Introduction

Samuel RUFAT1 and Pascale METZGER2

1Institut Universitaire de France, CY Cergy Paris Université, France

2IRD/PRODIG, Aubervilliers, France

I.1. Vulnerability in context

For the past 30 years, “vulnerability” has been everywhere. The term has been applied to all subject matters (population, ecosystem, technical or financial system, building, territory, country) and in relation to all kinds of threats. The term has taken a global reach with environmental issues, climate change and most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. It can be found in the public arena and the discourses of international organizations, as well as in public policies and the scientific work, most often to designate the particular conditions of exposure or fragility of these objects, with the aim of reducing them.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, the term “vulnerable”, applied to “individuals”, “populations”, “the public” and “employees”, has appeared in numerous discourses, reports, laws, norms and regulations. The objective behind the identification of “vulnerable persons”, that is, those “at risk of developing a severe form of the SARS-CoV-2 infection”, is to target public policies. In France, the “vulnerability criteria” are listed in a decree.1 They are based solely on the nature of an individual's health, leading to a very narrow conception of vulnerability, far from the analyses made by the social sciences since the end of the last century. In many countries, various regulatory texts, adopted in quick succession to broaden or restrict these vulnerability criteria, authorize the granting of specific rights as well as the restricting of public freedoms. It is for the sake of the protecting “vulnerable persons” that the elderly have been confined indoors in isolation, or that other people have been able to benefit from partial unemployment. The definition of vulnerability implied by “vulnerability criteria” and the designation of “vulnerable people” is therefore a political issue, which establishes categories of people and affects the rights of citizens. The social sciences must put this categorization process into perspective, or else they risk unknowingly endorsing freedom curtailments without proper regard for the rationale and imperative behind them: in other words, they risk participating in the government of people and places.

At the same time, much political and scientific discourse has asserted that the crisis situation caused by the pandemic has “revealed” multiple “vulnerabilities”, located not only in peoples’ individual health and access to health care, but also in economic organization, territorial configurations and social inequalities, at a global and local scale. It is clear that all these vulnerabilities are related to social, political and territorial inequalities that have been highlighted by social science research for decades.

The international context therefore calls for a collective work whose objective is to examine vulnerability: to chart how the social sciences have produced and worked on this concept since the 1970s, the debates to which it has been subjected, the methods used for describing and measuring vulnerability, and to what ends it has been purposed. At the same time, we will try to understand how the critique dimension of vulnerability has evolved as the concept has been integrated into public policies.

I.2. Vulnerability between critique and operationality

The notion of vulnerability was first developed in Anglophone scientific literature to stress the importance and even the responsibility of the social world in the production of so-called “natural” risks and disasters, which until then had been analyzed in terms of physical phenomena: the “hazards”. The intersection of hazard and vulnerability has become the alpha and omega of risk analysis, leading to a division within research on risks between the “hard sciences”, which analyze hazards (i.e. the probability of occurrence and the severity of destructive phenomena), and the social sciences, which are responsible for understanding vulnerability (i.e. the forms, causes and social consequences of these phenomena for societies and populations).

In the 1990s, the social sciences were able to achieve a certain unanimity in considering vulnerability as a by-product of the development patterns, by explaining its multiple “root causes”. Seen from this angle, the question of risks examines development and locates the causes of vulnerability in what can be called “maldevelopment” and the poverty it brings, inequalities and injustices, whether these be social, political, economic or environmental. The social sciences have thus turned risk into a critical, social and political issue. This “radical” way of thinking about vulnerability interprets political, economic and social structures as being factors of vulnerability. In this framework, reducing vulnerability means addressing its “root causes” (in particular, poverty and inequality): actions that would involve political choices which go against the grain of the world's neoliberal development, and actions that would entail a radical systemic change.

Despite this dimension of radical critique, the notion of vulnerability has gradually been incorporated into the drafting of national public policies and international recommendations for global disaster risk management. The institutionalization of vulnerability marks how the contribution of the social sciences to the problem of risk has been recognized, but it also assumes a certain operationality, understood as a capacity to put knowledge into practice, to help in the decision and formulating of public policies. When analyses point to development, capitalism and the fundamental structures of the economic and social fabric as responsible for vulnerability, concrete action to reduce risk would necessarily entail a revolution. Consequently, the institutionalization of the notion of vulnerability, which has been accompanied by a pursuit for operationality, has had the effect of emptying it of its most radical dimensions, and retaining only its rhetoric.

How has the integration of vulnerability into public policy reoriented and limited the contents of the notion? Has the notion of vulnerability been transformed to allow its mobilization in the field of public policy without challenging the economic, political and social order?

First, it should be emphasized that when it comes to issues of risk, as with the climate, the social sciences are often marginalized. Vulnerability has been developed within a conceptual framework of risk centered on the hazard, which has remained in a hegemonic position. The hazard is still considered as the first area of knowledge to be developed in order to improve disaster risk reduction, and the maintaining of a “hazard-centric” vision is confirmed by numerous analyses. Vulnerability is mobilized downstream of risk, that is, in the consequences of “damaging events”, much less upstream, in the causes of risk, thus attesting to the homology of the position of disciplines in the scientific field and the place of key concepts in public policies. The multi-disciplinarity that is increasingly imposed on risk research does not call into question the existing relationships of domination within the scientific world. Insofar as the “hard” sciences are considered to be the true authorities on knowledge, the social sciences appear to be supplementary, sometimes to justify “multi-disciplinarity” and obtain funding, and other times to legitimize choices made upstream.

Second, the demand for an applied vulnerability focus is shaped by political decision-makers and research funders, who expect the social sciences to explain what makes populations or territories vulnerable and to make recommendations that are “directly useful for action”. Taking vulnerability into account often boils down to quantifying and giving the characteristics of the “vulnerable” population in the “exposed” area. Decision-makers are looking for figures and “vulnerability maps” that show who the vulnerable population is and where it is located, that is, which populations and territories should be targeted by prevention or risk reduction policies. The social sciences must also deal with social perceptions and behaviors, which managers and decision-makers believe to be responsible for damages, due to the supposed distortions between the “real” risk as described by the “hard” sciences (i.e. the hazard) and the perceptions of the populations. This type of research has been very successful because it is easy to translate the results into public policies concerning “risk education” or “risk culture” without challenging established interests.

The mobilization of vulnerability in public policies has the effect of creating categories of “vulnerable populations” that are the object of specific public policies. In public health, the vulnerable population is defined by its own characteristics (pregnant women, newborns, disabled people, the elderly, people with chronic diseases, etc.). For “environmental” risks, this concerns populations located in “exposed” areas. There is a tendency to individualize...