Power and Changing Riverscapes: The Socioecological Fix and Newspaper Discourse Concerning the Rhône River (France) Since 1945

Abstract

Riverscapes are constructs that mix natural components with political, socio-economic, and technical strategies. This article shows how the riverscapes of the Rhône in France have changed under the influence of different power relations. We use newspapers to highlight the potential of news outlets as a data source with which to apply Foucault's critical and genealogical methods and to develop a political ecology of socio-ecological fixes. Media coverage is proxied by a content analysis and textual data analysis of 1,079 articles published in Le Monde, from 1945 to 2013. We study variations of newspaper discourse to create five chronological narratives: (i) the reconstruction of France and the creation of new landscapes, (ii) the promotion of national development through navigation, (iii) the quest for energy independence through dams and nuclear power plants, (iv) the abandonment of major projects, and (v) the definition of pollution and flooding as national problems at the same time as the rediscovery of landscapes as local amenities. River landscapes are related to national political objectives, even though schemes for the Rhône seem to be ever less geared to national ambitions. In specific contexts, bottom-up advocacy coalitions occasionally prove powerful enough to influence socio-ecological trajectories: their power seems to be on the rise as the national project wanes. They are often opposed to new socio-ecological fixes. While political drivers are instrumental in shaping the Rhône, economic dynamics are crucial. Energy production seems to be a good indicator for monitoring socio-ecological fixes along major rivers because it involves fixed capital.

Coping with scarcity: The construction of the water conservation imperative in newspapers (1999–2018)

“…IRaMuTeQ divides the corpus into text segments (i.e., segments of homogeneous size while respecting as much as possible the structure of the language, clauses or whole sentences of 40 words on average) and performs a top-down approach for hierarchical clustering as developed by Reinert for his ALCESTE method (1983;1990) to analyze the corpus's lexical structure (Cottet et al, 2015;Comby et al, 2019;Adam et al, 2020). Developed since the 1980s, the classification algorithm has proven robust.…”

“…The analysis of media discourse has proven quite efficient in reconstructing discursive trajectories and political strategies associated with them (Burke et al, 2015;Duffy, 2016;Comby et al, 2019). Indeed, news media coverage of natural risks often follows regulatory events and political actions (Hurlimann and Dornicar, 2012;Wei et al, 2015).…”

From asset to threat: trajectory of sediment on the Rhône River

“…From 1945 to 1986, CNR built 19 hydropower dams along the river (Figure 1), between the Swiss border and the upstream part of the delta, associated with major dykes to channel the river. Press reports of the time compared the CNR's projects to those of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US (Comby et al, 2019). In the 1970s and 1980s five nuclear plants were built near the Rhône (four are still in operation), drawing water from the Rhône to cool their reactors.…”

“…The significant transformation of the Rhône's riverscape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was illustrated by the use of the term 'river highway' in the national press in reference to the straightening of the river (Comby et al, 2019). In the space of 150 years the river formerly described as a 'furious bull' by the French historian Michelet in 1840 was tamed and transformed into a source of many utilities (nuclear power, hydraulic power, water for irrigation, navigation route), becoming a channelised river between two large banks for the majority of its course, flanked by a motorway and a high-speed railway.…”

“…Indeed, 'masking the cultural and political work behind these "natural" changes has helped make their political implications invisible' (Pritchard, 2004, p.798). From a similar perspective of river development, other authors have shown how power relations have contributed historically to the shaping of the Rhône's riverscape (Comby et al, 2019). Political science has shown how floods were related to political factors, the risk being made alternately invisible through the Rhône development strategy and visible through sociopolitical crises (Guerrin, 2014).…”