Brice AUVET, Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, France
The discourse of the water crisis is hegemonic. It is deployed at all scales, articulating the materiality of water, practices and environmental transformations, governance and technical infrastructures. The crisis confronts actors with an urgency to act with which they must come to terms. This presentation proposes to explore the narrative of the water crisis and its effects by crossing Political Ecology and Science and Technology Studies. I highlight the systematic and multi-scalar argumentative articulation of the water crisis. This involves understanding how this discourse articulates material realities, models, knowledge, infrastructure, uses, principles, rules, and roles for actors to knot the crisis. I explore the concrete functioning of this discourse within an irrigation canal management system in the south of France in the Crau.
Putting the crisis into discourse makes integrated management systems unavoidable and allows for the mobilization of actors. It monopolizes the discursive space of a rare and precious water and defines the role of actors as having to cooperate and make efforts. I highlight how this discourse of crisis clashes with practices and infrastructures oriented towards abundance that stem from the hydraulic modernization of the 1960s. The materiality of water balances between abundance and scarcity, between taking water and letting it flow, between asserting one's right and following the water saving plan, between power relations and participation. This work also highlights the dependencies between the canals and the environment (biotope, water table) that are put in tension with the water saving plans. It shows the epistemic difficulties of articulating crises and defining desirable environments and practices in the face of heterogeneous actors and practices. Exploring the crisis thus highlights the security transformation of environmental policies but also the resistance to this transformation, both material and human.
Mots clés : Environmental geopolitics|hydro-politics|Political Ecology|STS|Multiscalar
A104796BA