Résumé
With an historical overview of the legislative and regulatory framework of water pricing in France, this chapter first describes how the focus of pricing policy progressively shifted from budget balancing to water conservation then to social protection. The next part focuses on pricing practices in the urban sector. Price levels and the evolution of tariff structures are analyzed using surveys and case studies results. The fourth section focuses on water pricing in the agricultural sector at different scales: large public irrigation schemes, smaller water user associations, and individual irrigation systems. The evolution of water abstraction fees collected by river-basin authorities is also analyzed, and we present how these fees can be modulated depending on the degree of collective management of agricultural water resources. To conclude, we discuss the efficiency of water pricing in urban and irrigation sectors and highlight some limits to take into account several uses.