This paper proposes and analyses three policy instruments which can be used to enhance farmers' compliance with individual water allocations in a decentralized management context. Three regulation strategies are proposed for the case of groundwater allocations for irrigation: the first relies on economic instruments; the second is based on tools designed to promote prosocial behaviors; and the third combines assumptions from the first two approaches. They are evaluated through 16 scenario workshops involving 124 stakeholders and farmers in five French groundwater basins. Stakeholders' perceptions are analyzed, disentangling the ethical, economic, institutional, social and technical perspectives underlying the stakeholders' arguments for or against the proposed instruments for groundwater-use regulation. The analysis reveals a preference for the strategy that combines economic and social incentives.

Scénarios de régulation décentralisée des prélèvements agricoles en eau souterraine. Évaluation participative dans le bassin du Clain Scenarios of irrigation groundwater decentralized management. A participative approach in the Clain basin, France

In management, addressing behavioral and cognitive issues empirically is particularly challenging, as it requires combining both internal and external validity with multilevel data collection. The traditional quantitative methodologies used in this area, which are surveys and laboratory experiments, are ill-suited for this purpose. This paper presents a promising, innovative methodology, the experimentally validated survey (EVS), which allows researchers to face this challenge. The EVS relies on the implementation of survey questions previously validated by a controlled experiment. This paper adopts a threefold approach: descriptive, achieved by proposing a structured review of the recent body of literature; practical, achieved by discussing technical issues that one may encounter while running an EVS; and critical, achieved by discussing the advantages and limitations of such methodology for management scholars. Our main contribution is initiating a dynamic movement toward the importation of this innovative methodology into management research.