The desalination plant project in Mayotte: an ideal-typical example of the confrontation of political, scientific and environmental temporalities, specific to climate change and its effects.

The island of Mayotte has been experiencing water shortages for a number of years; the two hill reserves, as well as local boreholes and the only desalination plant on the island, are no longer sufficient to supply the population, particularly during droughts such as the one in 2023. Repeated water cuts and more or less scheduled water turns, coupled with the day-to-day living conditions of a large proportion of the population (including illegal immigrants), are now part of the destabilising factors on the island. Faced with what is proving to be an increasingly structural challenge to living conditions on the island of Mayotte, and in the wake of the drought following the 2023 rainy season, the government has issued a prefectoral decree, known as a ‘civil emergency’, to speed up the project to build a second desalination plant. Behind this political decision, taken under social pressure from a thirsty population, there are different relationships to temporality in the management of public affairs: the short, or even very short, timeframe of the civil emergency; the long, or even very long, timeframe of the construction and ecological dynamics of lagoon environments; and finally, the timeframe of science and the construction of its knowledge on an issue where the necessary multidisciplinary expertise comes up against the emergency context and the difficulty of sharing its conclusions with the general public. The way in which the project has unfolded over the months illustrates this.