(In)acceptabilités environnementales et/ou sanitaires : dilemmes autour de la démoustication du littoral méditerranéen français

• Main Authors: Elise Mieulet, Cécilia Claeys
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Éditions en environnement VertigO 2016-05-01
• Series: VertigO
• Subjects: relation between environment and health; social (un)acceptability; critical sociology; social unacceptability; mosquito control; vector control
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/vertigo/16940

Through a case study addressing mosquito and vector control policies in Metropolitan France, this paper stresses the need to deconstruct the normalisation and standardisation processes at work in the manufacturing of social acceptability. The questioning guiding the underlying reflexion of this paper relates to the tensions, pluralities, and fluctuations of the justifications registers regarding the social (un)acceptability of mosquito control. The originality of this case study is due to the fact that it reveals oppositions between protagonists carrying distinct interests, but also within the various group of actors, as well as individual dilemmas. This article is based on a long term sociological study initiated in 1995, and gathering a corpus of data collected through several research programs. Thus, the data used in this paper are derived from a selection of 261 semi-structured interviews and 1093 questionnaires coming from various work. First, the analysis focuses on the influence of the sociopolitical and economical changes on the space-time fluctuations of social (un)acceptability construction. Then, it shows how the social acceptability construction processes contribute to occult the peculiarly political question of the actors’ responsibility. Finally, the internal contradictions faced by the protagonists of the social (un)acceptability construction, opposing the plural injunctions of a polycephalic public power and the contradictory desires of a polymorphic population, are highlighted.