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While sustainable development has grown inescapable, environmental actors are to produce token of their “sustainability”. This paper analyses how a major actor in the conservation of sites of natural interest in France – namely the Conservatoire du Littoral (CEL) – organises its own intervention in the sustainable development of territories. What visions of the territories and of their socio-economy development does it bring? How does it bridge its environmental action with the sustainable development utopia? Based on several case studies launched by the CEL itself in 2007, the present paper analyses different types of governance and their associated visions of sustainable development. The paper concludes on what are the policy implications of such statements for the CEL.

This paper gives an overview of the contribution of institutional economics to the analysis of payments for environmental services (PES) in the recent scientific literature. This work is based on the review of a selection of papers that appeared to us as the most significant dealing with this topic. Three main analytical themes were identified : the conceptualization of PSE, architecture and governance of PES mechanisms and the understanding of their impact. Our analysis shows that different theoretical approaches from institutional economics coexist, sometimes within the same analytical framework. This leads us to discuss the complementarities and potential contradictions inherent to the epistemological pluralism.

This paper is based on the findings of a research project dealing landscape heritage of the Loire valley (France). We question the position of the scientist facing what we’re calling here a ‘latent’ heritage. The first part of the paper provides a geo-historical contextualisation of the hydraulic works (groynes) intended to improve navigation (channeling). We focus on identifying and analyzing time references used over the different periods : before, during and after the initial development of the groynes and the channel. Then, we present the results of a survey work with local residents demonstrating their weak knowledge of this history by pointing out the paradoxes of their social representations of these objects. The perspective of a future controversy, we defend a position of research "based on landscape analysis" to deal with heritage and participation issues in order to debate the temporalities at work in the restoration policy of the Loire River.

This paper presents a research on the capacity of planning to integrate new forms of mobily and innovation in transportation modes. From the examples of carpolling, carsharing (car clubs), bike-sharing and demand responsive systems, this paper tempt to understand how theses innovated transportation modes are considered in french public policy and especially in urban planning documents. The final aim is to improve the planning inscription of these news transportation modes in order to respond to spatial and environmental challenges and contribute to rethinking the planning.

This paper analyses how changes in pumping modes of groundwater reveal social and territorial transformations within an agricultural landscape. Our case study is the Saïss plain in the North of Morocco, where irrigated agriculture is mostly based on groundwater. The paper shows how farmers switched from the use of groundwater from the shallow phreatic aquifer to the deep captive Liassic aquifer, as farmers turned from wells to tube-wells. We analyse the drivers of this change, both in terms of groundwater pumping practices and in the representations that actors associate with these practices. We analyze the cognitive bases and value registers that are linked to this change. As a consequence, two “social worlds” emerged, a “world of scarcity” and a “world of abundance”, which are not compartmentalized and operate in a form of hybridity and which reveal territorialities necessarily subservient to the temporalities that punctuate the construction of the social worlds of the hidden waters of the Saïss.

How does environmental public action govern the heterogeneous temporalities of the social and natural worlds? To contribute answering this question, this paper critically studies the policies deployed to govern water scarcity in South-western France for more than thirty years. This paper shows the ambiguity associated to the construction of an environmental reference state for rivers corresponding to management threshold based on a modeled representation of rivers pristine state. To do so, this paper analyses the manner actors involved in the design and implementation of public policies try to render planning and crisis management consistent, thanks to common indicators. This paper discusses the manner actors create new rooms for maneuver by negotiating modeling methods and, by doing so, disarm environmental concerns.

This paper introduce the hypothesis that landscape is the principle of a new kind of governance, radically different from the prescriptive, voluntaristic and active way of usual ways of rulling and managing territories. More than a territorial project, Landscape governance should arouse critical and integratives (meta)projects. The paper deals with a research about the way great transport infrastructures of Likoto Eurometropolis have little by little generate aroud them non planned living spaces, that I call « urban plains ». I will show how those plains are more and more visibles, and perhaps become today a considered landscape, defended and appreciated by those who live in.

The aim of this paper is to indicate new research tracks to be explored in the field of economy of functionality. The observation of the implementation of economy of functionality shows that it is not possible to consider it as a sustainable development strategy per se. Questions are entire concerning its potential, in order to incent companies to adopt a more systematic approach in eco-design, as well as in taking into account sustainable aspects at a local level. In order to progress, the paper proposes a new typology of the economy of functionality, from which it is possible to reflect to this economic model through both eco-design and local questions of development.

Territorial ecology is quite a new field of research, especially in France. It first of all aims at analysing, and even transforming territorial metabolism, on the basis of both the natural and social process that impact this metabolism. Thanks to several case studies at the regional and département scale, the paper illustrates the contribution of bulk material balances to the understanding of territorial metabolism; studies the main material flows and identifies the three main types of materials involved: construction minerals (the consumption of witch is linked to urban sprawl process), agricultural and food products, fossil fuels. The paper also makes some suggestions in terms of pathways to dematerialisation, and proposes further research developments.

The implementation of sustainable development policies on a global scale should icrease the coherence of the management of environmental and labour resources in the various countries. This paper aims at explaining the consequences of the different forms of management and organisation implemented recently. It compares two indicators, poverty rates (and decent labour) and the ecological footprint, in order to suggest policies that should be led in OECD countries to achieve sustainable development. Several scenarios are identified, from the countries that show a high poverty rate and a strong environmental print to other countries that are more concerned by both environmental and labour resources. This paper attempts to present the features that can explain the variety of configurations.

politique de l’eau, gestion de la demande, transferts d’eau inter-bassins, protection de l’environnement, aménagement du territoire, afrique du sudThis paper questions the sustainability of the post-apartheid water policy in South Africa. Even if they were partly successful in the process of taking into account environmental problems and providing basic water services to previously disadvantaged communities, these policies have raised new problems. This paper shows that the implementation of the environmental Reserve and the water demand management policy have paradoxically accelerated the competition between regions for the access to water resources, and only temporarily stopped the building of huge dams and inter-basin transfers. One major reason is the controversial status of the environment in South Africa, deeply disturbed by the apartheid regime, and still politically and socially problematic.

This paper proposes a land-use conflicts analysis in terms of proximity. The first part of the paper presents the results of empirical studies on land-use and neighbourhood conflicts in the French countryside. Such study cases permit to underline the major part plays by the geographic proximity in the emergence of land use conflicts. The second part of the paper is devoted to the exploration and the characterisation of the geographic proximity "polemogene" properties. These latter are balanced with the virtues of organised proximity that may favoured the emergence of negotiated solutions to the conflicts. In the third part of the paper, an analysis chart that combines spatial and organisational dimensions of proximity is proposed. With such an analytical framework it is possible to identify the different types of land use and neighbourhood conflicts and to qualify some of their cooperative issues.

The French translation, “développement durable”, of the English expression, “sustainable development”, defines a mode of development intended to meet the needs of the present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This definition appears to us to be very biased. The objective of this paper is to provide the point of view of marine ecologists on the concept of sustainable development. In this paper, we explore in succession: the authors’ own definition compared with the one used in the social sciences, the identification of the coastal seas, their problems, and risks and stakes that confront them, and the requirements for a sustainable development of the coastal marine ecosystems. In conclusion, we highlight the difficulties encountered in meeting the requirements of sustainable development at sea, due to insufficient knowledge and the very relative interest given the sea by the French political authorities and institutional stakeholders.

The paper starts with the wide variability of nonpoint water nitrogenous pollution generated by agriculture. This variability depends especially on climate, soil types and farming systems. Our interdisciplinary researches, carried out on two different sites in France, show that space and time heterogeneity influence farm practices to be implemented in order to reduce pollution at the standard level. Hence the most cost-effective farm practices are different from one place to another, depending on local characteristics. Therefore this result emphasises the potential efficiency of spatially targeted policies. Theoretically, such policies are considered optimal, since economic agents tune their efforts according to the sensitivity of the milieu where they operate. But, according to empirical analyses, this advantage is counteracted by a high cost of implementation, monitoring and enforcement. In order to maintain the advantage of site-specific policies versus uniform policies, the former have to be implemented at an optimal level of space. This level should at least allow for a trade-off between lower expenses due to an appropriate tuning to the local conditions and heavier costs of decentralised measures. This paper deals with this specific question regarding territorialized policies. It is based on a study of the efficiency of differentiating the way this pollution is regulated, focussed on assessing the importance of spatial variability in physical parameters and in site-specific policies' costs.

Jobs requiring skills which integrate some dimensions of sustainable development are increasingly numerous, even if their description is not always clear. This paper proposes primarily to identify newly-created jobs from traditional jobs integrating new issues in their description. The jobs offered to economists clearly belong to the second category. Then, based on an experiment carried out at Grenoble University, this paper aims at stressing the need for training including on the one hand, courses “about sustainable development” and on the other, proficiency in using some transversal tools of economics and management, such as organisational change management. This proficiency is indeed imposed by the large variety of the professional positions on offer in this field.

Universities generate important flows of commuting and transport represent for them a core challenges for their attractiveness and their ecological footprint. This paper addresses the case of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. It analyses the mobility practices of students and staff (through a series of 13 annual surveys) and the main determinants that explain the use of the various means of transport. It then identifies four types of measures : the development of the transport supply, mobility management, planning and digitalization. On the whole the paper adds new knowledge to the issue of mobility on university campuses and the levers to make them into sustainable communities.

In this paper, we focus on community energy projects and try to characterize their economic activity from the perspective of the ecological, economic and social transition. We combine the literature about community energy with the polanyian concepts of embeddedness, substantive and plural economy, in order to scrutinize five citizen-based projects producing renewable energy, based in the Occitany Region in France. The paper discusses the political and ecological embeddedness of their economic activity, and defines a logic of « reticular autarky ».

Most of the time, pollutions are perceived as « already there » phenomena waiting to be established. On the contrary, this paper explains that pollutions are the result of a qualification process embracing both human and non-human entities involved in a given situation. Starting from the observation of dead fishes in a well-known river – la Loue, this paper analyses the inquiries led by fishermen, scientists and authorities aiming at solving problematic situations. In the search for solutions, the various stakeholders refer to different type of knowledge and to different social worlds in which rivers bear different meaning.

This paper is the introduction to the special section « Combating climate change and controlling energy demand ». In december 2015 and july 2016 the journal Développement Durable & Territoires published a special section addressing climate change adaptation issues. In this special section, we focus on climate change mitigation, dealing with politics, programs and instruments. The aim is to reduce greenhouse gases, through multi-level actions: reducing the use of fossil energy sources, developping renewable energies, efficiency and energy sobriety. The papers go beyond the technical dimension and address interelations between technical devices, socio-economic dynamics and actors’ practices. Energy provision issues allow us to tackle teritorial contexts in the North and in the South, to consider different geographic scales and to observe interactions between energy politics and urban and spatial planing.

This paper analyses the situation of sustainable development in a European Union that is undergoing a severe economic crisis since 2008. First it describes the gap between the challenges put to the forefront in sustainable development discourses on the one side and the causes of this crisis on the other. In addition, the stress of public budgets under the crisis influence weakens the support for ecological and energy transitions, at a time when climate policies are already suffering of difficulties of their own. However, and this is examined in the second part of the paper, sustainable development objectives continue to be affirmed in European policy texts, including references to environmental limits to protect, and long term transition goals. In the third part we scrutinize the place of economic approaches in these policies. An ambiguity is shown between on the one side the preeminence of economic short term justifications for policy measures, and on the other side the idea that the stagnation of economic indicators could also sustain alternative indicators of well-being, indicators that have been promoted within sustainable development goals. We conclude by launching some ideas about the articulation of critics on ecological and economic failures.

While medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs) are subject to an increasing interest and a growing demand, this paper focuses on MAP farmer-gatherers’ work. We adopt a crossing perspective between metropolitan France and the ultramarine territory of French Guiana. Based on surveys among MAP farmer-gatherers and related associations and on a good understanding of the socio-economic and institutional context, this paper explores through a comparative approach, the specificity of MAP farmer-gatherers’ job and the professionalization process in which they are engaged.

This special issue entitled « Technical objects at the prism of hydrosocial cycle : new theoretical and empirical approaches » presents new insights concerning water-society relations in social sciences. It is characterized by interdisciplinary approaches and engages with two main theoretical frameworks : science and technology studies and political ecology. Both are indeed mobilized in order to deepen the analysis of the dialectical relation between technical objects and hydrosocial systems, by using the concept of hydrosocial cycle. Our aim is to explain how « infrastructure » and « apparatus » forge and transform water-society interrelations, reshape them and modify their functioning. But also how the hydrosocial cycle, in return, sets out particular forms of infrastructure and apparatus. This paper firstly introduces the theoretical and epistemological debates linked to this special issue. And then it presents the thirteen papers gathered in this special issue, which, based on empirical studies, offer different uses of hydrosocial cycle approach to investigate water/society dialectical relations.

Analyzing practices that re-localize food and make food chains more sustainable in the context of three alternative food networks (AFN) in Brussels, this paper shows that these practices can be of huge diversity, in terms of models as well as in terms of intensity. Through comparative analysis of the three cases, it shows that the questions of re-localize and make food systems more sustainable can lead to different strategies while the general objective of sustainability is formally shared and collectively constructed. It illustrates that AFNs projects’ are leading the main choices but that no strategy makes the difference regarding the effects on direct stakeholders in each AFN. As conclusion, the paper, argues to consider complementarity between AFNs practices more than choosing which one is the best/more sustainable.

The objective of our paper consists in testing on the ground the concept of governance, which should be understood as a form of intervention by companies in public action. Using the social problem of “racial” discrimination in the workplace, we will show how this has been taken up by private players in initiatives such as the production of reports on the subject (Bébéar 2004, Sabeg and Méhaignerie 2004…) and in the recent signing of the “Charter of diversity” by forty french firms. In fact, these various initiatives (reports, charters…), show how private players are tempted to build on a public problem, to influence relations with the State, to legitimise and support their own explanations of what is real, their own ways of defining the causes, and their solutions. The fact that the question of discrimination has been appropriated by private players is a testimony to their increasing participation in political decision-making, and thus illustrates a way of working which is codified from the point of view of a negotiated standard, and partly characterised by the tools and procedures of governance. Thus, starting from the premise that governance is a way of working codified from the point of view of a negotiated standard, we have studied the Charter of Diversity in business which was published in October 2004.

From preliminary studies to the execution of road works, a road project is submitted to a succession of decisions, following a regulated procedure. This succession of choices is bordered by environmental, technical and financial constraints. Thus, the decisional process is complex, especially because various and numerous actors are implied. In this context, contribution of research can consist in elaborating methods that can inform on potential consequences of successive decisions, in terms of sustainable development. This expects an analysis of decision criteria that are specific to each actor inside the decisional process. The objective of this paper is to analyze on which general stakes the decisional criteria are based. First, factual elements of the decisional process are extracted from regulations. Then, non regulated criteria are investigated through the collection of expressions of different actors. A discussion put the obtained results in the perspective of environmental and consultation stakes. The analysis shows the difficulty to express a list of explicit decisional criteria that respond to the stakes of sustainable development. Environmental stakes are found better considered when a consultation approach is performed at the very beginning of the project. This consultation can only be decided by the client or the project manager, because this goes further than strict regulation demands. However this approach is often limited to local stakes, whereas planetary environmental stakes, such as climate change or natural resources depletion, are often neglected.

New-Caledonia's economy concentrates many contradictions: under development, protectionism, no VAT, political emancipation but high financial transfers from France… This paper analyses, from a taxation point of view, the sustainability of the current New-Caledonian economic system: how could this system persist without any structural crisis? Which tax reform should be proposed? The section 1 explains why tax reform is necessary. The section 2 describes New-Caledonia's economic and commercial system. The sections 3 and 4 present the principles of the VAT and of the social VAT. The section 5 analyses the opportunity to change New-Caledonia's customs tax for a VAT or a social VAT.

This paper presents the Bilan Sociétal experimentation in Rennes associations, realised by Rennes Métropole. It shows that local communities try to favour new forms of contracting between actors in the framework of the sustainable development and local social responsibility policies orientation. It shows however that this experimentation gives tracks to imagine new evaluation tools in a plural economy.

This paper examines a special public policy plan put into place in the Nord-Pas de Calais Region between 1993 and 2002. This plan called Employment-Environment Policy mixed the territorial and the local collective action dimensions. Examination of the ethos for collective action put forth by the various participants shows that the main difficulty for implementation arose, not from the very objectives of the programme that were in harmony with the Region's ones, but rather from the kinds of collective actions developed by the various players involved in the plan.

As other public services, the municipal waste service needs to evaluate its performances and is accountable for its results. This evaluation requires the definition of criteria and the selection of indicators in order to measure the progress and to allow comparisons with other municipal waste services too. Because the performance has many facets, a multi-criteria approach will be used. In the light of an analysis of feasibility and relevance, the paper puts forwards few, quite simple and complementary indicators which are gathered up into a synoptic table and make up an instrument panel.

Community-based management of natural resources is now a main figure of natural resources management. It seems to have a growing number of adherents. Its virtues are meanwhile disputable. This paper proposes a critical insight. Grounds of this approach need a more serious discussion. The application without precaution could provoke negative effects for resources as well as for population.

This paper aims at evaluating not only the wood-energy demand of Ouagadougou, the physic impact of this city wood energy consumption on the forest of its provisioning area, together with the causes of wood-energy price policy failures. The evaluation’s methods of wood energy consumption are reviewed in comparison with the resource supply conditions and the availability on data of wood resource demand. The data on the forest inventories of the wood-energy provisioning surface of Ouagadougou, as well as investigations into the households and the craftsmen allows estimating the consumption of Ouagadougou in wood-energy and its impact on the forest resources’ depletion. some complementary analysis have been done on the main causes of wood energy price policy failures.

Feederwatch program is a project dedicated to counting birds at feeders in the backyard of participants from November to April, since 1988. This program uses statistical means to calculate trends in the evolution of bird populations and areas of distribution, in order to cope, each year, with the huge cover of the program (North American continent) and consequently the huge number of lay people involved (16 000 in 2003). This case documents a successful program in « public understanding of science » oriented toward real science. This paper describes and discuss the various mechanisms aligning scientists and lay people, at each stage of the process of data collecting and processing, in what the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology calls an example of « citizen science ».

Using the theoretical framework of care ethics, this paper explores the extent to which urban community gardens offer the opportunity to renew links with ordinary nature, based on attention and responsibility. Our ethnographic study, based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, conducted in Malmö (Sweden), during 3 months with a local urban gardening network, shows that collective gardens allow direct contact with nature, satisfy needs for a contact with nature and allow the development of a diversity of relationships with plants, including caring relationships. We also find that these relationships exist through practice and other gardeners’ expertise. These results highlight how important are, within cities, spaces dedicated to learning complex relationships with nature. They stress the importance of sensory learning that contributes to environmental knowledge.

The Chaîne des Puys presents a large number of wetlands or former wetlands (maar, volcanic lakes or dams) whose current aspect gives them a “wild” appearance. Actually, for many of them, their landscape reflects the geomorphological history as well as the history of the local communities. This double aspect, both natural and cultural, makes these sites as a good model for conceiving a management plan that conciliate the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) based on aesthetical and geological criteria with the local ecological and cultural value that come from a succession of transformations or abandonments during the time. While the local authorities work on the application for an inscription of the Chaîne des Puys Limagne Fault on the UNESCO World Heritage list, this paper shows that by reconstructing precisely the history of these sites, it can help local managers to think about their management policy differently, focusing not on a strict conservation or protection dimension, but taking into account this historical frame in order to conciliate the expectations of the UNESCO with the local social demands.

For industrial ecology, officially born in the 1990s, waste produced by some processes or products can be reused as raw material by others. It gradually gained ground within the academic community, but also with companies and public authorities. If the need for human sciences to get involved in industrial ecology research has been acknowledged (Boons and Baas, 2007), the role of the researcher in strategy is often overlooked. This paper aims to highlight the potential contributions of strategic management to the field of industrial ecology and outlines a research agenda.

Climate policies are usually represented as being constituted by two complementary and balanced components: one for mitigating the causes of climate problem, the other for adapting to its effects. However, the practices observed at the local level indicate modes of construction and existence of mitigation and adaptation largely independent. This article aims to explore and discuss these tensions between, on the one hand these representations and, on the other hand, the practices observed at national and local level. It seeks in particular to better understand how adaptation is built and exists at local levels and to suggest ways for better integration of adaptation with the rest of local action. At last, the paper intends to demonstrate to what extent adaptation must be consider more "with" climate change rather than “to” climate change only, and it underlines the necessity for local public policy to be able to address adaptation “with” as well as “alongside” mitigation, while ensuring to maintain its legitimacy as a response to climate problem -climate change adaptation cannot do completely “without” mitigation.

The district of Karimama in Northern Benin, occupied by the W Park on about five-sixths of its surface, evokes a land characterized by a lack of farmland, the severity of the climate with recurrent extreme events (droughts and floods) and the lack of access roads. This paper investigates the perceptions of communities on their territory and some ongoing mechanisms developed to control space by enhancing common resources value. Through speeches and facts, we offer an explanation of factors underlying controlling process of bourgou “Echinochloa stagnina” pasturelands in the context of land recession.

Public policies have known a new managerial approach growth promoted by the cognitive and practice framework of New Public Management. This development has empowered the institutionalization of efficiency and effectiveness indicators in public sector’s practices. In fact, it seems that ecosystem services and payments for environmental services register in this new philosophy. Drawing on this, this paper proposes to consider the production’s conditions of tools and monetary evaluation procedures in environmental policies. Finally, the article argues that this procedures contains and disseminate a reduction point of view about the biodiversity value.

This paper questions the relevance of the concept of “services provided by biodiversity”. The discourse of key actors practitioners of biodiversity has been studied.This research investigates the relevance of this notion through the actors’ principles of justification (assumed as plural) as well as its consequences on the biodiversity management. By using French convention theory, different justification polities and worlds of action of actors concerned by biodiversity have been highlighted. The analysis of interviews conducted with actors of the Nord-Pas de Calais Region (firms, associations, and biodiversity managers) in strong link (and sometimes less intense link) with biodiversity shows that the human-nature relationships appears as entering into three categories (Human as dominant, Nature as dominant and integration between Human and Nature).The perception of Nature depends on the scale of analysis, within which Nature is perceived as an object or a system. Given these differentiated perceptions, biodiversity protection policies must be based on appropriate instruments.The notion of Payments for Environmental Services (PES), which often refers to bilateral relationships and market-based instruments appears as limited and inappropriate to stakeholders' expectations at the local level.

Despite the growing interest they arouse, market instruments, such as payments for ecosystem services (PES), are still far from being the dominant political strategies in the conservation of biodiversity and protection of the environment, in Quebec as elsewhere. Even though the PES have received greater consideration in recent years, the field of legal studies regarding this question has hardly progressed. Within this context, the aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims to provide an overview of the different political systems incorporating the concept of ES in Quebec and to identify the role it occupies within these arrangements. Secondly, it also aims to consider more specifically how PES Programs implemented in the agricultural sector of Quebec can help improve existing political arrangements in this sector.

Although its performance has been discussed, the national program of payment for environmental services of Costa Rica (PPES) is considered as a successful experience regarding forest recovery. This paper aims at characterizing the specific contribution of local intermediaries’ organizations to the implementation and results of PPES. We show that these organizations are diverse and contribute to PPES environmental and social performances through their capacity to provide a large of set of services to forest owners which facilitate their access to the program and valorize the land use it supported but not by their ability to reduce the costs of access to the program beard by the PPES beneficiaries.

The green and blue infrastructure (TVB) is a recent public policy entity which enroll the biodiversity conservation goal in the planning instruments, relying on complex and innovative principles (ecological corridors, functionality, etc.). Through the results of a thesis, the paper examines the transposition of ecological corridors in urban local plans. We hypothesize that these local interpretations of TVB encounter problems related to the legal powers of municipal tools concerning land use. These are hardly suitable for management of ecological issues. The study is focused on three municipalities located in Tours area, which is working on a TVB implementation since 2009.

Information plays a role in policy design and implementation. A huge quantity of diverse information has been produced on the Payment for Environmental Services Program (PESP) in Costa Rica. This paper proposes a categorization of the information based on six information flows. Among them, we show that the flow of information produced at national level and/or managed by the program contributes to minor changes. Conversely, information flows with international dimensions, are involved in more strategic changes. The article also highlights the fact that national and international dimensions are generally nested through the interplay of actors who contribute, through the mobilization of information, to trigger the changes observed in the PESP.

The current era of globalization and commodification has had a substantial impact on common-pool resources governance. In direct response to this, community-based organizations managing water and forests at the local level began to create their own transnational networks. Primarily, these organizations aim to achieve direct representation in international decision-making arenas in order to promote their model of collective governance. By reframing the representations of common-pool resources (from commodities to human rights or collective goods), they seek to influence norm-building processes and establish specific scales of community-based governance (local, regional or global).To what extent does the reframing of common-pool resources impact the scales of water and forests governance? This paper addresses the question by adopting a geographical approach of transnational social movements and undertaking a discourse analysis. The study focuses on two case studies: the Latin-American Confederation of Community Organizations for Water Services and Sanitation (CLOCSAS), and the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests (AMPB). On one hand, CLOCSAS frames water as a global common good and a universal human right compatible with an economic value. It aims to become an alternative expert on water issues. On the other hand, AMPB frames forests as a local common good and a territorial right. It aims to be differentiated from technical experts and works to consolidate territorial authority.

If the researches about short food supply chain give interesting knowledge, the empirical validation of their durability is even necessary given the lack of available data on the subject. The paper seeks to contribute to this literature by providing a unique methodological framework based on a mixed-method analysis to apprehend the three pillars of sustainable development, taking into account its systemic nature. This framework is then tested empirically over twenty farms in short circuits: the combination of the collection of materials both quantitative and qualitative allows us to qualify and to give precisions about the sustainability of short circuits.

In New-Caledonia, the management and governance of mining resources in a long view challenge the local state for a decade. This French territory is currently engaged in a decolonization process, which partly rests upon the development of news mining industrial plants. Meanwhile, this last ten years both mining and environmental law were drawn up. This article focuses on the Goro-Nickel mining project in the South of the country, mobilizations it has produced, and their effects upon the regulation of mining resources. Mainly based upon a doctoral research, this paper questions more largely the exercise of sovereignty in New Caledonia through the expressions of several values the mobilization has raised, especially regarding the place of the mining project, and how they can explain the signature of an impact and benefits agreement between indigenous communities and the mining operator.

Our paper aims to analyze the modalities of coordination among local actors who are involved in integrated water resources management. So as to understand the dynamics of territorialization, we ground our analysis in the proximity framework to highlight that social and spatial relations around water resources are unbalanced. How this spatial inequality is taken into account may favor, or on the contrary, harm the sustainability of coordination. The approach in terms of proximity allows us to account for the complex articulation between the processes of territorial construction and the subsidiarity and participation principles presented as gage of IWRM success.

This special section brings together a selection of contributions to the “Les temps des territoires” conference organized by the LADYSS laboratory in 2017. It presents a plurality of approaches centered on territories’ temporalities, described through the spaces and their uses, projects and development actions. These approaches from different disciplines question the categories and the tools designed by experts, to measure the time and to analyze the spatio-temporal dynamics. It discusses notably the recurrent use of reference conditions to conduct a project, or the injunction to adapt to climate change. These papers examine the meaning that inhabitants and actors give to the territories trajectories and the resulting retrospective or prospective constructions. This set of proposals has a methodological and reflexive ambition: what is debated in development choices and the meaning given to collective action, as well as the place that researchers can take there.