Christian Brethaut

The shifting territorialities of the Rhone River’s transboundary governance: a historical analysis of the evolution of the functions, uses and spatiality of river basin governance

AbstractFor the past decade, water policies have been strongly influenced by the concept of integrated water resource management (IWRM), and the river basin has been regarded as the most relevant scale for water governance. This article is based on the case of the Rhone River. Through historical analysis (from 1870 to the present), we study how the river’s functions evolve, how water users compete to secure their needs, and the effects on the governance structure and on its spatiality. While this governance structure has remained stable for decades, we show how the evolution of water policies (and the emergence of IWRM) and of environmental concerns strongly modified the strategies of actors. We also demonstrate how the governance structure as well as its space and scale of regulation tends to change with the attempt of central States to get back to the centre of the configuration of actors.

Interdisciplinary approaches for analysing governance challenges across the Rhône basin

AbstractThe Rhône basin is one of Europe’s major rivers. It stretches from its source in the Swiss Alps through to the Lake Geneva and then down through France to its mouth on the Mediterranean Sea, where its delta constitutes the Camargue Region. It crosses three different ‘cantonal’ jurisdictions in Switzerland alone, while its course through Lake Geneva itself demarcates the border between France and Switzerland. This presents a valuable opportunity to analyse the multitude of challenges that face the management of a river flowing through such a variety of different hydrological contexts and institutional settings (Swiss, French and European). For the first time, this special issue collates interdisciplinary insights into the challenges faced by the governance systems across the entire Rhône basin. Papers present insights into barriers and opportunities for effectively responding to the many political, economic and climatological challenges facing the managers of the River Rhône over the coming decades.

From the Promises of International Water Management Trends to the Reality of Policies and Practices: Some Conclusive Thoughts

Water management is influenced by international trends that hold, if rightly implemented, the promises of a better world. This chapter critically discusses these trends along three structuring lines. The first part proposes a way of organizing them around a series of nirvanas and narratives that emphasize the need of a governance shift, revealing their strongly normative nature. The second part highlights several analytical limitations (normative fuzziness, polysemy in practice and difficulties of measurement), questioning their capacity to produce well-informed recommendations for policymaking. The third part, finally, explores the domestic institutional variables and political games that may disrupt the linear implementation of these trends. It concludes with a plea for social sciences-based analysis in order to produce a better understanding of these dimensions.

Taking Up Practical and Intellectual Challenges Posed by International Water Management Trends: Some Introductory Remarks

Since about thirty years, many frameworks, concepts and practices have been developed at the global level in order to understand and address the challenges related to water management. These international water management trends have been at the heart of numerous attempts to promote, to apply or to critically assess their nature. This chapter constitutes the introduction of an edited volume contributing to such endeavours. Considering the water crisis as a crisis of governance and using Switzerland as an empirical laboratory, we aim to critically discuss these trends and the extent to which they structure domestic policies. In this introductory chapter, we develop the rationale of our analysis, we justify our focus on Switzerland and we present the structure of the book and the trends that will be explored.

Transboundary Water Management: From Geopolitics to a Non-state Analytical Perspective: The Case of the Rhône River

If water management is characterized by complex multi-level interactions and trade-offs among various uses, the transboundary scale represents an additional level of intricacy with the involvement of different institutional and legal frameworks. Facing a strong and growing complexity, governance systems evolve along history with different perceptions of stake at play, numerous attempts to define solutions and different types of actors being involved. This chapter, using transboundary management of the Rhone as a case study, focuses on the evolving role of states but also on the increasing involvement of non-state actors since the last 150 years.