Adjacent Ecologies: Social Worlds and Environmental Change in a French Marshland (Marais Poitevin).

• In Event: Social Theory and Environmental Change

Abstract

The Marais Poitevin, a 100,000-hectare wetland in western France, has undergone profound transformations since the 1970s and has become the site of enduring conflicts over land use and water management. While recent controversies surrounding substitution reservoirs (“mega-basins”) are often interpreted either as failures of governance or as technical disputes over resource scarcity, this article proposes a different theoretical framing. Rather than treating the conflict as a disagreement over water allocation, I analyze it as emerging from the confrontation between divergent activities and modes of valuation whose interdependence is materially produced through water.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025, combined with archival research and the analysis of an oral history corpus, the article reconstructs the trajectories of three social worlds that have structured the marsh: traditional wetland farmers and livestock breeders (maraîchins), cereal growers associated with agricultural intensification, and environmentalists oriented toward conservation and landscape preservation.
Each of these worlds both depends on and reshapes water flows and physical environments. Building on interactionist social theory, I use the concept of adjacent ecologies to examine how social worlds co-evolve and compete through the environmental consequences of their activities. By foregrounding the ecological interdependencies that link otherwise distinct social activities, this approach reframes water conflicts not as struggles over scarce resources, but as the outcome of overlapping ecological projects seeking to stabilize different ways of inhabiting and valuing the marsh. More broadly, the article contributes to social theory by showing how environmental change can be understood as a relational and processual effect of interactions between social worlds and the environments they actively produce.

Author

• Romain Cazaux, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales