Envisioning innovative groundwater management policies through scenario workshops in France and Portugal

In the Mediterranean basin, climate change is expected to result in reduced available water resources and increased water demand. This will lead to growing competition for the access to scarce water resources. And it will increase environmental pressures exerted on aquatic ecosystems and problems of water resources overexploitation. Groundwater resources could be significantly affected (drop in water tables, sea water intrusion) in particular because their exploitation is often weakly regulated. In this context, policy makers are increasingly enjoined to explore how current groundwater management rules can be adapted. Given the magnitude of predicted hydro-climatic changes, deep institutional, economic and legal changes will be required to take up the challenge of climate change. Policy makers and stakeholders will have to invent a new water management paradigm, calling into question some of the established assumptions, social values and even ideologies. In particular, the role of the State, market forces and collective action in water management will need to be re-examined. In this paper, we argue that the exploration of possible futures should not be conducted by policy makers and experts alone but that it should also involve grass root water users, farmers in particular. We present a participatory foresight methodology which was implemented in two case studies in southern France (Roussillon) and Portugal (Algarve). After describing the methodology, the paper focuses on three contrasted water management scenarios which were discussed with five groups of farmers. It then describes the results obtained, both in terms of ideas related to future water management scenarios and in terms of participatory process.