Alan Dombrie is a water management professional who has primarily served as Development Director within companies operating public concessions for drinking water and sanitation services on behalf of local authorities. He served as a local elected official from 2008 to 2020, with responsibility for environmental policy, and earned a Master’s degree in Political Science in 2019.
In March 2026, he will defend his DBA dissertation entitled:“A Model Derived from Stakeholder Theory to Align the Perspectives of Watershed Actors Combating Green Algae: The Case of the Saint-Brieuc Bay Watershed.”
The research is supervised by Professors Paul Beaulieu and Michel Kalika. It introduces the “Gouvern’algance” model, a novel decision-making framework designed to align stakeholders within a watershed engaged in combating green algae proliferation.
Thesis Direction
Prof Beaulieu Paul, Prof Kalika Michel
Thesis Title
Proposal for a model based on Stakeholder Theory to unite the perspectives of stakeholders in a river basin who are fighting against green algae.
The case of the Saint-Brieuc Bay river basin.
Abstract
The proliferation of green algae in Breton catchment basins is a marker of a conflict between stakeholders who increasingly do not understand one another and sometimes no longer even speak to each other. The current governance of these distressed natural areas has not managed to improve the situation.
Situated within an interpretivist paradigm and a qualitative approach, this research draws on a corpus of semi-structured interviews, complemented by a thematic analysis, in order to understand how stakeholder interactions, decision-making mechanisms, and the conditions for (un)blocking collective action are structured.
The results highlight a “governance without government” characterized by fragmented responsibilities, heterogeneous standards of evidence, competing scales (– subcatchment – catchment – coast), and unstable compromises, which contribute to the dilution of accountability and the erosion of acceptability.
From a theoretical point of view, the dissertation proposes a tool-based hybridization of stakeholder theory: it links the Salience model (Mitchell, Agle & Wood) – useful for prioritizing actors – with a systemic reading inspired from the Sagace model applied to a Stakeholder System (SS), in order to describe the system’s interactions, regulations, and trajectories.
From a managerial perspective, it formalizes a model of integrated governance (“Gouvern’algance”) combining steering, the production of shared evidence and a deliberative mechanism (citizen jury selected by lot, OECD framework) as an arbitration and legitimization mechanism in situations of impasse.