Scenic landscapes for participatory water management – PAGAIE

The accentuation of hydroclimatic evolutions and their interdependence with living organisms and, more specifically, with social systems, are now questioning the rules for sharing water. The objective of this project is to develop tools to enable the transition from a mode of management of a water resource conceived as abundant to a management constrained by hydroclimatic changes and their consequences for social systems and living organisms. These tools were tested during a previous project, Rivières 2070, financed by the MITI (CNRS), bringing together an SSE company, a consulting firm and researchers in hydrogeology and social sciences. Their formalisation is based on participatory approaches bringing together citizens, elected representatives, administrative officials, socio-economic actors and water managers during collective workshops.
The method that has been developed consists, during a first workshop, of sharing knowledge on the complexity of the functioning of hydrosystems under climate forcing (thanks to a co-constructed mural). In a second step, the participants are asked to define desirable scenarios for changes in agriculture, urbanisation, land use and demographic dynamics up to 2070. These scenarios are then modelled, according to the constraints of the catchment area and the climate, and then returned to the participants in the form of augmented reality landscapes during a final workshop. The visualization of these landscapes is used as a support for discussions aiming at finding agreements on the desired landscapes and, consequently, on the principles of water sharing, taking into account the multiple links and constraints uncovered during the first workshop.
The whole method has been tested in 2 Breton catchment areas. In order to stabilise it, this project aims, on the one hand, to duplicate it in 3 catchment areas with different socio-economic and hydrogeological conditions, and on the other hand, to deepen the analysis of the landscape dimension and of the negotiation during the workshops in order to improve the tools.