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 233

door-to-door to warn cattle breeders, for example. To use a familiar cliché, the
detour is useful because 'no one can be in two places at the same time'.
This strategy therefore makes it possible to account for entities that are tempo-
rally or spatially irreconcilable. To adopt this strategy is to rely on another party to
manage some part of one's action environment. In this way - and the transistor is an
extreme case - 'offl oading' the task of taking certain entities into account emancipates
the primary actor, at least temporarily and partially, from the work these entities
demand.
Paradoxically, the detour, by in a sense expanding the actor's space-time, pro-
vides a way of gaining time or, more precisely, having more time available to decide
on a course of action.
This analysis of the detour strategy enabled us to explain how the emancipation
process takes place, because it is a perfect example of that process. Of course,
there are other strategies and other resources that can contribute to emancipation
practices. However, there would be little purpose in listing them, since there are
potentially as many strategies as there are contexts and actors.
The aim here is rather to identify, through the analysis of a 'winning' strategy,
the sources and conditions of effective emancipation practices.

12.5 Towards Reasoned Emancipation:

A Condition of Action for the Future

Emancipation would thus seem to be a condition of action: one must be able to
'shrink the world' to be able to focus on 'what matters'. The effi cacy of these practices
nevertheless requires this 'shrinking' to be reasoned and fl exible, open to reassess-
ment throughout the course of action and able to adjust to the unexpected.
Without claiming to encompass all the possibilities, in the following paragraphs
we will look at what I believe to be the fundamental characteristics of reasoned and
effective emancipation practices in a context of action.

12.5.1 The Emancipation/Activation Pair

The essential characteristic is summed up in this proposition: any vehicle of eman-
cipation must also be a vehicle of activation, i.e. enable the thing emancipated to be
reintegrated into the AE where necessary.
This is essential if we consider that the AE I studied is specifi c to fl ash fl ood
warnings, and that it is only one of many AEs that the actor has to deal with: the
issue of fl ash fl ood warnings is generally only one of many issues that the actors
concerned have to manage. The capacity for complete emancipation from the issue
of fl ooding at normal times, in order to focus on other activities, is therefore essential.