Several reasons have contributed to focusing the attention of the social sciences on the dynamics linked to territories, given the relevance that the themes of power, development and social cohesion have taken on in those dynamics. This article addresses the way in which territorial contexts have actually embraced recent conceptions of power and the State, discussing the extent to which this expresses a new way of doing politics or, on the contrary, whether customary and insufficiently innovative modalities of action continue to be reproduced at local level.