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The sociotecimical infrastructure required to implement environmental policies has a definite political content: it frames and influences public action, most often in an implicit way. In this paper we take a normative stance on democratic governance, which raises the need for making this infrastructure debatable. We focus on the specific case of drought management in France, which has developed an infrastructure that consists of zoning, measurement networks and threshold definition for critical flows in order to be able to assess a current hydrological situation in any place and to associate it to a specific crisis level. First we identify the various criticisms voiced by stakeholders in drought commit- tees such as challenging the infrastructure's technical validity setting out its inadequacy to a specific context, disqualifying its use due to the gap between science and the existing practice. We then suggest introducing a tool borrowed from the anthropology of techniques : the operational chain. We propose to use it to render explicit and debatable the infrastructure, its structure and content and on top of that the “regulatory science” which it stems from. This tool entails overcoming the various forms of criticism observed as well as dealing collectively with the tension between principles of justice and adaptation to local conditions. We argue that it may also provide a medium to associate lay people in the development or the revision of the infrastructure itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selective fishing pressure on more highly valued marine living resources is one of the key factors proposed to explain changes occurring in fish communities and associated landings of commercial fisheries. The aim of this paper is to establish the nature of changes in the landings of French fishing fleets operating in the Bay of Biscay in the period 1973-2002, and whether these changes could be related to the relative economic attractiveness of different fish species. The analysis focuses on trends observed in the landings of all commercial fish species over the last three decades. It is based on data of annual quantities landed and ex-vessel prices compiled from official French landings records, and on bio-geographical descriptors of these species derived from published data. Using simple index numbers and multivariate analysis, we examined changes in total landings in terms of their volume and value, as well as changes in their composition. We show that the composition of landings significantly changed over the study period, with an increase in the proportion of pelagic species, of lower economic value. The average ex-vessel price of production by the fleets tended to decrease from the late 1980s; partly due to a cross-species drop in prices, occurring mainly after 1993, but also to the increased proportion of low-priced species in the landings. This caused a significant drop in the total gross value of production in the second half of the study period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]