La résilience à l’épreuve du local : la gestion du risque redéfinie par les habitants de Barrio Luján, Costa Rica

Despite its polysemy, the concept of resilience has been used in the past ten years in the risk management area, on an international and national scale. This concept has thus been incorporated in public policies regarding risk management in Costa Rica, particularly to engage the local scale of risk and reinforce inhabitant’s capabilities to face risk hazards by creating stakeholder’s emergency committees. Based on the results of a fieldwork in a workshop for dwellers of a neighborhood exposed to flood risk in San Jose, this paper interrogates the ambivalence of the concept of resilience as it is defined by sociopolitical devices of risk reduction in Costa Rica. The article demonstrates that the resilience frame of action, conceived by the city managers to reinforce inhabitants’ response capabilities in case of an emergency, paves the way for its own plot twist. Dwellers make local committee space their own and widen the search for their own vulnerability causes, only to question municipal risk management process