Investigating the justice dimension of water infrastructures: Demonstration and insights from a serious game in Kandal province, Cambodia

The Kandal province located in the South of Cambodia at the apex of the Mekong delta lies between the Mekong and the Bassac rivers. It is an area where water and society have long co-shaped each other but where there is relatively little water control and agricultural systems both depend on and are vulnerable to floods. The only “water infrastructures” found in the area are century old earthen canals made through a breach in the river banks (locally called Preks); they are used to support dry season agriculture, recession rice as well as fishery activities and support multiple environmental services in the floodplain. Over the last few years, the province started to witness significant changes as projects to rehabilitate these preks have been implemented by the government with support from development agencies. Several projects aiming at further controlling water to support agricultural intensification (as has been observed over the last two decades on the other side of the border, in Vietnam) will be implemented over the next few years in the province. This will have significant impact on the local environment though the form these projects will take is still under discussion. Together with the Royal University of Agriculture (RUA) and the Irrigation Service Center (ISC; a Cambodian NGO), two French research organizations (CIRAD and IRD) have been involved in developing innovative participatory tools (namely a serious game) to discuss different options of infrastructure development at both local and provincial level and their environmental justice dimension, both in terms of distributive (how will the cost and benefit of specific option be spatially and socially distributed) and procedural (what place should local farmers notably be given over water control infrastructure choices) justice. This workshop both aims at “presenting” the results of such collaborative work in an innovative way (whereby participants themselves contribute to generating the results) and discussing these with researchers and other stakeholders interested in issues of environmental justice. We propose to structure the workshop in two main parts: 1. The first part of the workshop (45 minutes) will consist in a “game session”. A select group of participants (about 5) will take on the role of key stakeholders involved in the development of water control infrastructures in Kandal province (local elected officials, civil servants of different ministries). They will collectively discuss which type of infrastructure they consider as being the most adapted among a suite of options (pre identified on the basis of actual scenarios being currently discussed among national decision makers). The session will then allow discussing how infrastructure development leads to reshaping social and environmental (in)justices on the basis of different flood levels (modeled according a dice throw, on the basis of actual hydrological frequency). Note that, if deemed important, 10 people could participate to the game session (working in pairs) 2. The second part of the workshop (45 minutes) will be devoted to a debriefing in which participants and observant alike will reflect on two main questions: (1) what are the different conception of distributive (in)justice that have emerged during the “game session(s)” in relation to different infrastructure development options and (2) what are the limits and advantages of such participatory tools in terms of advancing procedural justice over the choice of infrastructure development