When water committee good practices are not relevant: sustainability of small water infrastructures in semi-arid Mozambique

This paper explores the contradiction between the need of large scale intervention in rural water supply and the needed flexibility to support community institutions by investigating the implementation of the Mozambican National Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Program in a semiarid district of the Limpopo Basin. The results highlights that coordination between leaderships, the key committee members and the village governance level was more important for borehole sustainability that the normative functioning of the committee. In a context where the centrality of I eadershi p prevai Is for col I ecti ve action against the westerner concept of self-hel p and organization, sustai nabi I ity of rural water infrastructure derive from from the capacity of leaders to mobi I ize the community for supplementary funding. This in turn depends on the added value to the community of the water points and village politics. Any interventions that increased community conflicts for example for lack of transparency weakened the coordination and collective action capacity of the community and infrastructure sustainability. These results stress the role of project/program implementation pathway. Highlights: - At village level, money availability is more limiting for borehole maintenance than spare availability. - In local context leadership prevails upon water committee good practices. - External initiatives that increased community conflict collective action capacity of the community and consequently the sustai nabi I ity of small water infrastructure. - There is a need to producing measurable indicators focusing on the quality of support to community water institutions. (Résumé d'auteur

Natural resources governance scales and social learning approaches in peri-urban areas: Contribution experience in Bolivia and Brazil

Competition for water, often associated with a struggle for land, tends to be exacerbated in pen-urban areas because of the conflicting interests of the users, a dynamic land use pattern and specific hydrological functions provided to the city. The variety of stakeholder processes dealing with water often puts local nested approaches fully taking into account local strategies into opposition with basin-scale approaches able to engage in broader issues such as sustainability or global pressure. Assistance to multi-stakeholders' processes using simulation tools such as role playing games were tested in the metropolitan areas of two South American cities: 1) in the periphery of Cochabamba, to facilitate conflict resolution stemming from thé impact of urbanisation on the irrigation infrastructure, and 2) in the peri-urban areas of São Paulo to assist in negotiations on land and water management in a protected catchment. Both interventions designed to broaden the stakeholders' perspectives and facilitate the exchange of the different actors' views of water and land management by participation in role-playing activities. Both acknowledged the need to bridge to the gap between local-level management and regional-level management. This paper discusses the problems encountered by these two interventions to bridge local-level and regional-level land and water management needs. Both experiences underlined how different the issues at stake for the same problem were between local and regional management, thus limiting direct appropriation and integration at regional-level social leaming processes initiated at the local level (or vice-versa). Bridging the gap between these management levels was more complex than simply integrating stakeholders in the discussion process and developing better communication. The need for the development of a specific approach to facilitate interaction mechanisms between the two management levels or to creatively use the tensions between the different levels of management is highlighted. (Résumé d'auteur

Is small scale irrigation an efficient propoor strategy in the upper Limpopo basin in Mozambique?

In Sub Sahara Africa, there is evidence that households with access to small scale irrigation are significantly less poor than households without access to irrigation. But private motopump tend to be unequally distributed. This paper investigates the success of explicit pro-poor intervention with emphasis on small-scale irrigation in the semi-arid Limpopo Basin in Mozambique. It highlights that the high irrigation cost are progressively excluding the poorest who do not have the mean to derive from other activities the cash to fund for irrigation functioning. Besides the functioning of collective scheme where they had been included is jeopardized by the development of private irrigation supported by hidden subsidies which are being appropriated by local elite. This unequal mode of access to irrigation can contribute to stir resentments at community level, weakening community cohesiveness and consequently its margin for collective action and coordination capacity which are crucial for collective irrigation. Highlights : - Small scale irrigation has recently been increasing due to drought relief interventions or funding from local development fund which in practice is subsidizing private irrigation. - Poorest families tend to drop-off from collective irrigation while they have no access to local development fund due to the bias of the allocation mechanism. - The fragile land tenure arrangements of collective irrigation are jeopardized by the development of private irrigation. - A proper analysis of the economic profitability of small scale irrigation is needed. (Résumé d'auteur

Antimicrobials in agriculture: reducing their use while limiting health and socioeconomic risks in the countries of the South

The widespread use of antimicrobials in agriculture is increasing, driven by growth in intensive livestock production and demand for animal products. This is creating a serious problem of antimicrobial resistance: bacteria are developing antimicrobial resistance mechanisms, which spread through populations of bacteria, including those affecting humans. Antimicrobial resistance has a major impact on public health, and its effects on animal health and biodiversity are not yet fully understood. To address this alarming situation, reducing and rationalising the use of antimicrobials is a global priority, in the North and the South alike. This calls for intersectoral actions involving professionals and researchers from many different scientific fields: domestic animals, wildlife, plants, humans and the environment. Implementing such actions is particularly complex in the countries of the South

Sharp interface limit of the Fisher-KPP equation

We investigate the singular limit, as \ep \to 0, of the Fisher equation \partial_t u=\ep \Delta u + \ep ^{-1}u(1-u) in the whole space. We consider initial data with compact support plus, possibly, perturbations very small as $\Vert x \Vert \to \infty$. By proving both generation and motion of interface properties, we show that the sharp interface limit moves by a constant speed, which is the minimal speed of some related one-dimensional travelling waves. We obtain an estimate of the thickness of the transition layers. We also exhibit initial data "not so small" at infinity which do not allow the interface phenomena

Revealing representation mismatch through role playing games: Example of peri-urban catchment management in Sao Paulo (Brazil)

In spite of the implementation since the 70's of various legislation to control urbanization in the headwater catchment of the Metropolitan Region of Sao Paulo (Brazil), illegal settlements without sanitation infrastructure have continued to spread. This expansion has led to a rapid degradation of water quality in the main water drinking reservoirs that provides 50 % of the domestic water supply of the city. In the last decade, the development of a new water governance framework based on the principles of integrated water management has strengthen the need for discussion between the different stakeholders and levels of management. But the efficiency of the legislation is undermined by functional difficulties faced by the committees. Their role as discussion platforms is weakened by important asymmetries in power and access to information between a fragmented and poorly represented civil society, powerful actors such as the water firm and the biggest municipalities, and the short-term electoral strategies of many municipalities. This contribution aims to discuss how the role of computerized role playing games to highlight how different are the preoccupation of actors representing the center and institutional sphere actively participating in the catchment committees and the local stakeholders, and the consequences of this discrepancies for development of sustainable solutions for the preservation of the headwater catchment. The role playing game Ter'Aguas, developed using a companion modelling approach has integrated the representations of local actors as well as institutional ones. It allows simulating the negotiations related to local planning including land and water infrastructure planning involving different actors. Players take decision concerning land market, land occupation and land use changes, as well as the development of urban infrastructures, taking into account social and economic factors. The simulated negotiations take place in the context of a legislation inspired from the specific catchment legislation that has just been approved, allowing simulating how this legislation could effectively be implemented. The game was played with the watershed committee and separately with representatives of peri-urban local actors including representatives of urban settlements, of local municipalities and of the water firm. There were huge discrepancies between the two of game sessions concerning the content and focus of the main negotiations. While institutional actors focused on the role of business activities and environmental police to control the urbanisation process and prevent the degradation of water quality, the discussion with local actors mostly focused on negotiation between land title regularisation and sanitation, based on the opportunities and constraints of the new legislation framework. They also tried unsuccessfully to use the speculation mechanisms. The difference is significative of the difficulties of institutional actors to identify and take into account the interests of local actors and reveals a top down approach of planning that may lead to failure in the implementation of the legislation. It raises questions about the possibility of finding efficient long term solutions to control the urbanisation process and water quality degradation in the headwater catchment of Sao Paulo. (Résumé d'auteur

Strategies to institutionalize companion modelling approaches

Participative approaches are often viewed as an interesting way to promote the links between local and regional levels necessary to policy decentralization. Among those, the companion modelling (ComMod) approach aims at developing collective learning and at supporting decision making process by eliciting the different perceptions of a complex situation and by collectively exploring possible futures. This participative modelling and simulation approach has historically been developed and experimented at local level. But as many participative approaches, it has rapidly been confronted with the questions raised by the necessary inclusion of larger scale of decision. For instance, to which extend is it possible to transfer the collective knowledge developed to non-participants, or how to associate different types of stakeholders such as regulators? This institutionalisation of the approach implies up-scaling processes (transfer of the approach to higher decision levels), as well as out-scaling processes (dissemination of the approach and outputs to actors of the same level than the participants). When considering the link between human and environment processes, it is now widely acknowledged that scales are social and political construct and that the organisation in level of the society is subjective. Furthermore, the perception of the dimensions to be accounted for varies from one actor to the other. Thus, according to the participation strategy, the issue definition, the representation process, the tools legitimacy and the mode of integration and comprehension of knowledge may differ. This paper presents and discusses methodological strategies that have been tested in 14 experiences to institutionalise the ComMod approach. Participation, representation development and implementation methods, such as: participation of external actors at various moments of the approach, specific communication methods, development of generic tools and representations, training and formation are being reviewed. The analysis of the cases study points out two main concerns in participative modelling institutionalization. First, one need to clarify what is to be institutionalized; It may refer to the transfer of a tool or of the approach in order to replicate it, to the appropriation of issue and its complex questioning, or to the integration of the outcomes into the organizations. Second, the approach participates to the power plays around scale issues among institutions. The issues, the outcomes, and the approach are scale dependent, and they all relate to the choices made in term of participation and/or representation. The integration of new actors in ComMod process may imply the collective redefinition of the issues and the development of new tools. Moreover, the scale choices of the representation may exclude some actors. The process outcomes are particularly difficult to transfer. Indeed, they relate to socio-political changes embedded in the social context and/or ephemeral collective learning. Efficient strategy to achieve the dissemination of these outcomes remains a research question. At last, the transfer of the approach itself is associated with high risks of normative and prescriptive drifts. It therefore calls for careful designed training processes. (Résumé d'auteur