International audience As heritage raises growing in public policies and plays a role in enchancement of local territory, legislator keeps implementing new tools of pubic action, thus enabling several ways of managing and protecting heritage. Decentralization, leading to change in actor's organization, affects patrimonial policies, although it is still centralized. Considering the current managing system, which turns into contractualization and partnership, this paper relies on the specificity of the patrimonial policies in Tours and Orléans in order to question the use of governance and regulation concepts to describe these news ways of public action.