Résumé
In the environmental field, water management provides examples of the move towards participative democracy. Indeed, French water policy promotes participative river basin management settings. Such settings place different forms of knowledge in contact with each other, and raise the issue of assembling this plurality within the decision-making process.How to combine scientific, lay and diverse cultural forms of knowledge? “Hybrid fora” (Callon, Lascoumes and Barthes 2001) are political settings which tackle this issue, using the principle of symmetry. Following this pragmatic stance, this communication paper studies how “participants” assemble different forms of knowledge, specifically focusing on plural cognitive forms; from the most personal to the public. How do people cope with their attachments to the environment while participating in “governance” practices? How do they cope with the necessity of making people and things equivalent and general? This paper focuses on these tensions, relying on Thévenot’s framework of “regime of engagement” (Thévenot 2000). This author analyses people's shifts between different “pragmatic regimes of engagement” (“familiarity”, “regular planned action” and “justification”) and moral treatments of their attachments to the world. He examines the “familiarity regime of engagement” which is wrecked in public arenas. The Lentilla and the Llech are two Mediterranean rivers in the south of France where the predominance of agricultural water uses is being challenged by environmental issues and the development of recreational water uses. A new approach to sharing water is needed. The existing political modalities of management are of the community type and lean on interpersonal arrangements. Based on strong social links, they have proved efficient. But today they are encountering difficulties as they are required to make room for new people with particular concerns regarding water. As a consequence, some of these people (“neorurals” and the French water agency) are requesting public debates and the development of formal settings (management plans, rules and regulations, contracts, standards…) in order to guarantee the integration of their “good” including satisfying interests or moral principles and protecting personal ties. This paper focuses on participants’ “engagement” and the Assembling of knowledge forms in the Lentilla and Llech participative water management settings. Interviews, observations of meetings, as well as an experimental game, are used. This game aims to make people experience shifting between pragmatic regimes: from familiar engagement to public formats as well as between various water management “orders of worth” (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006) in order to make “compromises”. The game is assumed to be suitable for simulating the composition of heterogeneous pieces of knowledge and for supporting participative management. The paper presents the case study, the game, its theoretical background and the first results of its experimentation.