correction of final work submitted by students and grading. Where possible, at some stage during the processing of their files, students are put in direct contact with a representative of the local authority (member of a department, elected official, etc.) or a party involved in the case in question.

In the event that the clinic is approached spontaneously by a local authority, it determines whether it is possible to offer, in partnership with lawyers, an educational exercise to students following this request and under what conditions.