Audrey Sérandour et Teva Meyer présenteront les premiers résultats des travaux de la tâche 1 du programme NucTerritory à l’occasion du colloque “Geographies of the law: Inquiries into the space-law tangle” organisé à Turin les 13 et 14 décembre.
Cette communication proposera de discuter de l’utilisation des méthodes géo-légales pour documenter les mécanismes de production des zones de gestion du risque autour des centrales nucléaires en Grande-Bretagne.
Titre de l’intervention: Protocols and sources: a methodological discussion on geo-legal research through the case of nuclear power emergency planning
Résumé: Despite the ongoing inflation of research investigating the place of law in the social production of space, recent papers claiming a geo-legal lineage continue to deplore the methodological weaknesses of this field. Questions of methods were regarded as “peripheral or even irrelevant” (Braverman, 2014) and were “rarely explained and even less analyzed or justified” (Santoire et al.,2020). Precluding theoretical debates between scholars and limiting generalization efforts, this lack of methodological discussions constitutes one of the greatest gaps of law geography. Based on the work conducted in the NucTerritory research program, this paper presents a systematized protocol for geo-legal research. NucTerritory aims at qualifying the relation between space and nuclear power plants, with a particular insight on the role of law on this nexus, to identify the variables leading to diverging nuclear territorialities. The comparative approach implemented by NucTerritory, led to the elaboration of a replicable research protocol which will be open for debate.
Bridging Garcier’s “juridic textualization” (2009), Santoire et al.’s “textual hermeneutics” (2020) and Bennet & Layard’s “spatial detective” (2015), we built seven-steps method to investigate the role of law in the production of nuclear spaces, from the identification of “geo-legal objects” (Garcier, 2009) through systematic grey literature analysis to the study of their application onsite via semi-directive interviews and fieldwork. Following a theoretical discussion on our methodology, this paper will present the protocol application to the case of Heysham nuclear powerplant in the UK. Results led us to focus on the issue of risk zoning around the power plant and to evaluate its (absence of) influences on spatial planning in the infrastructure vicinities. Our protocol illustrates how the entanglement of particular text laws, their appropriation by actors and the peculiarities of the socio-spatial context ended in the invisibility of the risk planning zoning in Heysham.