Coordination autour d'une ressource commune et logiques d'acteurs. Une analyse au travers des usages agricoles et ostréicoles de l'eau dans le bassin versant de la Charente

The analysis of the coordination upon common resources has been focused essentially on the question of the choice of management instruments in order to guide the behavior of the economic agents. Therefore, the potential role of actors’ behaviors, upstream from the process of coordination, is insufficiently studied. This explains partially the failure of some of these instruments. Thus, the aim of our research consists in constructing a theoretical framework able to explain upstream determinants of the coordination. We integrate, in this perspective, the potential effect of institutional and technological variables, and effects linked to the local dynamics towards the strategies adopted by the actors. In the empirical part of our study we concentrate on the specific problem of the sharing of water resource between the farmers and the oyster farmers on the Charente river basin. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses, we show in particular the existence of macro-institutional and cognitive constraints that reduce significantly the whole of strategies and lead to the preservation of the level of water consumptions. However, our investigations also allow us to shed light on the complex game of the local interactions between the farmers and the oyster-farmers and how these latter antagonise these trends and limit to a certain extent the problem of sharing of the resource.