Publications

Experiencing the landscape: landscape agency in a multifunctional valley after dam removal on the Sélune River, France

Publication d'un article dans la revue Ecology and Society

L’article « Experiencing the landscape: landscape agency in a multifunctional valley after dam removal on the Sélune River, France » vient de paraitre dans la revue Ecology and Society. Écrit par Marie-Anne Germaine et Alexis Gonin, cet article s’appuie sur des enquêtes menées dans le cadre du programme de recherche « Sélune 2 / Reconfiguration des collectifs et projet de territoire » après le démantèlement des barrages de la Sélune. La place du paysage, et plus spécialement son agentivité, y sont discutés alors que les acteurs locaux découvrent un paysage transformé après la vidanges des lacs et la suppression des barrages hydroélectriques.

Vous trouverez ci-dessous le résumé (en anglais) de l’article accessible ici :

Here, we examine landscape as an actor of ecological restoration projects rather than as a resource. Based on relational thinking and the notion of agency, we aim to identify affordances recognized by local actors and to mobilize relational thinking to understand human-river relations. Although restoration projects have mainly been tackled from the point of view of contestation and landscape attachment, we question the capacity of these operations to produce multifunctional landscapes. We analyze the way in which the radical transformation of a landscape, resulting from the removal of two hydroelectric dams, led stakeholders to act. Our results not only reveal the limits of engineering approaches that struggle to overcome the nature–culture dualism, but also the value of integrating non-humans when we consider relationships rather than only objects. We analyze how the potential uses of a valley are revealed by the radical landscape transformations brought about by an ecological restoration project. We observe how the stakeholders project themselves into this new configuration, the resulting landscape visions it inspires in them, and how new functions emerge from the relationships woven between a new landscape and its stakeholders.