The Construction of Safety Areas Around Chemical Plants, or the Return of the Local Area? F. Duchene, Laboratoire RIVES
Following a European directive, French law has, since 1987, provided for the inclusion of industrial risk in documents pertaining to soil regulation. However, as this law gave state employees no precise directives as to its application, it has taken over ten years to come into effect. The core of this work was to map out the risks: it was necessary to define the zones where building is no longer allowed. Caught up in the crossfire of contradictory reasoning, the actors involved had difficulty determining the spatial limits of industrial risks. We shall use a paradigmatic example to deconstruct the different stages of the negotiations involved: firstly between scientists, industrialists and risk managers, then between internal departments of the public services, and finally between State departments and the local communities whose job it is to ensure the application of this regulation. Ultimately, one group is significantly missing from the negotiation process : the population concerned. Yet it was their protection that the law was supposed to organize.
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