Understanding the Warning Process Through the Lens of Practice: Emancipation as a Condition of Action–Some Lessons from France - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 216

account for in carrying out their warning activities has grown constantly over the
last 30 years or so. This proliferation of 'entities' involved in the warning process
(WP) is such that it is impacting the capacity for action. Moreover, the prospect of
climate change suggests that this proliferation will continue, if not accelerate. We
therefore face a central problem affecting future action - the proliferation of what
stakeholders have to take into account in the course of action - and it is essential to
think about it as early on as possible in the development of EWS.
After setting out the methodological framework of this research (Sect. 12.1 ), I
will explore this 'proliferation', its causes and its effects on action (Sect. 12.2 ), then
I will describe the way in which the actors nevertheless succeed in acting appropri-
ately, by highlighting an unexpected practice that I have described as 'emancipa-
tion', through an analysis of the detour strategy (Sect. 12.3 ). Finally, from these
fi ndings I will try to identify possible ways of fostering this potential resource to
make EWS more effective (Sect. 12.4 ).

12.2 Research Design, Data and Methods

Following Sorensen ( 2000 ), the incapacity of standard approaches to warning sys-
tems to explain all the processes of decision making and action in a real-life context
has already been drawn up (Créton-Cazanave 2009 ). In view of this, this research
highlighted an alternative approach that focuses on the warning process rather than
the warning system (Créton-Cazanave et al. 2009 ).
This section clarifi es the defi nitions and the methodological aspects of this
research and presents the case study and data used to carry out the analysis.

12.2.1 A Practice-Based Approach to Defi ning the Warning

Process

Here, warning is defi ned as the socio-technical process by which the reality of a
given situation is assessed in order to establish its meaning, so as to constitute and
coordinate action in a context of assumed danger (Créton-Cazanave 2010 ).
Warnings are therefore less about systems or signal reception than about action
in context (e.g. Thévenot 2006 ). The actual practices through which the stake-
holders are able to operate warning processes must be considered. For this purpose,
this study draws on the approach of French Pragmatic Sociology (Nachi 2006 ),
related to the so-called practice-based studies, that highlight practice as an empirical
object as well as an epistemology. In this approach, the concept of practice encom-
passes three dimensions: (1) the set of interconnected activities that stabilise