Читать книгу River Restoration - Группа авторов - Страница 28

According to Szałkiewicz et al. (2018), in Europe “52% of the projects analyzed have been designed and implemented without the participation of local stakeholders.” Whether actively or passively concerned by a decision, the individuals or collectives (group or organization) that make up society nevertheless have interests that may be positively or negatively affected by its execution (or nonexecution). These interests often determine their relationship to the river and their stance on restoration. In policy approaches to river restoration, stakeholders are at the heart of the discussion (Figure 1.9), and the question is often to determine which river restoration stakeholders are or should be involved in decision‐making (Junker et al. 2007). Political approaches to river restoration are often strongly biased toward broad participation. According to various authors, the river restoration decision, as well as its evaluation, is best made collectively (Jähnig et al. 2011; Deffner and Haase 2018). This positioning places river restoration at the center of a democratic debate. Indeed, it considers that a restoration project, insofar as it creates value (Light and Higgs 1996), must produce a value that is shared or at least collectively debated if the project is to have relevance and social legitimacy (Deffner and Haase 2018). The river is considered a common good around which a “community” coalesces. This community is made up of individuals who often have different or even divergent interests, but who come together around a shared project. By placing the democratic issue at the heart of restoration, political approaches make the river a tool for living together. In this sense, political action cannot be taken independently of the social and cultural contexts in which it takes place.

Figure 1.9 Lexicon specific to international scientific publications dealing with the political stakes of river restoration.

The form of the democratic debate is also at the center of considerations; representative democracy giving expert groups legitimacy to act is questioned. More and more authors are placing participatory approaches at the center of their work and considering the involvement of different stakeholders in the project; they approach the political dimension of river restoration from a governance perspective. According to Mansourian (2017, p. 402), “governance determines who takes decisions, and how these decisions are made and applied.” Some of these studies are interested in the satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, of stakeholders regarding the degree and manner in which they were involved in the project (Junker et al. 2007; Heldt et al. 2016). Others propose a monitoring of governance, and analyze, often in a critical manner, the way in which the interplay of actors within the loop has been able to influence decisions (Tanaka 2006; Lee and Choi 2012; Hong and Chun 2018). Thus, within the framework of the restoration of the Anyangcheon river in Seoul (South Korea), Hong and Chun (2018) were able to highlight power asymmetries between the different stakeholders of the project that contributed to prioritizing, in the choice of restoration objectives, scientific values to the detriment of nonscientific values, such as cultural, aesthetic, social, or educational ones. The importance of the leadership of certain stakeholders, endowed with varied influence and capacity, for driving the concretization and orientation of projects is often mentioned (Lee and Choi 2012; Barthélémy and Armani 2015).