Science réglementaire et démocratie technique

Abstract

The sociotechnical infrastructure required to implement environmental policies has a definite political content: it frames and influences public action, most often in an implicit way. In this paper we take a normative stance on democratic governance, which raises the need for making this infrastructure debatable. We focus on the specific case of drought management in France, which has developed an infrastructure that consists of zoning, measurement networks and threshold definition for critical flows in order to be able to assess a current hydrological situation in any place and to associate it to a specific crisis level. First we identify the various criticisms voiced by stakeholders in drought committees such as challenging the infrastructure's technical validity, setting out its inadequacy to a specific context, disqualifying its use due to the gap between science and the existing practice. We then suggest introducing a tool borrowed from the anthropology of techniques: the operational chain. We propose to use it to render explicit and debatable the infrastructure, its structure and content and on top of that the "regulatory science" which it stems from. This tool entails overcoming the various forms of criticism observed as well as dealing collectively with the tension between principles of justice and adaptation to local conditions. We argue that it may also provide a medium to associate lay people in the development or the revision of the infrastructure itself. © NSS Dialogues, EDP Sciences, 2010.