Soft institutional changes towards improved freshwater governance in the coastal zone

Abstract

This paper examines the potentialities of soft institutional changes toward the improvement of freshwater governance in the coastal zone. Freshwater management seeks to reduce welfare losses due to overexploitation of common-pool resources provided by river catchments and their associated ecosystems. Due to the complexity of the governance system, improving the performances of one coastal social-ecological system is then a matter of searching for the adequate soft institutional changes. In the Pertuis Charentais region, increasing scarcity of freshwater during summer threatens the health of this coastal ecosystem and the sustainability of human activities which depend on the use of natural resources. The allocation of freshwater between competing uses or concerns is a core issue for integrated coastal zone management; it reveals the necessary trade-offs between the services that freshwater is expected to deliver to the natural system but also to households, land farmers, recreational fishermen and shellfish farmers. In order to address this issue, we built a conceptual framework which combines the ecosystem services approach with the institutional analysis of common-pool resources. Stakeholder involvement allowed the identification of the realistic soft institutional changes which could improve the governance system. The simulated scenarios suggest that innovative collective arrangements involving farmers could provide some leeway for other more restrictive top-down measures. This participative experiment illustrates also the demonstrative potential of social-ecological modelling for the exploration of acceptable new institutional arrangements.