When the exception becomes the rule: learning how to govern water scarcity in the French Grand Est Region. Analysis of the regulatory work of State services.

This communication analyzes how the administration of the Grand-Est region in France seizes an existing drought management instrument, the administrative decrees limiting or suspending water use, to deal with a situation considered as unprecedented, where the lack of water goes from a status of cyclical crisis to that of a structural problem. The administration grasps and also transforms this device to stimulate new ways of dealing with the material environment, to draw boundaries and spaces for action or inaction. This work is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis. We gathered all the "drought decrees" issued between 2010 and 2020 in the départements that belong to the Grand-Est Region in order to build a typology. We also conducted a dozen semi-structured interviews in several regional and departmental State services.

We analyze the administrative acculturation to drought and the processes associated with it. They concern (i) socio-technical infrastructures (measurement networks, drought committees), (ii) organization and professionalization, as well as (iii) negotiation and coordination of public officers' fields of competence. In particular, we mobilize the "framing - overflowing" dialectic (Callon, 1999) to account for the permanent tension between, on the one hand, the desire to frame management protocols and measures regionally and, on the other hand, the overflows, adjustments, and adaptations imposed by the singularities of biophysical phenomena (Granjou, 2016) and the socio-territorial dynamics at play as well. The analysis of the social life of drought decrees then highlights the different functions that the local services of the State assign to them. The decrees aim to acculturate users to this new reality and to allow the administration to test the extent and limits of its power of intervention. The case of the droughts in the Grand Est illustrates the processes of construction of a new administrative competence over a territory.

Bibliography:

Callon M. 1999. «La sociologie peut-elle enrichir l’analyse économique des externalités? Essai sur la notion de cadrage-débordement », In Foray D., Mairesse J. (Dir.), Innovations et performances. Approches interdisciplinaires, Paris : EHESS, 399-431.

Granjou C. 2016. Sociologie des changements environnementaux. Futurs de la nature. Londres, Grande Bretagne: ISTE. 189 p.