Christian Bréthaut, Analyse comparée de régimes institutionnels de gestion des réseaux urbains de l’eau en station touristique de montagne. Les cas de Crans-Montana (Suisse) et de Morzine-Avoriaz (France)

La station touristique est un espace urbain consacré principalement au tourisme, qui accueille également une population résidente permanente. Du point de vue de la gestion des réseaux urbains de l’eau, cette caractéristique induit des usages propres à tout espace urbain, mais également des spécificités liées à la forte fluctuation saisonnière de la population résidente ou encore à la présence d’usages particuliers tels que l’irrigation des golfs, la production de neige artificielle ou le ther..

Participatory modeling updates expectations for individuals and groups, catalyzing behavior change and collective action in water-energy-food nexus governance

Participatory modeling is a potentially high-impact approach for catalyzing fundamental sustainability transformations. We test if participation in a group system dynamics modeling exercise increases participants' agency through a novel method to evaluate potential behavioral change using expectations measures. A water-energy-food nexus a functionally interdependent but under-conceptualised system with low consensus and high scientific uncertainty -- was mapped and its evolution simulated by 46 participants in three interventions in a region undergoing hydropower infrastructure development in North-eastern Cambodia. Participants' system-related expectations were measured before and after the interventions. Our results suggest that participants became significantly more optimistic about their individual agency to increase agricultural and fishing income, and interestingly, less likely to participate in local government development planning procedures. Findings also reveal how some uncertainties for multiple variables were reduced within and across the groups. Such converging expectations suggest that participatory modelling could contribute to making collective solutions and institutionalised agreements more likely. This research contributes to innovation in sustainability because it unpacks some underlying mechanics of how participatory processes can lead to new adaptive capacities, shared perspectives and collective actions

Promoting Development in Shared River Basins : Case Studies from International Experience

Transboundary freshwater systems create inevitable linkages and interdependencies between countries. The use of shared water resources by one country will, in most cases, impact other countries sharing the same system. At the same time, coordination among countries in the development of transboundary basins can yield greater benefits than would be available to individual countries pursuing individual development. UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 Target 5 recognizes this potential, calling on the world community to implement integrated water resources management at all levels, ‘including through transboundary cooperation as appropriate’. With a growing number of basins in which water use and demand permanently or temporarily exceeds the amount of renewable water available, and uncertainty from climate change, SDG Target 6.5 becomes increasingly relevant to development interventions designed to secure availability of supplies and create resilience. This is a companion document to the study "Promoting Development in Shared River Basins: Tools for Enhancing Transboundary Basin Management," which aims to contribute to relevant knowledge for achieving SDG Target 6.5. It presents six case studies from international experience on coordinated management in transboundary basins: Kura-Araks Basin; Columbia Basin; Chu and Talas Basins; Vuoksi Basin; Douro Basin; and Rhône Basin. The case studies demonstrate real-world application of selecting appropriate tools for individual transboundary situations along a three-stage process of coordinated basin development, which is detailed in the main study

Entre imbrication, instrumentalisation et infusion: le rôle des consortages de bisses et des bourgeoisies dans les politiques de gestion de l'eau à Crans-Montana

Papier présenté au colloque international "Les Bisses : économie, société, patrimoine", Sion IUKB, 2-5 septembre 201

The shifting territorialities of the Rhone River's transboundary governance: a historical analysis of the evolution of the functions, uses and spatiality of river basin governance

For the past decade, water policies have been strongly influenced by the concept of integrated water resource management (IWRM), and the river basin has been regarded as the most relevant scale for water governance. This article is based on the case of the Rhone River. Through historical analysis (from 1870 to the present), we study how the river's functions evolve, how water users compete to secure their needs, and the effects on the governance structure and on its spatiality. While this governance structure has remained stable for decades, we show how the evolution of water policies (and the emergence of IWRM) and of environmental concerns strongly modified the strategies of actors. We also demonstrate how the governance structure as well as its space and scale of regulation tends to change with the attempt of central States to get back to the centre of the configuration of actors

La coordination entre régimes institutionnels de ressources comme condition d’une gestion durable des ressources touristiques alpines

This article, drawing on the analytical approach of institutional resource regimes (IRR), offers an original analysis of the challenges of resource management in an Alpine touristic space (Crans-Montana in Switzerland). Particularly, it shows how an approach in terms of IRR allows identifying the institutional and political conditions for sustainable management, not only for touristic activities as such, but also for a territorial system of resources as a whole. Based on this analysis, the article advocates the development of a “resource geopolitics” strategy capable of coordinating the different resource regimes at the scale of the functional space of the tourist resort

Interdisciplinary approaches for analysing governance challenges across the Rhône basin

The Rhône basin is one of Europe's major rivers. It stretches from its source in the Swiss Alps through to the Lake Geneva and then down through France to its mouth on the Mediterranean Sea, where its delta constitutes the Camargue Region. It crosses three different ‘cantonal' jurisdictions in Switzerland alone, while its course through Lake Geneva itself demarcates the border between France and Switzerland. This presents a valuable opportunity to analyse the multitude of challenges that face the management of a river flowing through such a variety of different hydrological contexts and institutional settings (Swiss, French and European). For the first time, this special issue collates interdisciplinary insights into the challenges faced by the governance systems across the entire Rhône basin. Papers present insights into barriers and opportunities for effectively responding to the many political, economic and climatological challenges facing the managers of the River Rhône over the coming decades