Towards a reframing of the drinkable water governance. Of the sanitary conformity with the requirement of environmental quality. ; Vers une recomposition de la gouvernance de la qualité de l'eau potable en France. De la conformité sanitaire à l'exigence de qualité environnementale

Abstract

Taking as a whole, the quality of the drinking water distributed in France was improved thanks to curative and palliative solutions. However, the quality of the water resources used to produce the drinking water keep on deteriorating. The Water Framework Directive (WFD), aiming at a good state of the waters in 2015, constraints the managers of the water resources dedicated to human feeding to integrate regulatory injunctions (health, environmentalist, managerial) and structural imperatives (reassurance of supply), while taking into account economic issues (i.e. facilities rationalisation, cost sharing), political stakes (i.e. institutional, local) and social concerns (i.e. solidarity, acceptability of water price). Two rival managerial logics are facing these injunctions. This first one, based on the watershed, implies to position the Water Agencies at the centre of the planning and funding schemes of water policies. The second logic aims at reinforcing the Department (a French local authority) on these issues. These logics are fully part of a process which main consequences are the increase of the interdependence and co-responsibility of the multiple actors (public and private) involved in the steering of health and environment policies at the multiple levels of governance in Europe. The thesis developed here is that the heterogeneity –of the injunctions, issues and ways to articulate the managerial logics- leads to a reframing of the drinkable water governance, which this work proposes to describe and analyse. The sociological research device relies on a multi-level (i.e. national and the various levels of the French local authorities) understanding of the governance of the drinking water quality, emerging since the 2000s (WFD), and on the analysis of 6 cases: the legislative negotiations of the LEMA (2006), a Departement's management of the AEP process, a reframing of the AEP services during a health crisis, and the implementation of three devices of the drinking water preservation (legislative, experimental ...