Studying the “Chambon crisis” to think the relationship between territories, institutions, populations and sciences

Résumé 0

The closing by a landslide risk of the road RD1091, linking the Haute Romanche valley to Grenoble on 10 April 2015, initiated a social and economic crisis with strong impacts on the Villar-d’Arêne and La Grave municipalities. This crisis has persisted even after the reopening of the tunnel and the building of an emergency road. Tourism abruptly stopped with the closing, an acute problem for a territory whose economy relies primarily on this activity: residents lost their capacity to move freely and difficulties to reach hospitals, family and services appeared rapidly. Residents found it difficult to make their situation visible to local institutions: these reacted rapidly from their point of view, but the difference between lived experiences and knowledge, representation of the crisis has created tensions, misinterpretation and conflicts. This paper proposes a qualitative analysis of the process of vulnerability development for the Haute Romanche territory through tensions, interactions and complementarities that emerged between the incident, the political decision, lived experiences (practical and subjective) of the local population and the ongoing work of social science and ecology researchers.