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water users for those located close to one border of the institutional zoning for
drought management, but also to the existence of plurality of water resources (e.g.
ground VS surface water) or misunderstanding of correlations between their use and
availability of water elsewhere.
Paradigm of situated action [5] is then suitable to analyze this process. Attitudes of
participants in the Drought Action Plan implementation depend mainly on the on-
going context, based on their perception of water availability and needs as well as
their perception of some fairness and ecological concerns. From a methodological
point of view to organize observations in a way suitable with this paradigm, we
considered Operational sequences [8] as a means to describe how stakeholders
process for crucial activities such as assessing drought situations and drought
references [2].
3
A Model to Explore Drought Management Patterns
We focus now on the issue of evaluation and agreement on evaluation among
stakeholders, including administrative authority and water users. The challenge is the
explicit representation of conflicting views on environment and its impact on the
evolution on a socio-ecosystem.
3.1
Requirements for the Model
For the sake of simplification, we assume that water use can be limited to irrigation
for it is the main quantitative use at low water times. We also assume the presence of
a policy maker that helps to ensure suitability of drought management process.
With this model, we aim at analyzing sensitivity of the water system and water
uses to various scenarios of institutional settings and individual behavioral patterns of
water users in complying with restriction rules. The situation and focus described
above generates the following requirements for model development:
•
a spatially explicit representation of hydrological dynamics, with a granularity able
to cope with the farm scale and distributed observation at each time step,
•
representation of pumping at farm level according to perception of drought, and
knowledge on rules in use at county level,
•
dynamic representation of pumping consequences on surface discharge,
•
representation of dynamics of implementation of rules at county level according to
their efficiency on drought mitigation,
Finally we consider that stakeholders are first related to specific spatial objects. These
can be specific places, such as a pump's location, a measurement station or any
specific landmark. They can also be aggregated pieces of land, such as a river, with
fishermen representatives for example assessing drought through the length of a river
without flowing water.
Simulation of drought management policy in practice fosters then the need for
specific modeling of resource dynamics: scale of observation of resource by
