The Introduction of the Concept of Resilience in the Public Policies Related to Risk management and Climate Change: a Focus on the French Case

Following the American and British examples or the international organizations such as the World Economic Forum (and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, French institutions (national and local governments, public organizations, universities) have increasingly used and developped the concept of resilience over the last few years. However, if from a broad perspective, this emergent dynamic could be interpreted as one of the French attempts to better apprehend the reality of modern crises (both natural and technical disasters such as the Japanese earthquake in March 2011, multi-scale and transboundary crises leading to situations of great uncertainty such as the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009, emerging risks linked to climate change), a more precise focus reveals that the definition and the use of resilience can broadly differ from an actor to another. Indeed, depending on the scientific field or the degree of responsibility of the users, resilience can be understood as a risks prevention principle, as a crisis management specific methodology, or as the capacities of a community or a society to rebuild its organization and its infrastructures after a disaster. Following Claude Gilbert and Emmanuel Henry's recent work on public problems definition, the main argument of my contribution to explain this actual confusion is that the concept of resilience, by moving disaster issues from the security and technical field to the prevention and adaptation field, challenges on one side the legitimacy and the competences of the actual risks and crises management responsible, and raises on the other side the influence of actors coming from other disciplines or fields (NGOs, civil societies, social sciences, environmental experts)