Understanding the governance of sustainability pathways: hydraulic megaprojects, social-ecological traps, and power in networks of action situations

[EN] To enable sustainability pathways, we need to understand how social¿ecological systems (SES) respond to different governance configurations, considering their historical, institutional, political, and power conditions. We advance a robust methodological approach for the integrated analysis of those conditions in SES traps. Our advancement consists of a novel combination of the networks of action situations approach with an agency-based polycentric power typology and the concept of discursive power. We test the approach by building on previous research on the Doñana estuary¿delta SES (Guadalquivir estuary), which is characterized by a rigidity trap in the context of ecosystem and water governance. Specifically, we focus on a recent hydraulic megaproject involving deep dredging in the Guadalquivir estuary, finally canceled due to its broad negative socioeconomic and environmental repercussions. According to our analysis, certain governance, institutional, and informational mechanisms currently prevent further SES degradation in Doñana. However, key governance actors are caught in a lasting coordination failure prone to mutual defection strategies owing to power dynamics and discursive-institutional inertia. Although seemingly stable due to counteractive mechanisms among actors, this situation is at continuous risk of being unbalanced by powerful actors promoting large SES interventions such as deep dredging. Such interventions bear the systemic risk of strong suppression of SES functions, and a regime shift to a lock-in trap. This overall undesirable situation might be escaped through transformative policy designs that take into account meso-level mechanisms, such as discursive power and its role in non-decision-making, pragmatic inaction, and inefficient investment and infrastructure. Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. Pablo F. Méndez gratefully acknowledges funding from the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under Grant Agreement No. 871128 to eLTER PLUS Project. The work of Sergio VillamayorTomas was supported by the Ramon y Cajal Fellowship (RyC-2017-22782), from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, through the Maria de Maeztu Programme for Units of Excellence (CEX2019-000940-M). The authors greatly appreciate the comments made by David Barberá, Melf-Hinrich Ehlers and Jill Tellier who reviewed initial drafts of the ma