ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From Risk to Relational Complexity: Network-Based Prevention in Latin America

• In Event: Epidemiology Unbound 2

English Abstract

This paper traces the trajectory of network-based reasoning within the ECO₂ model, a Latin American, community-based framework for addressing drug use in contexts of social suffering. It explores how the architects of the model came to articulate an anti-prohibitionist approach to prevention/harm reduction that stood in stark contrast to the models of drug prevention that were being developed by their Anglo-American counterparts at the same time.
ECO₂ took shape in the political ferment that followed the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. It was the product of an unusual collaboration between a Catholic priest, a geophysicist, and a team of Italian psychoanalysts. Drawing on complexity theory, second-order cybernetics, community psychology, and Spanish-language traditions of social-network analysis, the founders of the model approached networks not as channels of risk and/or protection, but as dynamic ecologies open to transformation. Rather than seeking to secure predetermined behavioural outcomes through risk-management techniques, they conceived the ultimate aim of prevention as the expansion of the effective complexity of the social networks, roles, and relationships through which communities organise their collective life.
Following ECO₂ from its initial articulation to its institutional uptake, the paper explores what forms of prevention become possible when epidemiological sensibilities circulate through different intellectual and political worlds. By mapping this trajectory, the paper contributes to understanding how alternative genealogies of network thinking can productively unsettle dominant prevention paradigms and open room to reimagine the conceptual foundations of risk, community, and the very aims of epidemiological intervention.

Author

• Theo Di Castri, University of Cambridge