The shifting territorialities of the Rhone River's transboundary governance: a historical analysis of the evolution of the functions, uses and spatiality of river basin governance

For the past decade, water policies have been strongly influenced by the concept of integrated water resource management (IWRM), and the river basin has been regarded as the most relevant scale for water governance. This article is based on the case of the Rhone River. Through historical analysis (from 1870 to the present), we study how the river's functions evolve, how water users compete to secure their needs, and the effects on the governance structure and on its spatiality. While this governance structure has remained stable for decades, we show how the evolution of water policies (and the emergence of IWRM) and of environmental concerns strongly modified the strategies of actors. We also demonstrate how the governance structure as well as its space and scale of regulation tends to change with the attempt of central States to get back to the centre of the configuration of actors