Scientific Expertise And Public Action. Governing The Air Pollution Problem In Paris.

• In Event: Air Pollution Governance: Sites, Styles, Histories

Abstract

In the 1990s, following the French air pollution cohort study (PAARC), the air pollution, and in particular the industrial air pollution, no longer represents a public health issue. It calls into question the Air Quality Monitoring Association funding in Paris. The Regional Health Observatory epidemiologists are commissioned to confirm this hypothesis. In 1994, the first “time series” studies are published, illustrating short and medium term effects between exposition to low doses of air pollution and cardiorespiratory health, causing excess mortality. Scientific and institutional partnership, carried out with epidemiologists on the international level and with other scientific circles (toxicologists, statisticians and metrologists), legitimized the epidemiologists approach. The new air pollution source is documented – transport, ignored so far for its environmental-health harmful effects. 

Today, despite a public accumulation of scientific knowledge, the associative mobilizations rise, the health agencies development and the significant growth of scientific expertise in the public policies development, the national public action is characterized by a certain degree of inaction leading to the long-term persistence of these problems. This study calls for attention to the recent phenomenon of a rise in environmental and health public action initiated by Paris as an addition to or substitution for national policies. Drawing on documentary analysis, interviews and observation of a Paris newborns cohort experts, this paper analyses the place of scientific, political and economic dynamics, and in particular the role of epidemiologists, that structured the definition and multiply attempts to set up public policies related to environmental-health problems in Paris.

Author

• Justyna Barbara Moizard-Lanvin, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Centre de recherche médecine, science, santé et sociét