Le socio-pathosystème : une notion pour comprendre et construire l’action de gestion de la santé animale

Socio-pathosystem: a notion to provide a framework for integrated animal health management

¹ Sciences de gestion, INRAE, UMR SELMET-LRDE, Corte, France
² Sciences des organisations, Études sociales des sciences et des techniques, INRAE, UMR LISIS, Marne-la-Vallée, France

^* Auteur correspondant : francois.charrier@inrae.fr

Reçu : 16 Mars 2020
Accepté : 22 Juillet 2021

Résumé

Les crises sanitaires conduisent progressivement à construire une vision intégrée de la gestion de la santé animale. Les mouvements politiques et scientifiques, marqués par des mots d’ordre épistémiques comme One Health ou EcoHealth, achèvent un travail entrepris de longue date, par de nombreuses communautés de recherche de toutes disciplines, pour intégrer la diversité des contextes du risque épidémiologique et en affiner sa compréhension et pour construire des actions visant la réduction de l’exposition des populations. Alors qu’elle recèle des clés d’interprétation des situations sanitaires, et des cadres pour construire des dispositifs de gestion, la recherche en gestion est curieusement absente de ce domaine. En posant la focale sur la gestion publique de la santé animale, nous montrons dans cet article que les situations sanitaires sont faites de nexus de problématiques qui dépassent le périmètre d’une compréhension de la relation entre le pathogène, l’homme et son milieu. À partir d’une construction dialectique entre situations et dispositifs de gestion, nous proposons alors la notion de « socio-pathosystème » pour rendre compte de l’émergence de ces problématiques et de l’activité organisatrice pour les prendre en charge.

Abstract

Animal health crises are progressively leading to an attempt to build an integrated view of animal health management. Political and scientific movements, marked by epistemic watchwords such as One Health or EcoHealth, are completing a long-standing effort to integrate the diversity of epidemiological risk contexts, to refine its understanding and to develop actions to reduce population exposure. The need to extend conceptual frameworks to include social and ecological dimensions of risk has indeed been successfully addressed by many research communities from all disciplines. But Management research is surprisingly absent from this field, even though it holds keys to interpreting health situations and developing management systems. Indeed, literature on animal health crises often describes a complex managemental and organizational activity in the hands of public servants, but without proposing an interpretative framework of the complexity and diversity of the management problematics they deal with. By focusing on the figure of the manager, we show in this article that animal health situations consist of a nexus of problems that stretch beyond the borders of the relationship between the pathogen, humans and their environment, and the causal relationship promoted by risk analysis. From a dialectical construction between management situations and management settings, we argue that the “social context” of the pathogen, largely investigated by many research communities, differs from the “social context” of the manager, which is under-investigated. We propose the notion of “Socio-pathosystem” as a framework to address the process of emergence of these nexuses of problems and the organizing activity that they trigger. We advocate in favor of the development of knowledge infrastructures involving a diversity of stakeholders, which should allow to better connect research and democratic management objectives.