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 236

one can nevertheless identify the main pitfall for reasoned emancipation: amnesia,
or the tendency to ignore.
As I said, the purpose of emancipation practices is not to leave certain entities
completely out of the equation. On the contrary, they are about the temporary and
reasoned suspension or delegation of their role within the actors' AEs.
However, in certain extreme cases, an emancipation practice can drift into the
abdication of an entire component of reality. For example, when a municipality
considers the prefecture to be a transistor-intermediary for everything relating to
hydro-meteorological phenomena and forecasting, and announces that, in the
absence of any GALA message from the prefecture, there is no reason to take action.
This shows the ambivalence of the concept of emancipation: if the municipality's
assessment is correct, this detour allows it to act appropriately and relevantly while
saving its energy and attention for other important problems; if its assessment is
wrong, the forgotten/ignored aspect of reality could deliver a painful reminder.
Emancipation practices are therefore vulnerable to the tendency to ignore
referred to above, in particular when their activation function fails. In fact, if the
vehicles of emancipation/activation are not continually maintained, tested, adjusted,
adapted, the part of the AE from which the actor has been emancipated may become
completely forgotten, or 'fossilised', making it impossible to incorporate new enti-
ties or new problems, such as those associated with climate change.
This illustrates the fact that an element that, from one point of view, is a factor of
effi ciency can become a source of error or ineffi ciency. So the existence of vectors
of emancipation should not become a pretext for ceasing to think about ways to
manage the expansion of AEs . Despite the resources they possess, there is a limit to
what the actors can control. In this respect, input from operational players is essen-
tial to the identifi cation of points of fracture, case by case and context by context.

12.6 Conclusion

So the problem is not so much the expansion of the AEs themselves as the fantasy
that everything can be taken into account as in the past, without any changes in the
practices of the actors concerned. The fact is that strategies that were effective yes-
terday, in a 'simpler' world, are not necessarily relevant today. As long as the idea
remains that the actors must consider everything, while being assigned more and
more things to consider, there will be a risk of action deadlock. If my diagnosis is
right, and this expansion of AEs is indeed taking place and set to increase, we are
facing a new warning problem which demands the development, or the support, of
new tools and new action strategies.
Against this background, the need to forget part of the world in choosing a course
of action must be recognised. Processes therefore need to be fostered that permit an
emancipation from what is 'less' important, and for this relative importance to be
constantly reassessed.