The Challenge of Making Groundwater Visible: A Review of Communication Approaches and Tools in France

Groundwater specialists strive to make groundwater issues visible. They face a dual challenge: first to develop knowledge on groundwater and secondly to share this knowledge with other stakeholders who should be included in knowledge development , groundwater management and protection policy. Questioning communication is all the more interesting as groundwater is a quasi-invisible resource. How groundwater and issues can be made more visible? In the field of sociology, with a pragmatist stance, our chapter questions how instruments frame interactions and represent groundwater. Indeed, the groundwater is made visible by tables, indicators , maps, photographs, videos, games, stories in newspaper and spokespersons such as hydrogeologists. Within a project funded by AFB (The French Agency for Biodiversity), we reported on a number of communication approaches and activities implemented in 11 case studies in France. The inventory is based on web mining, grey literature review and interviews. The chapter develops a transversal analysis of the use of the instruments, and identifies assets and limits across the cases according to the following categories: public targeted; content, issues brought to the fore and normative stance adopted; type/format. Finally, concrete recommendations are made.