Dossier « Politiques du changement global. Expertises, enjeux d’échelles et frontières de l’action publique environnementale » - Les catastrophes : un horizon commun de la globalisation environnementale ?

Abstract

Disasters are often portrayed as an inevitable horizon of environmental globalization. The representation of these threats on the global political stage is regularly interpreted as resulting from the work of transnational expert communities. Contrary to these homogenizing visions, the article shows how various social sciences studies on risks and disasters developed from different objects in Europe, North America, and the global South. They theorized in different ways the relation between disasters and globalization, focusing respectively on global environmental crises, disaster preparedness and vulnerabilities due to unequal development. Insisting on the multiplicity of epistemic regimes allows pinpointing the limits of risk cosmopolitism that takes for granted disasters as global phenomena as well as their common imagination. It shows the necessity to pay better attention to varying and conflicting ways of scientifically thinking about disasters, embedded in political contexts and post-colonial relations.