This project aims to identify the adaptation capacities of actors involved in food production who deploy their strategies over a local or intermediate scale, yet who face global scale changes. The aim is to start from the constraints experienced by these actors and to analyse them using the theoretical framework of spatial and territorial reorganisation, legal pluralism, political ecology and civic epistemology. These actors face simultaneously an upheaval in land tenure, in their interaction with water and in the ecosystems in which they live and work. This project builds on seven case studies, demonstrating a wide spread of economic development: the Ampefy area in Madagascar, the Lango and West Nile areas in Ouganda, the region of Al Auja in the West Bank, the Beka valley in Lebanon, the Naivasha basin in Kenya, the Terai in Nepal and Brittany in France. All of these case studies are now experiencing an upheaval in land tenure and in agricultural production. Five of them also experience great mutations in the technical choices concerning water. Three of them experience large scale foreign investments. One of them is located at the heart of important migration flows. Six experience tension between subsistence agriculture and commercial agriculture as well as competition for land between local notables who want to apply the national water law and local populations using local land and water property systems. In all cases, industrial agriculture’s effects on water alter the ecosystem and the human activities linked to it. In all cases, international consultants play a pivotal role in the technical choices concerning water made either by foreign investors, by national governments or by local investors. All of these case studies are located at the heart of a co-construction of technoscience concerning water and agriculture, an arena where actors deploy strategies over scales ranging from very local to global. This project gathers three research units : ART-Dev in Montpellier, the Centre d’Etudes Himalayennes (CNRS) in Villejuif and GECKO in Nanterre to carry out an interdisciplinary study. Geography, political science, agricultural studies, science and technology studies and geomatics are combined to explore human interactions with land and water within agricultural production in all seven case studies. This project is ambitious as it innovates theoretically while it is fed by the case studies. It is original in its tackling both land and water, as it explores territorial and political reorganisation mechanisms linked to land and water. It then studies the co-construction of society and nature that is at work within these territorial processes. These co-construction mechanisms allow us to identify the adaptation capacities of those actors in food production who deploy their strategies over local scalar levels, yet face global changes.

The PRESHINE (Pressions sur les Ressources en Eau et en Sols de l’Himalaya Népalais) project addresses the question of the availability and usage of water and soil resources in the Everest area (Solu-Khumbu) in a context of climate change and of profound transformations caused by tourism to a mountain territory within the Sagarmatha National Park. Here the resource is regarded as a construct, a product not only of physical processes that occur in this high- and middle-mountain region affected by the monsoon, but also of all the societal factors (socio-economic, technical, political and cultural) that lead to establishing water as a resource and to regulating its access and sharing between different usages (agro-pastoral, domestic, tourist, energy). Bringing together researchers from the social sciences (geography, agronomy, history and landscape ecology) and from the environmental sciences (hydrology, glaciology, meteorology, pedology, biochemistry), the PRESHINE project is a follow-up to the PAPRIKA (Cryospheric Responses to Anthropogenic Pressure in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya Regions: Impacts on Water Resources and Society’s Adaptation in Nepal) project. PRESHINE's purpose is to follow new paths of research introduced by PAPRIKA, this time starting from questions raised by the programme’s social science researchers, with the environmental scientists then stepping in to measure and modelize water availability. It is a question of evaluating spatiotemporal shifts according to the usages but also with the representations that the various actors have of climate change (snow and melting glaciers, deregulation of the monsoon), and their effect on the territory. Indeed, in the Himalayas, numerous authors admit that water will be the resource most affected by climate change (drop in availability, modification of its temporal distribution due to changes in precipitations, increased risk of flooding, etc.). The melting of glaciers along with the consequences of this on the reduction in freshwater stocks has become the symbol of this. However, in the Everest area, glaciers only partly contribute to the flow of rivers, with most of the water coming from rainfall. Even though high-mountain streams receive a good supply of water from glaciers, it is not the case in the middle mountains where there are no glaciers. Thus, villagers who live off rainfed agriculture, cattle breeding as well as mountain tourism, suffer more from changes in prevailing precipitations (monsoon and spring rains, winter snow) and from the reduction in snow cover—that impact the cereal and vegetable production reserved for tourists, as well as fodder outputs for pack animals carrying goods for tourists— than by the melting of glaciers. The latter occurs between the two tourist seasons (spring and autumn) and has the advantage of supplying streams before the monsoon; these streams provide a driving force for the mills and micro-electric plants set up in tourist areas in the high mountains. The aim therefore is to compare the significant social factors of change identified within the PAPRIKA programme (developing mountain tourism, setting up Sagarmatha National Park, launching market gardening to supply vegetables to lodges for tourists, which requires large amounts of water for watering plants, setting up micro hydro-electric plants or implementing new techniques for tapping and using water) with the effects of the identified climatic changes (prevailing precipitations, surfaces left free by melting glaciers and by the reduction in snow cover, duration of snow cover and its role in the storage and release of water, and in soil conditions for agriculture). All these factors are likely to lead to changes in water and soil resource availability and, in return, to changes in socio-spatial practices.

Ruling on Nature. Animals and the Environment before the Court - RULNAT Objectives The aim of this project is to study how nature-related issues are brought before law courts; how the environment and animal protection are handled at judicial level by lawyers, activists, and the state; how nature is ‘judicialised’ and ‘governed’ through the judiciary in different countries, and how the global debate on acknowledging some kind of rights to nature and animals is implemented in actual litigations. There are important intellectual and political stakes in understanding these processes, and the project is based on the theoretical assumption that a study of judiciary cases in all their multifaceted complexity provides a pertinent and original angle from which to understand how human relationships to animals or to the environment are shaped – or not – by legal action. Context The animal and nature protection debate has begun to intensify across the world, and animal welfare and ecological issues are repeatedly brought before courts. These issues are now considered a complex and delicate matter involving animals' or nature’s own interests, particularly (for animals) their right to be spared useless suffering and to live in suitable conditions according to their individual and specific needs. Should we then rethink our legal relationship to animals and to nature? Animals are ‘things’, ‘goods’, ‘property’, legally speaking, though they may be granted various types of protection; they are not legal persons. Should they be conferred legal rights (and not simply the ‘right’ to be protected)? If so, how are we to articulate these rights with human ones? Christopher Stone’s idea of attributing a legal standing to nature has become a juridical tool that, despite being the object of much criticism, carries considerable weight all over the world; and some legislatures or courts have granted legal personhood to various natural resources. A similar move concerning animals has been initiated, questioning the boundary between humans and animals. Methodology The project is based on the idea that the close association of juridical and anthropological studies can bring a new, more comprehensive understanding of the issues at stake. We shall therefore pay full attention to the complex, long-term judicial story of lawsuits, by conducting case studies in different countries, associating traditional ethnographic methods and legal analysis. The project is structured around five broad questions: - Animals and natural resources as holders of ‘rights’ - Attributing ‘legal personhood’ to animals and natural resources - Conflicts between humans and animals - The role of experts in court cases - Legal precedents and the global debate Originality The specific and distinctive focus of the project, differentiating it from other work on the environment or on human-animal relationships, is the analysis of real litigations within a comparative perspective, and the close combination of legal and anthropological approaches. Participants A consortium of three French research centres and one Belgian scientific partner has been created. The team comprises social anthropologists with experience of pertinent fieldwork, legal scholars with a particular interest in comparative law on the relevant issues, and environmental lawyers (six French researchers, in collaboration with seven foreign researchers); support for three young researchers is requested (one PhD and two postdoctoral fellowships). Outcome Some fifteen papers will be edited in international-level publications, and ethnographic videos will be produced. A book will compile contributions from a final symposium organized in the last year of the project. We plan to hold regular meetings (open workshops or seminars with invited researchers). A blog will be dedicated to the project, providing additional visibility to the project.