The social reception of coastal risk management: an insight through the prism of participatory simulation

Abstract

While offering alternative methods of coastal risk management, the French public authorities are facing the reluctance of local authorities. The social acceptance of risk management is particularly relevant as the perspective of the effects of climate change makes the need to define optimised and long-term strategies more and more important. Based on a participatory simulation experiment, we show how the social reception process of a risk management policy is constituted, by presenting a case study in Oléron, during which workshop’s attendees experiment with alternative management modes of flooding risk. The article shows that the implementation of a participatory process makes real the possibility of qualifying the social reception of a public risk management policy, in terms of risk knowledge, coastal risk management scales and sensitivity to the effects of climate change. The mechanism proves to be a means for the workshop participants to seize the debate arenas that the workshops constitute: the discussion shows that it is a form of “overflow” of the scientific mechanism, in favour of the public policy appropriation.