Analysing the Postures of Researchers Supporting the Creation of a Farmers’ Groundwater Association in Tunisia

In the Limaoua region in Tunisia, a collective of farmers was recently built to deal with groundwater overexploitation. The area belongs to the Jeffara system (Gabes South aquifer). Water in the Limaoua area is mainly used for agriculture, especially arboriculture. The area includes about 630 farmers. Most of them are large farmers owning plots from 10 to 300 hectares, but the area also has six public irrigated perimeters where farmers own smaller plots (0.5- 1ha). The area benefits from the good quality of the soil, access to grid energy, and road infrastructures allowing easy access from the city of Gabes. These advantages attracted many new arrivals over the last fifteen years, especially wealthy populations who acquired land. Most of these installations have been accompanied by the creation of boreholes and surface wells, licit or illicit, leading to overexploitation of the aquifer. The annual drop in the aquifer level is between 0.4 and 1m. in 2017, the administration created a “safeguard zone” to limit the number of drillings. This created tensions between farmers and the administration, and the number of boreholes, particularly illicit ones, continued to increase. In this context, a multi-stakeholder participatory process was launched in 2021 to find a common ground. It led to the creation of a farmers’ association in December 2023. This intervention will focus on the postures and practices of researchers in this process. For this, it will use a framework to unravel the research postures and practices of the different researchers involved: detached/embedded, flexible framing/ inductive bricolage, etc. and how these might have affected the conception and implementation of the participatory process. This framework is based on the work of Hazard et al (2020) and Chambers et al (2021) and was developed in the frame of the Transdisciplinary Pathways for Sustainable Water Governance (Transwater) project.