Dn its 2023 annual report, the Court of Auditors and its thirteen regional audit chambers focus on water management. They have launched an extensive survey of central services and a large sample of decentralized State services, local authorities, groups of municipalities and national and local public establishments contributing to water management. Their conclusions underline that “the effectiveness of the water policy suffers from the complexity and lack of clarity of its organization, which must be structured and clarified around the perimeter of the sub-watersheds”.
These works are published when, in certain corners of France, water consumption exceeds our capacities over increasingly long periods of the year. In an attempt to stem the problem, the authorities are deploying more and more restrictive measures. But how hard it is to find your way around each other’s scope of action, because there are so many of them!
Just judge: ministries, central administration departments and its decentralized services, national public establishments, research institutes, all levels of local authorities and different forms of groupings of authorities, all have their say on the definition and implementation implementation of water policies.
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Competing interests
“Quantitative water management is both deconcentrated and decentralised, managed at the river basin scale and then at the local level. The State, through the Dreals, the water agencies and the departmental territorial directorates (DDT), plays a very important role in its definition, financing and implementation, whereas at the local level no local authority territory is identified as the leader”, recalls the Court.
To complicate everything, the State administrations are not on the same wavelength concerning the management of the country’s hydrological resources. Take the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion. The latter favors the achievement of the objectives of good status of water bodies set by the framework directive on water for the 2027 deadline. But, for its part, the Ministry of Agriculture aims to preserve the possibilities of levy for farmers badly affected by episodes of drought. As for the Ministry of Health, it focuses on the sanitary quality of drinking water. There are also the Ministries of Industry and Energy which are speaking out on the subject. These two institutions naturally aim to preserve the interests of the sectors of activity for which they are responsible. Consequence of these divergences: “The decisions taken by the representatives of the State on the territory are the fruit of compromise between these interests and contradictory priorities”, note the Elders of the rue Cambon.
Moreover, at the local level, the situations reported are grotesque, because a hydrographic basin often extends over several regions and the territory of a region can intersect several hydrographic basins. A sub-catchment basin can extend over several departments and the territory of a department can be shared between several sub-catchment basins.
Prefects with a shovel
Thus we are witnessing a proliferation of actors. “The regional and departmental prefects are in contact with several basin coordinator prefects and have to deal with various local political realities, even contradictory ones, which are as many reasons to bring different solutions in a given administrative territory to problems of same nature”, indicates the Court.
It goes without saying that this framework does not facilitate the coordination of decentralized State services. Basin coordinator prefects rarely master the diversity of situations in vast river basins. Sometimes they face prefects from neighboring departments who take contradictory measures for the same watercourse. It is for this reason, moreover, that a new crisis management procedure was devised in 2019. It allows the basin coordinator prefect to appoint coordinator prefects for interdepartmental sub-catchments. Complexity when you hold us! This is how the coordinating prefect of the Adour-Garonne basin designated the departmental prefects as interdepartmental coordinators for the main rivers in the catchment area.
“To overcome the mismatch between the administrative map of the State and that of the water management bodies, coordination mechanisms have been put in place”, specifies the Court of Auditors. Thus, the interdepartmental water and nature missions coordinate at departmental level the State services whose mission is to manage and police water; they also concoct an interdepartmental control plan. But this is not always enough to bring all the actors to agreement, underline the Wise Men.
Partial data
In practical terms, knowledge of a watercourse or aquifer is shared between various administrations: Ministry of Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion, water agencies, BRGM, OFB, local entities , etc. “The controls carried out by the regional chambers of accounts show to what extent the information available to the departmental directorates of the territories is fragmentary and unreliable. The information systems used to trace the controls are not used by all the partners and contain partial and conflicting data with the reports of the interdepartmental missions for water and nature”, explains the Court.
READ ALSOHeat waves, drought, storms… the record summer of 2022, a taste of the future As for the state more specifically, it faces real difficulties. Hard, hard for him to enforce the rules of the game that he determines! Indeed, on the one hand, it defends an administrative logic (regions, departments) and, on the other, a hydrographic logic (sub-watersheds). Moreover, its means to ensure policing and control are insufficient. The entanglement between its responsibilities and those of local authorities makes their distribution incomprehensible and contributes to the dilution of everyone’s responsibilities.
Faced with this mille-feuille, what is the government doing? It commissioned four inspections to learn the lessons of the summer 2022 crisis, marked by an exceptional drought. The idea? That they formulate proposals for improving the territorial governance of water and the coordination of State services.
A slow realization
It is indeed becoming urgent, because the results are not always there. 56% of surface water bodies and 33% of groundwater bodies are not in good condition within the meaning of the “Community Water Directive”.
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“The available data also show that 43.3% of surface water bodies are affected by diffuse pollution (nitrates, pesticides, in particular), 25.4% by point pollution and 19.4% by abstraction of excessive water, and that 10.7% of groundwater bodies are affected by excessive abstraction. In 2027, 67% of surface water bodies (7,646 out of 11,407) and 40% of groundwater bodies are at risk of failing to achieve good status within the meaning of the European framework directive,” say the Wise Men.
The latter temporize by indicating that we should not overwhelm only our administrative organization of the country. The situation “is also explained by the slowness of awareness of the importance of the problems, the difficulty in changing behavior, the persistence of pollution which implies long delays between action and results, the effects of climate change “. Either.