Co-Constructing Health Territories

Context and challenges

This highlights the need to produce knowledge for the multi-actor design of flexible and adaptive management methods (Armitage et al., 2009), capable of responding to the many aspects of animal and plant health issues, and including multiple actors (farmers, breeders, hunters, environmental associations, cooperative and industrial companies, etc.). 

Indeed, between situated infectious foci (animals, herds, plots of land) and globalized health policies (FAO, OIE, WHO) applied on a national scale, the ways in which multiple health issues are managed vary according to the territorial structure in which they intersect. Searching for an appropriate scale of time, space and actor network, which we will call a “health territory”, therefore appears to be a major challenge in building new ways of managing diseases in agriculture. This “territory” scale, which can shift from one health situation to the next, could make it possible to synthesize (or even modify) the different frameworks for interpreting the multiple risks and complexities of a health situation (Leach and Scoones, 2013), and to identify operational perspectives for action in the field.

Goals

The COCOTS project proposes to form a multidisciplinary consortium to think at the management action level. This shifting, multi-actor, multi-dimensional and multi-risk approach involves a local or situated understanding of the epidemic phenomenon and other associated risks, thus calling into question the methods used to produce scientific and technical knowledge. The consortium proposes to construct and explore the notion of “Health Territories”, which translates conceptually and methodologically the search for a scale of space, time and actor network, and which would allow for integrative, multi-risk research and management of health situations. The consortium is based on the participation of researchers from four INRAE departments (ACT, ECOSOCIO, SPE, SA), whose aim, through work on this concept, is to build an interdisciplinary research community capable of producing an integrative vision of health.

INRAE structures

Non-INRAE partners