[2024-2023] Water CVN’ Lab / « Water CVN’ Lab »

Contrats de recherche financés

Water CVN’ Lab

Programme de recherche porté par Pierre-Alain Ayral (Ingénieur de recherche, CNRS, UMR 7300 ESPACE)

Objectifs du projet de recherche

Ce programme de recherche vise à initier la création d’un laboratoire vivant sur la commune des Plantiers située dans les Cévennes. L’objectif est de voir comment le consortium est en capacité d’accompagner les citoyens à vivre dans un territoire en tension par rapport à la ressource en eau. L’équipe d’ESPACE accompagnera plus spécifiquement le déploiement d’une démarche de science citoyenne sur ce territoire.

Résumé du projet (en anglais)
With a typical Mediterranean hydrological regime, the upper watershed of the Gardons is characterized by extreme climatic variability: « flash » and « rapid » floods as well as periods of severe low water and drought (Laganier, 2014). These characteristics raise many questions concerning the future of these rivers, which are subject to strong environmental pressures linked to climate change combined with a seasonal variability of its population.

Les Plantiers was one of the municipalities particularly impacted by floods in 2020 and the severe drought in 2022. These interrelated impacts of global changes invites to reveal the spatial and temporal diversity of a « way of living » (Mathieu, 2014) with water at work through interlocking games of scale and time (socio-hydrological interactions, change of scales and transfer of impacts between upstream and downstream of the catchment area). In Les Plantiers, like other mediterranean territories, water is the object of an intense and continuous production of knowledge. Local and scientific knowledge should not be opposed (Agrawal, 1995) but rather articulated or hybridized as local hydrologic knowledge often exceeds the fragmented disciplinary horizons of scientific knowledge.

The main objective of the project is to support citizens and local authorities in their desire to dynamize their territory, to reduce tensions and to be able to collectively organize a multipurpose reflection of their future. First, it will be to co-construct a reference inventory based on local and scientific knowledge. The available knowledge will be capitalized, but also completed through participatory approaches to define a reference inventory of water management at the scale of the municipality.

Then, a Living Laboratory (LL) (Janin et al., 2017) will be co-designed with citizens, institutional actors, economic ones, elected authorities involved in the territory and scientists. The living lab will be used as an arena allowing actors to collectively experiment sustainable and desirable solutions to care and protect the water territory. Discussions among stakeholders will focus on the expected effects of each solution on the quantity and quality of available water, and interdependencies and communities of vulnerability between human and non-human uses.

Outputs of the projects will be the creation and mutualization of local knowledge on water issues and managements, leading to the creation of qualitative and quantitative collaborative database. The projects will also produce guides and itinerant photography exhibitions.

Expected outcomes of this LL designed in innovative, inter-sectoral and cross-disciplinary co-learning are numerous: enhancing mutual learning on locally adapted water management practices, student training, dissemination of knowledge and experimentation acquired during the LL to a larger community of both scientists and citizens. Following the ENoLL label, the Water CVN’Lab of “Les Plantiers” could be scaled up to the association of municipalities “Causse-Aigoual-Cévennes” and replied to other territories.

Bibliography

Laganier O., 2014, Un couplage de modèles hydrologique et hydraulique adapté à la modélisation et à la prévision des crues à cinétique rapide – Application au cas du bassin versant du Gardon, (France). Autre. École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne. Français. NNT : 2014EMSE0749. tel-01126972

MATHIEU N., 2014, « Chapitre 6. Mode d’habiter : un concept à l’essai pour penser les interactions hommes-milieux », dans : Robert Chenorkian éd., Les interactions hommes-milieux. Versailles, Éditions Quæ, « Indisciplines », 2014, p. 97-130. DOI : 10.3917/quae.cheno.2014.01.0097. URL : https://www.cairn.info/les-interactions-hommes-milieux–9782759221875-page-97.htm

AGRAWAL A., 1995, Dismantling the divide between indigenous and scientific knowledge. Development and change, 26(3), 413-439.

JANIN C., PECQUEUR B, 2017, Les living labs: remise en question des processus de mise en marché et de politique publique. Canadian Journal of Regional Science/Revue canadienne des sciences régionales, vol. 40, n°1, p. 5-11.

Productions