The increasing use of the term 'left-behind places' in public debate and in the media has highlighted the problems of decline experienced by areas that are usually given little consideration and considered to be falling behind the growth trends of metropolises and dynamic regions (MacKinnon et al., 2022; Pike et al., 2023). These areas, which are often sparsely urbanised like small and medium-sized towns, are facing a slowdown in their demographic, social and economic dynamics, and a weakening of their capacity for action and development (Roth, 2016; Béal, Rousseau, 2022; Béal, 2023). This context has led to the implementation of public policies aimed at 'left-behind places' in different national contexts (Martin, 2021). In France, these spaces have been put on the agenda through the introduction of a number of public policy measures aimed at specific categories of area: small and medium-sized towns and rural areas (Béal, 2023). One of these public policies is of particular interest to me because it is aimed at the category of 'small towns'. This is the "Small Towns of Tomorrow" programme launched by the State in 2019-2020, from which more than 1,600 small towns with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants are currently benefiting in order to build and implement their regional regeneration projects. These national policies have been criticised and questioned in the media and in the scientific literature because they run the risk of standardising projects and are modelled on a metropolitan growth model, both of which reduce the capacity of small towns to invent innovative solutions to specific local problems (Béal et al., 2016; Delpirou, 2019). How are small towns appropriating this national programme and how, within the framework of 'Small Towns of Tomorrow', are they succeeding or failing to develop innovative solutions? At the same time, another subject is receiving a great deal of attention from scientists and national and local players: narratives, images, identities and imaginaries. In a globalised and neoliberal context, narratives are becoming a tool of attractiveness that is increasingly used by regions and cities to position themselves in competition between territories and to support city governance (Bernadou, 2014; Cole, Morel-Journel, 2022). This is why I am interested in cognitive approaches in this context of national policies for small towns, i.e. the dimension of representations, beliefs, narratives and imaginaries in the making of public action. So what role do cognitive approaches play in the local appropriation of a national programme to support 'small left-behind towns'? And what does this tell us about small towns' capacity for innovation? Based on the case study of a small former mining town in central France (Saint-Eloy-les-Mines) that is taking part in the 'Small Towns of Tomorrow' programme, this paper aims to show how small towns are trying to adapt these national policies to their specific local challenges and implement innovative planning strategies and tools. To do this, I use a threefold textual, textometric and iconographic analysis of a corpus of national documents consisting of the 3 'Small Towns of Tomorrow' press kits (2020, 2021, 2023) and a second corpus of local institutional documents consisting of the application file (2020) and the 'Small Towns of Tomorrow' agreements of Saint-Eloy-les-Mines (2021, 2023). By developing a few examples from my analysis, my results show that while municipal strategies and the placing of local issues on the agenda continue to be influenced by the quest for growth and attractiveness, which is reinforced by the images disseminated by the national programme, we can nonetheless see a number of signs of innovation in local public planning action. By developing a narrative of the "energy crossroads", the municipal players are trying to specify and put on the agenda current local issues, such as the energy transition, and to promote innovative solutions, for example with the creation of a heating network recovering the waste heat from the main local company. However, there are other uses of this same narrative, which consists of bringing coherence to a very broad and ultimately relatively standardised action plan. We can therefore conclude that cognitive approaches do not play a single role in the local appropriation of the "Small Towns of Tomorrow" programme, but multiple roles. Narratives and imaginaries are used on many stages of local action and in different ways depending on the intention of the actors, the recipients, etc.