The Achievement of a Decentralized Water Management Through Stakeholder Participation: An Example from the Drôme River Catchment Area in France (1981–2008)

International audienceDifferent water Acts (e.g., the European Water Framework Directive) and stakeholders involved in aquatic affairs have promoted integrated river basin management (IRBM) over recent decades. However, few studies have provided feedback on these policies. The aim of the current article is to fill this gap by exploring how local newspapers reflect the implementation of a broad public participation within a catchment of France known for its innovation with regard to this domain. The media coverage of a water management strategy in the Drôme watershed from 1981 to 2008 was investigated using a content analysis and a geographic information system (GIS). We sought to determine what public participation and decentralized decision-making can be in practice. The results showed that this policy was integrated because of its social perspective, the high number of involved stakeholders, the willingness to handle water issues, and the local scale suitable for participation. We emphasized the prominence of the watershed scale guaranteed by the local water authority. This area was also characterized by compromise, arrangements, and power dynamics on a fine scale. We examined the most politically engaged writings regarding water management, which topics each group emphasized, and how the groups agreed and disagreed on issues based on their values and context. The temporal pattern of participation implementation was progressive but worked by fits and starts

Boundary Judgments in Water Governance : Diagnosing Internal and External Factors that Matter in a Complex World

Governance failures are widely recognized as a key reason why, despite sustained attention over previous decades, many longstanding water problems continue to go unsolved around the world. A major challenge in analyzing and addressing water governance problems is making “boundary judgments” in the face of complexity. Improving water governance requires accounting for a diverse and sometimes unclear set of internal and external factors that cause water problems. For example, drivers, actors, and institutions implicated may be both “internal” or “external” to a water governance system, depending on how problem boundaries are delineated. This problem confronts researchers and practitioners alike, and although recognition is growing, it remains extremely challenging to practically address. Diagnostic approaches are needed to deal with the complexity of contemporary water governance problems. In this paper, we propose a practical diagnostic approach to support structured, context-specific, critical diagnostic inquiry. We build on complementary initiatives emerging in other fields, paying particular attention to external factors that are often neglected, while being sensitive to the capacity constraints of policymakers and practitioners. The approach is flexible in allowing for either cursory or in-depth analysis as appropriate in a given situation. This allows for the identification of tangible improvements and “small wins” to improve water governance systems within a bigger-picture perspective of the diverse causes of water governance problems. Innovatively, we take a user-oriented perspective to support researchers and policymakers in practice, and break new ground in providing tractable tools for dealing with complexity in water governance