Socio-ecological and territorial Assessment of Roches Noires VCA
Over the first two decades of our millennia, the village of Roches Noires has been subject to the covetousness of real-estate foreign promoters, eyeing a 365-hectare of nearly unbuilt freehold land, rich in ecological features, for so-called “Smart City” projects.
So far, all projects collapsed. The first ones on sole financial / feasibility issues, the latest ones, from a mix of uncertain feasibility outweighed by public and social opposition, namely by NGOs.
In the middle, the villagers of Roches Noires who have been told many stories so as to tame opposition from the “people”, an etiquette that carries some weight at each electoral rendez-vous, leaving the people themselves in the dark of information as regards to the development of their village, in between two elections, in between two projects.
The latest project was the occasion for deeper ground-works and manipulative actions causing some culmination of division between the pros and cons, between the politically aligned and non-aligned, between the haves and the have-nots.
With the intent of initiating a long-term, underlying groundwork that would encourage bottom-up decision-making via collective management structures, mru2025 contracted a Socio-ecological and territorial Assessment of Roches Noires VCA by the expertise of Raphaël Merven. Raphaël has expertise in socio-ecology. He had previously carried-out a study on the contribution of the mangroves to the inhabitants of the coastal villages of Mauritius.