A social-physical approach to question the scaling of local innovations for improving agricultural water management in the Mediterranean

Against a backdrop of increasing scarcity and pressure on water resources in the Mediterranean, technical informational innovations for existing irrigation systems have potential to support farmers and Water User Association in these critical times. The capacity to track water flows and transfers at various spatial and temporal scales is now clearly identified as one avenue to improve irrigation management. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are being developed at an unprecedented rate, but they are still not as widespread as the increasing conflictual situations may require. The objective of this communication is to propose a methodology to overcome barriers to larger uptake of ICT due to technical and organizational specificities. We developed a specific method, cross-referencing spatial information and analyzing innovation processes. It relies on a reflexive and analytical project perspective and a corresponding process between physical and social sciences. Following-up eight local experimentations of the participatory design of tailor-made decision support systems (https://prima-hubis.org/, 2020-2024), in the course of the project we focused on the how to widen local developments in space and time. We suppose the existence of common pathways, or patterns, that unfold in collaborations at different scales, from the plot, farm, scheme spatial scales, to the territory, watershed, or administrative region. The methodology consist of two simultaneous steps:

• building of a Geographic Information System to support the agro-hydrological description of irrigated systems to understand the possibility for geographical expansion, e.g. developing a Multi-Criteria Analysis integrating spatial analysis with collective expertise to draw patterns of irrigation technical infrastructures at a Mediterranean scale;
• recomposing social patterns of local innovation temporalities: using a context-mechanism-outcome framework to guide research on multifaceted collaboration, we draw and analyze innovation timelines and storylines to understand how contextual factors hinder or foster causal chains.

This research was triggered from an overall aim of HubIS project’s consortium to build recommendations at the regional Mediterranean scale to improve local irrigation performance. Acknowledging the importance of contextual conditions on the success of projects, we suppose that innovation “scaling potential”, or percolation rate, depends both on local socio-hydrological system dynamics and on trends at other scales.

We believe that this case of searching common interfaces between disciplines based on a set of collaborative innovation situations may profit the environmental scientific community. Indeed, as any other multi-site projects, spatially and temporally bounded, it remains difficult to understand the processes of diffusion of technological innovations. System dynamics are often ignored in conventional policy approaches, assuming a singular path to progress and a singular view of the problem, and hybrid methods not so common. We want to prove here that we may begin to draw generalizations through multiple case-study comparisons. A composition work is under progress. Obviously, mapping of the ability of irrigated areas to “receive” water-conservation technologies is very ambitious. We finally want to open a discussion about the potential development of some kind of digital platform which would be dedicated to the observation of sustainability narratives, that may help analyze and represent sociotechnical dynamics and model future trajectories.