Agriculture in European mountain areas plays a key role for society. Farming activities protect landscapes and provide society with vital ecosystem services and agriculture is an integrated part of the livelihood of mountain communities. However, mountain farming is not sufficiently competitive and resilient in the current socio-economic context. Mountain food actors need to bring additional values to their production. Territorial labelling is a strategy they developed in an attempt to overcome this issue. The thesis shows that territorial labelling has the potential to create synergies between mountain food actors and to help better organising food chains. However, if labels manage to convey the values of the products to distant consumers, it is translated differently in the configuration of the actors at territorial level. Thus, the impact of labelling strategies on rural development depends of the representativeness of actors in the initial process and in the decision making.