Dictionnaire critique de l'expertise

The public health scandals that have rocked France and other Western countries over the past few decades have led to the creation of agencies responsible for evaluating public health and environmental risks, while the call for increasingly independent, transparent, objective and scientific expertise has only grown.

However, practices are often still quite far from such imperatives. As a necessarily 'impure' compromise between science and policy, expertise is largely the product of battles being waged much higher up at the level of the production of knowledge, and which involve a variety of different actors: researchers, administrative agents, victims’ groups, manufacturers, lobbyists, journalists, whistle-blowers, etc.

Designed for practitioners, students and professors, this is the first dictionary devoted to health expertise. It describes the uses, notions and concepts of the field in some 40 entries. Drawing on the most recent research, it simultaneously illustrates the institutional context surrounding expertise and the actors that contribute to it or endure its consequences.

Emmanuel Henry is a political scientist and sociologist; he is also a professor at the Université Paris-Dauphine and a researcher with the Irisso group (UMR CNRS, Université Paris-Dauphine). Claude Gilbert is a political scientist, an emeritus director of research at the CNRS, PACTE, UMR CNRS, and the Université Grenoble Alpes, Sciences Po Grenoble. Jean-Noël Jouzel is a sociologist and a political scientist, a researcher at the CNRS and also within the Centre de sociologie des organisations [Centre for Organisational Socioogy] at Sciences Po. Pascal Marichalar is a sociologist and a research fellow at the CNRS’ IRIS (Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux sociaux [Interdisciplinary research institute on social issues]) (UMR, CNRS, EHESS, INSERM, Université Paris 13).