Le champ des politiques hydriques dans l’Ouest étasunien : éléments d’interprétation des instruments d’action

Faced with the "water crisis" that the western United States has been going through for the past fifteen years or so, the competent players in the field of water have decided to provide answers that can be described as "neo-conservationist". It is not so much a question of review...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Joan Cortinas, Franck Poupeau
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Institut des Amériques 2020-03-01
Series:IdeAs
Subjects:
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/ideas/7789
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Summary:Faced with the "water crisis" that the western United States has been going through for the past fifteen years or so, the competent players in the field of water have decided to provide answers that can be described as "neo-conservationist". It is not so much a question of reviewing the economic and urban model at the source of water consumption exceeding the available resources, but rather of finding contractual and technical arrangements that will enable economic and urban expansion to continue. By distancing itself from critical geography approaches to these issues, the paper argues that the emergence of "neo-conservationism" in the Western United States is not the result of an unquestioned domination by economic, political and bureaucratic elites whose only motivation is to remove obstacles to the process of capital accumulation. The thesis of the article is that the water policies observed should rather be considered as the provisional state of structural power relations between the different protagonists of the water policy field.
ISSN:1950-5701