Making existing knowledge explicit on socio-ecological dynamics: The complementarities of three methods in a watershed territory of the Bolivian Eastern

International audiencePeople of the Zapocó watershed territory in the Bolivian Eastern, has a long tradition of growing cattle, exploiting the forest and setting up water access points. Recently with newcomers of different origins, these activities have increased in intensity, leading to deforestation and rising competition for water and land. Contentious issues are getting more numerous within a complex legal framework aiming to promote environmental protection, agricultural production as well as new settlements in this region. Associated with extreme events and diminishing rainfall, Climate Change (CC) might worsen current trends and generate more conflicts. In this context, the restoration or enhancement of ecosystem services (ES) becomes essential for CC adaptation, as stated in the EcoAdapt research-action project where the authors are collaborating. However, before elaborating responses in terms of CC adaptation strategies, existing information requires systematization for a common understanding amongst stakeholders of what is going on in their territory. For that matter, an analysis of socio-ecological dynamics was conducted in the Zapocó watershed. The present communication proposes to discuss the methodological choices for this analysis and their relevance for a shared representation of current processes. Three approaches and their tools were considered: The Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation (OSPC) from the Conservation Measures Partnership; The Problem-Actor - Resources-Dynamics-Interactions (PARDI) from the Companion Modeling research community and the Resilience Assessment framework from the Resilience Alliance (RA). Instead of considering them as alternative approaches and fully develop one of them, we borrow from each, what best serves our purpose. We thus highlight complementarities in our specific study. The OSPC framework generates a conceptual framework with an initial concern for "conservation objects" and allows stakeholders to state what factors threaten these resources directly or indirectly through cause and effect relationships among factors. In Zapocó where the central issue is water quality, forests and water infrastructures were also considered as objects of conservation, without explicit representation of the processes linking them however. Influent factors were shown to operate at the different scales, from local (e.g. logging) to national (forest law) and global (climate change).Originally named ARDI, PARDI co-construction method with stakeholders serves participatory modeling in natural resources management. It goes further in relating factors and conceptualizing dynamics, making explicit who are the actors and how they interact amongst themselves and with resources, thereby influencing their dynamics. In Zapocó, PARDI provided insights on how domestic water is contaminated by livestock extension, and on the coordination defaults for sustainable investments in water infrastructures. The problems made explicit are not new in some cases or about to be solved in others. The resilience approach provides specific inputs here, for the inter-scale analysis of past dynamics. The historical profile of the Zapocó socio-ecological system signals the importance of national laws on the decisions made at the farm scale whose aggregated effects drive changes at the scale of the watershed territory. We conclude by discussing whether new methodological development would more generally enrich the analysis of socio-ecological dynamics affecting the ES on which adaptation to CC often rely