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

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.