The Rise and Fall of the French Agences de l’Eau

International audienceThe Agences de l’eau (Water Agencies) are well known abroad as the French attempt to develop integrated water management at river basin scale through the implementation of the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP). Yet, after 30 years of existence, environmental economists became aware that they were not implementing the PPP, and therefore were not aiming at reducing pollution through economic efficiency. Behind the purported success story, which still attracts visitors from abroad, a crisis has been recently growing. Initially based on the model of the German (rather than Dutch) waterboards, the French system always remained fragile and quasi-unconstitutional. It failed to choose between two legal, economic and institutional conceptions of river basin management. These principles differ on the definition of the PPP, and on the role of levies paid by water users. After presenting these two contrasting visions, the paper revisits the history of the French Agences, to show that, unwilling to modify the Constitution to make room for specific institutions to manage common pool resources, Parliament and administrative elites brought the system to levels of complexity and incoherence which might doom the experiment

Coevolution of the cell cycle and deferred-use cells

The cell cycle and cell fate decisions are interlinked in a broad range of developmental contexts in many organisms. Coordination of stem cell proliferation and differentiation is essential for normal development, organ homeostasis, and tissue repair through a direct interplay between cell cycle progression and differentiation in somatic stem cells in the skin, brain, gut, and hematopoietic system. The connection between cell cycle and cell fate decisions is present across the whole evolutionary tree. Human embryonic stem cells have an interconnection between cell cycle, self-renewal, and differentiation, while they exert a metastable state with heterogeneity at the single cell level. The cell cycle is tightly intertwined with cell fate decisions in diverse species ranging from yeast to human. Particularly important insight to the processes coordinating cell fate and the cell cycle has been derived from pluripotent stem cells