Risks and Crisis management : a New Cause for the Policy Makers?

International audienceThe general interest of policy scientist in risks and crisis management has constantly grown since Ulrich Beck's Risk Society in 1986. It is now widely admitted that natural or man-made disasters, biological risks and sanitary crisis have to be considered first as the results of social and economical dynamics if not concrete political choices. On the other hand, the multiple recent fails of crisis management during episodes such as the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 and 2010, or the E.coli crisis in 2011, and the unprecedented impacts of disasters such as the Indian ocean tsunami in 2004, the hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, rather show that governments still struggle to consider risks and crisis management as priorities of their political agenda. Yet risks and crisis management policies are numerous and still increasing in many countries, but they are disseminated through a wide variety of institutions and organizations, and their objectives are diverse,ranging from regulation to simple consulting. Moreover, their legitimacy is often challenged by other organisations from the civil society and the private sector. Reciprocally, some emerging actors, mainly coming from international organisations, local governments and NGOs use the topic of risks and crisis management as a gateway to "penetrate" the field of public policies : they develop and promote their own knowledge, and challenge the action of the national governments on this specific topic. Is risks and crisis management becoming an autonomous problematic inside the public policies