Sofia Guevara Viquez, Research Fellow at the Cities, Territories, Environment and Societies research centre (University of Tours), was  the speaker for the session.

She  talked about her PhD research on public risk management in Costa Rica, more precisely on the community emergency committees (CCE, initials in Spanish). These participatory devises are encouraged since 2006. Created on the initiative of the municipalities, and composed exclusively of residents, these socio-political devices aim to involve residents of exposed areas in crisis management actions.

The thesis chooses to question the CCEs set up in San José, the country’s capital, to deal with urban flooding. By adopting a systemic approach, the survey method examines the relationships between municipal officials and residents in these participatory committees in two neighborhoods with different socio-economic profiles, Barrio Luján and La Carpio

The thesis shows that devices a priori designed by bureaucrats to disseminate a culture of risk among population, are used both by residents and by local officials, to defend their projects in the concerned  territories.This instrumentalization is not univocal, nor fixed, it evolves along with the two actors’ interactions. Thus, the thesis draws attention to the unstable nature of the categories proposed by public risk management, reinvested, or even swamped, by the way in which the inhabitants appropriate them. In the two cases studied, residents emphasize public policy limits and its contradictions in relation to its pursued objective. It underlines the contribution of inhabitants’ conceptions of the territory and invites a reflection for new pluralist risk policies frameworks.