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International audience; This paper proposes an empirical investigation of the impact of social relations, referred to as structural social capital, and cultural values, referred to as intangible cultural capital, on tribal agricultural production in New Caledonia. By using microdata from an original survey on tribal communities, we construct a simultaneous equations model to explore the mechanisms by which cultural values and social relations interact with agricultural performance. Several original findings emerge from this study. First, agricultural performance (production and yield) is a result and, simultaneously, an explanatory factor of social relations, highlighting the limited substitutability between these two sources of wealth (agriculture and social capital). Second, cultural values appear to be an explanatory factor of tribal social relations and thus indirectly affect economic performance. Moreover, our results suggest that the complementarity between the forms of capital is essential for the extensification—maintenance/scaling up—of tribal agriculture (crop production) and even more essential for the intensification (performance, i.e. crop yield) of this activity and the persistence of social ties. Our results thus show that the neoclassical hypothesis of perfect substitutability between the components of wealth is not valid for socioeconomic sustainability.

International audience; Coastal area is always a zone with complex problems. Due to the attraction they exert, are facing many social problems. Therefore, a coastal city is usually a city with problems. Its extension, caused by the influx of people from different backgrounds, creates an increased demand for services. One of the problems frequently encountered, especially in Senegal, is access to water. The problem of access to water is poorly treated, without being correlated with the urban evolution, i.e. with increasing population and demand growth. The water resource is facing numerous complications such as the lack of integrated management, integration issues at the governance level, where the local factor is often forgotten. The town of Mbour, object of our study, does not come out of that lot, being an attractive coastal city, from an African country. This indicates the need for an integrated management oriented from local to a global basis and not vice versa. The study presented in this paper indicates that a large proportion of the population has not access to a verified drinking water system and uses water from wells or standpipes. Half of the surveyed population (50%) has no access to a water supply system. The water poverty map of the town overlaps with that of the general poverty excepting few neighborhoods. This means that even areas that are not affected by poverty have a very low or poor access to water, which so far remains the perverse effect of the reform of the Senegalese water sector in 1995.