Retour sur la co-construction de stratégies de recomposition spatiale. Le cas de l’Occitanie (France)

Abstract

The increase in coastal risks associated with rising sea levels calls for dynamic adaptation measures to reorganise coastal territory. The challenges of appropriating measures and putting them into practice are major. They are multi-level and at the crossroads of different policies: land use planning, tourism, risk management and so on. Faced with these challenges, this article reports on a co-construction process towards a policy of spatial integrated managed retreat in the context of the Occitanie region and its governance. In practice, this resulted in the co-construction of a shared regional framework, building a community of practice and adapting territorial governance arrangements. This article offers a reflective analysis of this co-construction. Firstly, the process (30 months in total) is transcribed by means of a chronicle, detailing the diversity and complementarity of methods and approaches that have been used. The main achievements (common definition, principles of action, scale of intervention, temporal typology of actions) and the choice of a governance framework are then presented and discussed on how they could contribute to gradually build a community of practice as well as the types of constraints encountered. The contributions towards the community of practice are analysed in terms of knowledge sharing, pooling and collective learning. This reflective analysis provides lessons for local stakeholders and, more broadly, for the transition of coastal territory.

Keywords

• erosion
• coastline
• Co-construction
• territorial transition
• integrated managed retreat
• adaptation pathways