Dialogue and Change : contribution of plausible solutions co-design to the evolution of organic waste transactions in La Réunion ; Concertation et changements : le cas du recyclage desdéchets organiques à la Réunion
Improving the interactions between economic activities and the environment is a contemporary challenge and has been a major research topic for the last decades. Current trends recommend to implement dialogue processes to contribute to adaptive governance systems, ensuring both sustainable use of natural resources and protection of ecosystems. Despite growing empirical case studies, political ideologies and emerging analytical framework, the relationships between dialogue processes and effective observed changes in the human-nature interactions still remain unclear.This research explored the mechanisms through which a dialogue process may contribute to effectives changes in the way human-nature interactions were organized. To address this question, we did apprehend human-nature interactions as economic activities and focused on the organization of the markets involving natural resources. Two hypothesis of contribution of dialogue processes to market organization change based on literature were set: The improvement of organizations and individuals actors skills, knowledge and information through collective learning and the evolution of market organization through institutional change.Our research was conducted using the Girovar project as a case-study. In la Réunion, this project implemented a dialogue process to explore collectively large-scale recycling scenarios to solve a growing environmental issue of organic waste treatment. Parallel ethnographic studies were conducted to analysis both the dialogue process and evolutions of effective economic transactions involving two types of organic wastes: poultry litter and green-waste compost.Our main results are that dialogue processes provide resources to operational actors but do not trigger change. These resources include knowledge exchange and technical learning but exclusively to dialogue participants. At a broader scale, assessing the credibility, saliency and legitimacy of the recycling solution provides a "rational myth" that contributes to institutional ...