Does Local Water Governance Enforce Ostrom's Principles? Investigating French Local Water Committees | La gouvernance locale de l'eau met-elle en oeuvre les principes d'Ostrom? Une étude des Commissions locales de l'eau (CLE)

[Departement_IRSTEA]Eaux [TR1_IRSTEA]GEUSI

International audience

English. The 1992 French water act defined local participatory planning instruments, named "water development and management schemes" ("Schéma d'aménagement et de gestion des eaux" or SAGE for their French acronym), to be designed by local water committees ("Commission locale de l'eau" or CLE for their French acronym) involving representatives from the State, local governments, users and environmental NGOs. In the 1990s, public action first considered SAGE as a mean to foster local governance, cooperation between heterogeneous actors and integrated water management. In other words, SAGE became a mean to limit conflicts and enroll local stakeholders in the production of common waterscapes. It is also from this standpoint that many scholars have studied the SAGE. The 2006 French water act changed the scope of SAGE. The act, indeed, made compulsory defining a set of legally binding rules. They complement the main document of the SAGE that corresponds to a strategic plan defining priorities for a given hydraulic territory, objectives to be reached and the means to achieve them. Such rules address particular and spatially delineated stakes for which the CLE considers the current public regulations to be inadequate. Since 2006, the law and its decrees have circumscribed what the rules can or cannot target. They, however, also give to the CLE some room of maneuver in the definition of the rules. Thus, since 2006, SAGE have a new legal and coercive scope: what does it change for the local governance dynamics that surround the production and implementation of SAGE? Up to now, more than one hundred sets of rules have been defined at a national scale. What are these rules made of? How do practically the CLE proceed to design the rules? How do the heterogeneous members of the CLE end up agreeing on a rule: on its goal, on the means of achieving it and on the level of constraint it implies? Which resources do they mobilize in order to legitimize the rules they produce? How does rules' production influence the relations between the members of the CLE? How does the CLE interact with the State actors in charge of enforcing water police? To answer these questions, we have combined a quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis was based on an extensive study of 104 SAGE documents. We built a data base of the encountered rules in order to deploy statistical analyses. In particular, thanks to a clustering, we identified different types of set of rules. The results show a great diversity both in the content of the promulgated rules and in the combination of rules. Such rules can for instance define the maximum amounts of water that categories of users are allowed to withdraw. They can also impose additional wastewater treatments or more stringent measures to compensate wetlands loss. The qualitative analysis was based on twelve semi-structured interviews with (i) persons employed by local governments to coordinate the design and implementation of SAGE and with (ii) local representatives of the State administration. The results show tensions between cooperation, negotiation and regulation, between adherence and coercion. They highlight the difficulty to produce stringent decisions, to comply with the various and somehow contradictory qualities that actors assign to the rules they produce. The results also point that actors may need to maintain margins of maneuver in order to handle uncertainties and the diversity of the situations encountered. Finally, the results give indirect insight on the characteristics and functioning of water police.