Water Policy in New Caledonia: Participative Co-building of Water Governance in a Decolonization Process

Author Biography

Caroline Lejars is a researcher at CIRAD (International Cooperation Center for Agricultural Research for Development) and currently deputy director of a research unit on Water Management (UMR GEAU) in Montpellier. Her research focuses on the governance and management of hydrological territories mainly in North Africa and the Pacific. Most of her research is based on participatory approaches to support the organization of collective action. She has carried out and directed various research projects on groundwater governance, water contracts and arrangements and participatory planning for water policies. She was a lecturer at AgroParistech (2009–2010), associate professor at the National Agronomic Institute Hassan II in Morocco (2011–2016) and at the New Caledonian Agronomic Institute (2016–2019). Séverine Bouard is a Human Geographer (PhD). Her research focuses on assessing the extent of agriculture and hunting/fishing among Indigenous Pacific livelihoods in the context of the commodification of nature and emerging Indigenous discourses on nature and places. She focuses on the trajectories of people and territories, highlighting social change at work. She has taken part in, or led, more than ten research programmes on natural resource management and has developed a research practice deeply rooted in fieldwork. Her aim is to understand and co-design public policies with stakeholders that are based on and respectful of indigenous ontologies and livelihood strategies. Together with Caroline Lejars, they led the research programme GOUTTE (Water on Governance on Customary Lands in New Caledonia), on which this edited volume is based. After twenty years of research at IAC in New Caledonia, she has joined the Department of Environmental Management at Lincoln University (NZ) in May 2025.