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 227

However, situations of risk are rarely so stable, and it has to be possible to concen-
trate on something other than the weather forecast for 6 h, while ensuring that if an
update comes sooner, this fact is known and the new data is incorporated.
Ultimately, the AEs that I identifi ed correspond to everything that, in an ideal
world, the actors 'should' take into account. In reality, certain entities will vary in
importance in a given situation and at a given moment. So emancipation practices
will enable the actors to concentrate on what matters at time t, while retaining the
ability to reintegrate new entities into 'what matters' at t+1.
So, in this context, emancipation has to be understood as the process of being set free
from some injunctions ('everything, and more, has to be taken into account'), poten-
tially detrimental from the action perspective, and then being empowered to lead the
most relevant possible action according to the specifi c situation .

12.4.1.1 To Ignore Is Not to Emancipate

Before giving a full description of the detour strategy, let us look at a few typical
practices designed to reduce the number of entities needing to be considered which,
despite appearances, do not constitute emancipation .
The fi rst is to concentrate on the offi cial procedure and stick to the plan - as it
was previously established according to the national legal framework - and to
ignore everything outside it. Unfortunately, procedures are rarely a perfect match
for the territory, the context and the situation (Vinet 2007 ). This approach can limit
the capacity to adapt to a shifting and partially indeterminate situation, typical
of many cases of climate risk. The second is to rely on an argument from
'tradition':
For my part, I can't see the point of websites…This is what we've always done here [go and
see what's happening upstream of the bridge], I used to go there with my granddad when I
was a kid, and it works fi ne!!

Although traditional local knowledge is generally useful, it has its pitfalls, as one
mayor describes:
Me, I listen to what the old-timers say…But I don't give it too much credit…You see,
everyone has a view, based on their own experience (…) It depends on where they live. (…)
But what these people forget is that things have changed and it's no longer what they knew
before, before the dikes and the canal (…) So when people say 'you should do this, you
should do that', they don't know the rules, so they tend to talk rubbish.

We see here that regulatory and territorial changes result in a (justifi ed) expan-
sion of the AEs. This makes it necessary to include new factors that sometimes run
counter to tradition. In this case, there is a big temptation simply to ignore these new
entities.
The third option can be to ignore changes in the state of the environment, and to
continue acting as if it were business as usual. This is typically what happened dur-
ing the storms in France in 1999 (Dedieu 2009 ).