From Crisis Management To Risk Society Governance: A Cultural Revolution[De La Gestion Des Crises Au Management De La Société Du Risque : Une Révolution Culturelle]

For Ulrich Beck (1986), the advent of "The risk society" implies a shift in the rationality of contemporary societies. The driving force of collective action is no longer the production and distribution of wealth but the regulation of risks, including those that affect economic and financial activity. A few major events, from the September 11, 2001 attacks to the Fukushima accident and the 2008 financial crisis, confirmed these analyzes. The awareness of global warming and the worsening of pandemic risks have even reinforced this feeling of urgency. This leads to questioning the notion of crisis, usually conceived as a series of exceptional events momentarily upsetting the order of things, which finds, once the crisis is over, its "normal" course. In the risk society, the crisis becomes a central part of the "normal" order of things. To better account for the profound cultural revolution implied by these findings, this paper places them in the more global context of changes of the contemporary world. Then he highlights the bankruptcy of the political and administrative systems of Western states, faced with such challenges. He concludes on the urgency to change scale and to tackle the real problems, societal and planetary, in rupture with the obsolete political strategies which monopolize for too long the public debates.