Maintaining the Status Quo Under Increasing Drought Risk: How Public Policies and Property Rights Shape Agricultural Water Uses in Western France

Over the past decades, summers in Western France have been marked by lower rainfall, higher temperatures, and an increased risk of drought. These climatic changes have intensified rivalries between water uses, including agricultural, urban, and environmental uses. While local and regional institutions regulating water uses exist, their ability to make arrangements among water users is being challenged by agricultural and environmental actors through various means: vertical venue shopping, strategic litigation, and social protest. Mobilizing the programmatic action framework, the goal of the paper is to explain how the agricultural sector influence public policies and mobilize their property rights to shape water governance in Western France, specifically in the Clain basin. While the literature puts forward the success of the (French) agricultural sector in making neo-corporatist arrangements, we argue that the intersection of agricultural and water issues has led to a status quo where both agricultural and environmental actors fail to achieve their goals: while the agricultural sector aimed at constructing reservoirs to maintain existing agricultural practices, environmental actors targeted a reduction of water withdrawals to protect natural habitats. To explain actors’ failure to reach a new local arrangement on water, we consider two main variables: 1) policy processes, including a) the discursive strategies of the agricultural sector in framing issues in order to influence policy processes and their outcomes, and b) relational tactics to obstruct competing coalitions from entering strategic policy venues; 2) property rights, such as how farmers make use of property on land and infrastructure and use contracts in the context of liberal market institutions to secure income or increase wealth. In terms of methods, we performed a document analysis, including: secondary literature, the press, legal documents on agricultural and water policy changes, government and court decisions, as well as protocols of local, regional, and national assemblies referring to agricultural and water uses and relevant for the Clain basin. Further, we conducted 64 semi-structured interviews with farmers, agricultural interest groups, elected officials, agency representatives, and environmental interest groups working at local, regional, and national levels. The results of our research show how the agricultural programmatic group has failed to implement their solutions to adapt to increasing drought risks; at the same time, the group was able to delay and limit reductions of water withdrawals defined by authorities, thus limiting targeted environmental mitigation. While the discursive strategies applied by the agricultural group have focused on “food sovereignty” and “securing production”, they achieved adaptations of national legislation in favor of reservoirs. However, regional and local decisions on water uses have sparked judicial and political conflict, in particular regarding the public financial support to reservoirs, and the amounts of authorized water withdrawals. Furthermore, fluctuating commodity prices have challenged the profitability of irrigation, leading to a partial reduction of water withdrawals. In addition, as water withdrawal authorizations significantly influence agricultural business values, farmers oppose their revocation, thus hindering the re-allocation of water uses.