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The fiction of “individual responsibility” at the heart of environmental health decisions: A sociological analysis Volume 10, issue 3, Mai-Juin 2011

Author
Université de Provence Laboratoire Population Environnement Développement UMR 151 - Université de Provence/IRD Centre Saint Charles Case 10 3, place Victor Hugo 13331 Marseille cedex 3 France

The issues of environmental health, which have developed at an accelerated rate over the past decade, are characterised by their cross-sectional nature, their complexity and a degree of resistance to scientific mastery, qualified as “uncertainty”. In this situation, policy decision-making, which is particularly delicate, targets so-called vulnerable populations by information campaigns or education programs on health, the environment or construction, etc. The objective of our presentation is to illuminate the implicit underpinnings of this form of public action. We thus see, from the example of indoor air, that the activities that are implemented focus on the desire to “empower” individuals whose domestic environment has been dangerous from its construction responsible, to make them responsible, so that they become the managers of their immediate environments. “Empowerment” as a mode of management of public problems and as a discourse is found in other domains, including combatting welfare fraud, “return to work” schemes, medical deductibles and co-pays, road safety, and waste sorting. It is based on the history of the construction of the modern individual, a subject driven by its will to exist by and for itself. In the health field, this is expressed by the admonition to become “individual sentries” for our own bodies, to look out for our well-being, that of those who around us, and that of our environment. This conception of an individual who has acquired self-control and self-mastery does not take into account the realities of social determinism that are still present and the mechanisms that produce social inequalities in health. In this sense, environmental health is a field particularly revealing of the rearrangement of the social links between individuals and a society considered simultaneously protective and source of aggression. This hypothesis is based on a survey using interviews and participant observation currently underway for a doctoral dissertation in sociology.