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International audience; Landscape management involves tackling both systemic and social complexity: the former due to multiple interacting entities, the latter due to incommensurable knowledge and value systems of stakeholders. Current practice in landscape management makes wide use of participatory methods, which helps increase the breadth of our understanding of sustainability problems, e.g. biodiversity loss, agricultural pest damages or water penury. However, this practice also often offers a flat, harmonized picture of the landscape, which precludes observing ambiguities and out-of-the-box arguments and ideas for overcoming problems. In this article, we analyzed two research settings that tended to surface and formalize incommensurability between stakeholders regarding the sustainable management of landscapes – one focused on quantitative water management, the other on agroecological pest control. The objective was to investigate if and to which extent these ‘opening-up’ exercises, based on a deliberative rationale, were beneficial to landscape sustainability. The results indicated that in both cases, participants strove to position their knowledge and values relative to others: this way, they delineated a negotiation and learning space to invest in, and enhanced the quality of their arguments, allowing new insights on the focus issues. These findings offer an operational counterpoint to the prevalence of ‘closing-down’ approaches in landscape approaches. In the general context of ecological crisis, these examples promote methodological options that offer space to disruptive narratives, as well as tools that allow a reflexive use of the scientific knowledge, models and indicators traditionally used in sustainability appraisals, without discarding them.

International audience; We analyze two research settings that formalize fundamental divergences among stakeholders about the sustainable management of landscape-one about quantitative water management, the other about agroecological pest control. Our point is that the elicitation and formalization process that took place in both cases fostered collective deliberation, by forcing participants to position their knowledge and values in regards with others. This way, the argumentative quality of the debate grew and we gained new insights on the problems tackled. Our experiences offer a counterpoint to convergence-seeking approaches, supporting that participatory processes should integrate representations in order to build a shared picture. Because this convergence view is at odd with the existence of incommensurabilities that characterize the plurality of people involved in landscape-scale issues, we emphasize the relevance of participatory methods that help focalizing the debate on problematic incommensurabilities, e.g. those that generate discord about the landscape changes to implement, so that they can be overcome. Keywords : agroecological pest management, quantitative water management, social and technical incommensurabilities, participatory modelling and simulation, collective deliberation

International audience; AbstractWater imbalances are an environmental, social, and economic problem in many agricultural watersheds, including those in temperate climates. Structural changes are recommended because crisis management, through water restrictions, is not sustainable. However, the content of these changes is debated, especially because their impacts concern different sectors and stakeholders and are uncertain. MAELIA is an integrated assessment and modeling platform, which combines a multi-agent model with a geographic information system; it represents fine-scale interactions among water, water management, and agricultural systems, accounting for daily irrigation decisions on each field and effects of the corresponding water withdrawals on water flows. In this article, for the first time, we investigated the effectiveness of some of the most popular strategies aimed at solving water imbalances considering environmental, water management, and agricultural indicators calculated with MAELIA. The alternatives we assessed were (i) reducing the irrigated area, (ii) assisting irrigation with decision-support tools, (iii) implementing crop rotations, and (iv) merging water storage into large reservoirs. Simulations were run for the 2001–2013 period on a case-study area, the downstream Aveyron watershed. We show that, in this area, the decision-support tool and crop-rotation alternatives drastically decreased irrigation withdrawals and required fewer restrictions and flow-support releases. However, those two alternatives had different impacts on the environment and farming systems: decision-support tools cost almost nothing for farming systems and improved environmental indicators slightly, while crop rotations had greater potential for long-term environmental preservation but degraded local and farm economies in the current context. The uniqueness of this study comes from using a fine-scale mechanistic model to assess, in an integrated way, the impacts of politically debated water management strategies that were previously only assessed in terms of potential withdrawal reduction.

International audience; One of the great challenges of developing sustainable water management is to integrate water and land use issues, and to favor stakeholders’ involvement in the process of designing a solution to the specific issues of water basins. This study aims to help reach these objectives: we present the outcomes of a methodology that aims to design, with stakeholders of a watershed facing quantitative water manage- ment issues, alternative agricultural landscapes that they each consider as potential solutions. Our design approach combines (1) facilitation of participatory workshops for designing changes in cropping systems and their spatial distributions at the landscape level with (2) formalization of these alternatives in a GIS. The formalized alternatives provide precise information about fields, farms and areas concerned by the designed changes. We present two sample results of this methodology implemented in a 840 km2 irri- gated landscape located in a water-deficient watershed in southwestern France. We discuss how our design approach may be useful for a wider design-and-assessment methodology involving researchers and stakeholders with conflicting interests. We show that our co-design approach provides fertile ground for the emergence of salient, credible and legitimate change options.