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Participatory Policy Making in Practice: Simulating
Boundary Work in Water Governance
Nicolas Gailliard, Olivier Barreteau, and Audrey Richard-Ferroudji
IRSTEA, UMR G-EAU, Montpellier, France
nicolas.gailliard@irstea.fr
Abstract.
Concerted and participative management has emerged in recent years
in the French water policy to respond to the current projections of climate
change, and an increasing demand for water in response to population growth.
Therefore water management needs to move towards more sustainable practices.
In France decentralization caused legislative changes. The Water Act of
1992 and the establishment of SAGE (Local Water Management Plan) and river
contracts have generated the need for people facilitating them. We consider
here a new category of people named boundary worker which will be part of
what some authors call intermediary people (Mauz, Granjou, Billaud, Moss,
and Medd).
This new approach to public policies is not completely stabilized. Its
implementations on the ground are very diverse. Little is known on their
efficiency. Our work aims at providing means to improve the assessment of this
aspect of participatory governance for public policies.
In this paper we propose a model to represent consequences of the
involvement of a boundary worker in river basin governance, taking in account
the context (social, institutional, physical) of this involvement. To achieve this
we will particularly relate and articulate an analysis of several interviews with
the boundaries worker.
Final aim of this model is exploration of various conditions of involvement
of boundary workers and consequences on the evolution of socio-hydrosystems
they are attached to.
Keywords:
Agent-based modeling,
qualitative data, boundary worker.
1
Introduction
Water resources management is increasingly requiring interfaces between the various
users and resources. The aim is to facilitate an evolution towards more sustainable
practices of the socio-hydrosystem. One of the interfaces mobilized to facilitate this
implementation is the intervention of boundary workers, such as a river basin
manager or a basin institution facilitator. In recent years there has been an increasing
number of boundary work from different background in matter of water management.
All these new people take with them their own scientific and political knowledge and
also a personal vision of the situation. How the dynamic of socio-hydrosystem evolve
with the introduction of these people into the collaborative management process?
