Junior research scientist in quantitative water management in hydrosocial territories

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INRAE presentation

INRAE, the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, is a public research organization bringing together 12,000 employees across 272 units in 18 centers across France. As the world’s leading institute specializing in agriculture, food, and the environment, INRAE plays a key role in supporting the necessary transitions to address global challenges.

Faced with population growth, food security challenges, climate change, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss, INRAE is committed to developing scientific solutions and supporting the evolution of agricultural, food, and environmental practices.

INRAE is recruiting researchers by open competition and offering permanent position.

Work environment, missions and activities

Water is a growing issue of tension between stakeholders and uses, and between sectoral policies in territories at different scales. Global change is accentuating these tensions by modifying water availability on the one hand, and by generating uncoordinated policies and adaptations that modify the water cycle on the other. In terms of water quantity, agriculture and the environment are in almost all cases the key sectors for these tensions, due to the risks of insufficient flows for ecosystems and water stress for crops (or heavy and sometimes risky investment in irrigation facilities). Adaptations targeted at specific sectors or uses generate transfers of vulnerability, making these efforts at times ineffective. Indeed, these adaptations can affect the availability of resources that can be mobilized by others, but also access to key infrastructures or to the resource itself via institutional changes, or understanding of how the system works.
To deal with this, critical approaches, such as “political ecology”, enable an analysis of physical and social interdependencies and underlying relationships, but struggle to propose tools for a structural transformation of practices. The “involved” approaches mobilized in sustainability sciences, including participatory approaches, enable the co-construction of evolutionary trajectories for shared hydro-social territories. However, these approaches have difficulty in taking into account the transfer of vulnerability outside the group initially mobilized in a participatory approach. What is lacking is an operational critical capacity to assess the relevance of the composition of this initial participant group in terms of identifying the stakeholders potentially affected by the proposed choices. The integration of critical approaches into monitoring and evaluation of concertation processes should enable to overcome some of these biases.
The position will draw on analytical frameworks for understanding the links between the social, ecological and hydrological dimensions of territories and their dynamics. In addition, the arenas in which knowledge about these hydrosocial territories is confronted modify perceptions and knowledge about the resource and its issues, and consequently their behavior. The aim is to trace how these cognitive changes can affect practices and the positions defended on the subject. Finally, in just a few years, the question of water and how it is shared has gone from being a relatively technical issue left to the experts to a major cause of environmental mobilization, sometimes on a national or international scale.

You will contribute to the active field of developing tools, devices and approaches for participatory water governance with a critical geography and social science perspective, in order to revise participatory methodologies for water management to jointly integrate social and environmental justice dimensions. In the specific context of quantitative water management, your research will test new ways of involving stakeholders in long-term negotiation and monitoring-evaluation. You will combine approaches based on management methods with critical analytical approaches. These approaches are complementary. Critical approaches question modes of governance and associated technical choices (regulation/monitoring tools, technologies, etc.) by taking a closer look at the interests, ideologies, narratives and science invoked to justify these choices. The approaches involved facilitate the concerted construction of territorial trajectories with a diversity of stakeholders (farmers, government technical services, elected representatives, associations, citizens). You will contribute to a better understanding of behaviors and logics related to water use and quantitative management on a territorial scale, taking into account interdependencies and cascading effects.

You will be posted at the joint research unit G-EAU, a unit specializing in water governance on a territorial scale. The unit has solid expertise in water management in Mediterranean territories facing water tensions in a context of climate change. Current trade-offs between different water uses, established following the implementation of the Water Framework Directive, are being called into question as new environmental challenges emerge. Our aim is to understand these ongoing transitions in order to propose sustainable trajectories for water resource management. To achieve this, the unit is developing interdisciplinary approaches involving hydrology, hydraulics, social sciences and agronomy. The growing demand for interdisciplinarity in calls for projects, as well as the need to support ministries and local authorities in their resource management policies, requires researchers capable of analyzing territorial water issues and integrating them into a public policy perspective. In particular, the national and local debates surrounding the implementation of the French Territorial Water Management Projects are particularly topical. There are many requests to shed light on these discussions and provide tools for overcoming conflicts.

In the AQUA department, the position complements the approaches to anthropocene hydrology of GOS 2 “Water resources: supporting sober and sustainable management of water as a common good in territories”. It contributes fully to the scientific front on understanding and acting on the uses and modes of governance of water in hydrosocial territories. In addition, through its ability to take into account all the interdependencies within these territories, it will contribute to the emergence of a genuine hydrology of the Anthropocene by integrating users into the water cycle and the indirect and cumulative effects of adaptations to their practices.

This position will enable us to consolidate and renew our expertise in territorial water management in a context of increasing artificialization of the water cycle (reservoirs, groundwater recharge, reuse, etc.), to better assess the relevance of the necessary investments and to inform the controversies generated by this artificialization.

Training and skills

PhD in environmental human geography or, more broadly, environmental social sciences.

- Understanding of the issues and logics of the main players involved in quantitative water use in all its diversity (farmers, government technical services, elected representatives, environmental associations, citizens).
- In the medium term, this profile should evolve towards an HDR (habilitation) and become involved in leading the interdisciplinary component of the collective.
- Open to analytical frameworks from other disciplines

Skills:
- Methods of critical geography (political ecology)
- Knowledge of environmental and agricultural public policy design issues
- Knowledge of water use issues in agriculture
- Proven experience of interdisciplinarity and a taste for implementing it
- Experience of working with stakeholders

INRAE's life quality

By joining our teams, you benefit from:

- 30 days of annual leave + 15 days "Reduction of Working Time" (for a full time);
- parenting support: CESU childcare, leisure services;
- skills development systems: training, career advise;
- social support: advice and listening, social assistance and loans;
- holiday and leisure services: holiday vouchers, accommodation at preferential rates;
- sports and cultural activities;
- collective catering.

For international scientists: please visit your guide to facilitate your arrival and stay at INRAE. 

How to apply

1. I download the applicant guide Application guidelines CRCN 2025 pdf - 3.93 MB
2. I write down the profile number CR-2025-AQUA-2
3. I apply GO