First steps to build an animal disease management strategycollective approach to deconstruct problems

Abstract

The past decades have seen growing sanitary events, strongly affecting animal health and thus questioning the classical ways of designing disease management strategies. Moreover, the growing knowledge on pathosystem dynamics, especially when involving wild fauna, and the tendency of official authorities to delegate the implementation of health policies to regional professional actors, raise important issues on how to design disease management strategies with stakeholders. In Corsica, the Aujezsky disease, caused by a virus shared by domestic pigs and wild boars, has been persistent for the past thirty years with a high prevalence, despite the various strategies designed and implemented. After Continental France has been recognized as free of Aujeszky disease in 2008, French authorities in Corsica have been looking for a way to build an efficient management system in order to eradicate this disease. The partial failure of an experimental plan conducted from 2011 to 2013, led researchers from INRA to propose an experimental participative approach to design a new strategy. This communication aims to present the first results of a round of participative workshops, held in 2015, and involving a large diversity of stakeholders (farmers, official services, veterinarians, animal health farmer associations, regional agricultural chambers, hunters, researchers…). These workshops allowed us to build a systemic representation of the Aujeszky disease problem, integrating its different dimensions (technical, biological, organizational, regulations…) and to create an arena where stakeholders involvement is legitimated through knowledge hybridization processes, enhanced by the collective search of solutions.