L'Espace Politique (Oct 2020)
Le citoyen, l’expert et le politique : quelle place pour les savoirs locaux dans la lutte contre les changements climatiques ?
Abstract
For the past 15 years, the mouth region has been altered by an accumulation of hydrological risks against which state policies have shown limits. Today, it is necessary to invest new creative imaginations to re-enchant its adaptive governance trajectory, which has been unsustainable until now. In order to document a possible sustainable transition, I propose a socio-hydrological monograph - a geophysical and human description - of the panorama of the area around the mouth of the Senegal River, before characterizing its trajectory of adaptive governance since the 1970s and finally, I present the agenda of its possible re-enchantment, in a pluralistic, relational and cosmopolitan dimension of knowledge. The analytical timescale of this paper is documented through a collection of "mixed" empirical data - field surveys (53 informants surveyed); academic archives; administrative/institutional documents -. The treatment of this empirical corpus proves that, apart from scholarly knowledge, local/vernacular knowledge co-exists and can give new impetus to public policies in distress, in the face of ecological disasters that have become planetary. This paper will focus on local knowledge in a context of combined ecological crisis. Thanks to a plurality of corpora from the work of the French Ministry of Colonies, qualitative interviews and academic archives. Thus, I define the organization of scientific knowledge carried by the actors of hydrological governance, then prove the coexistence of traditional knowledge still invisible held by indigenous populations through observation and field missions that have allowed to interview 53 individuals between 2016 and 2017 in the town of Gandiol. My results show that apart from the scholarly knowledge that is constantly emerging among elites and technocrats, memories, narratives, techniques, and strategies coexist and function. Thus, in an increasingly vulnerable world (floods, drought, marine submersion, erosive beach crises), where public policies, scientific and technical knowledge have shown their limits in the face of global ecological disasters, a decolonization of environmental imaginations is necessary thanks to a recognition of knowledge, a rebalancing of systems of thought, philosophies and epistemologies. It is in this register that my research is mobilizing real alternatives to re-found the contents of local knowledge (learned and traditional) in the construction of resilience in the service of hybrid intelligence. A contribution to the field of local/vernacular knowledge, in a discipline such as geography.
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