River Restoration. Группа авторов
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interested in societal issues (e.g. Tanaka 2006; Jia et al. 2010; Che et al. 2012). As a proportion of the total work they publish on river restoration, some countries, such as Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and China, are among the most active on societal issues. In total, since the early 1990s, more than 400 authors from 31 countries have contributed to publications on societal issues in the field of river restoration.
Despite publications from a large number of countries, there does not seem to be an internationally structured scientific community around humanities and social sciences. While most of the publications listed in the WoS involve authors belonging to different institutions, a minority are the result of international institutional cooperation. Scientific communities do exist, but they are multifaceted and rather structured on national or even regional scales. Sometimes it is more accurate to speak of scientific teams than communities. While these teams contribute to the production of societal knowledge in the field of restoration, they are often structured around broader or related research issues. Thus, significant works on river restoration have been published by a network of researchers from several English universities working on flooding and public perception issues (e.g. Tunstall et al. 1999, 2000; Eden et al. 2000; Åberg and Tapsell 2013). Also, in Switzerland, in the canton of Zurich, a scientific community specializing in public participation issues has produced notable work in the field of river restoration (e.g. Schläpfer and Witzig 2006; Junker and Buchecker 2008; Seidl and Stauffacher 2013). The dynamics of regionalized research often seem temporary. Several researchers, whose work is now a reference in the field, have only had a momentary commitment to restoration issues (e.g. Pahl‐Wostl 2006; Junker and Buchecker 2008; Buijs 2009). Out of more than 400 identified authors, less than one‐tenth have participated in multiple publications on the topic of river restoration.
Figure 1.3 Geography of international scientific publications on societal issues in river restoration (1992–2019).
The ad hoc nature of scientific commitments can be explained by the fact that research is often conducted in connection with the implementation of fixed‐duration restoration projects. The bibliometric analysis identified more than a hundred rivers for which research was undertaken on societal issues related to the implementation of restoration projects (Figure 1.4). Some of these projects are known mainly through these societal studies. For example, in South Korea, several research teams (notably attached to universities in Seoul province) have worked on the social, economic, and political evaluation of the restoration of the Cheonggyecheon and Anyancheon rivers, two rivers that are now emblematic of urban restoration (e.g. Lee and Jung 2016; Kim et al. 2017). In Israel and the Palestinian Territories, it is economists who have published scientific literature on restoration projects on the Yarqon, Jordan, and Kishon rivers (e.g. Becker et al. 2014; Garcia et al. 2016). Societal research has also focused on emblematic river restoration projects conducted on major rivers such as the Rhine (e.g. Buijs 2009), Danube (e.g. Bliem et al. 2012), Colorado (e.g. Bark et al. 2016), Sacramento (e.g. Golet et al. 2006), and Kissimmee (e.g. Chen et al. 2016). It is often in the context of such projects that an interdisciplinary culture is forged. In France, several studies on the social and political issues involved in the restoration of the Rhône (e.g. Barthélémy and Armani 2015; Guerrin 2015) were developed as part of a global approach to long‐term socioecological research (Lamouroux et al. 2015; Thorel et al. 2018). Similarly, research on the Cole River and Skerne River (Tunstall et al. 1999; Eden and Tunstall 2006; Åberg and Tapsell 2013) in the United Kingdom was undertaken as part of an interdisciplinary European project (Holmes and Nielsen 1998).
1.4 A research field tackling several topics
Among the publications in the field of river restoration, those devoted to societal issues are distinguished by a specific lexicon (Figure 1.5). The qualitative analysis of these publications makes it possible to reduce the apparent thematic diversity and to schematically draw three main lines of research.
1 The first brings together research on human–river interactions. The public’s environmental perceptions and preferences as well as social practices are often central to this first corpus of 53 publications. Analysis of the different links that individuals have with rivers, of their consideration within the framework of projects, or the way they are impacted by restoration measures, constitutes a first important challenge for researchers.Figure 1.4 Map of the study sites of international research publications on societal issues in river restoration (1992–2019).Figure 1.5 A lexicon specific to international scientific publications on the societal stakes in river restoration.
2 A second thematic corpus, composed of 38 publications, focuses more specifically on the political issues raised by the implementation of restoration projects. The analysis of governance and the roles played by the different actors involved in restoration projects structures the work in this corpus. In particular, the issue of public participation is at the heart of much of the work.
3 Finally, economic approaches structure a third problematic corpus consisting of 66 articles. Economic evaluations of restoration projects, sometimes based on cost–benefit analyses, are central to this work. Notably, strong methodological attention is paid to the evaluation of nonmarket ecosystem services restored by restoration projects.
These different thematic fields are not independent. Understanding environmental perceptions, for example, is often a first step in the political analysis of conflicts between actors. Similarly, the assessment of economic benefits, as well as the political analysis of opinions regarding restoration projects, often depends on the preferences of certain categories of stakeholders for different river states. Numerous publications therefore contribute to the advancement of knowledge within several thematic fields.
1.4.1 Understanding human–river interactions in the context of river restoration
Since the first works published on human–river interactions in the context of restoration in the early 2000s (e.g. Tunstall et al. 2000; Connelly et al. 2002; Piégay et al. 2005), a significant proportion of the publications in the corpus have dealt with this theme (Figure 1.6). These contributions are most often part of a constructivist conception of nature that posits that the humans are a stakeholder in the elaboration of the reality in which they intervene; reality is seen as a mentally constructed representation (Moscovici 2001; Dunlap et al. 2002). The implications of this conception are important in the field of environmental action. Since the river is no longer considered as an intangible reality, it is necessary to make room for the plurality of the modes of understanding in order to define the objectives and modalities of action. This is all the more true in the field of restoration, where determination of the reference – which can be defined as an approximation of the desirable state of the river, a standard chosen from several possible alternative states (Le Floc’h and Aronson 1995) – appears to be an eminently subjective value‐laden activity (Hull and Robertson 2000); restoration is not only a scientific exercise based on rational criteria (Davis and Slobodkin 2004). Anchored in this epistemology, several research studies focused on the dynamics of human–river interaction within the framework of restoration projects.