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Cet article s’intéresse aux contestations riveraines qui, depuis le tournant des années 2010, visent la politique de prévention des risques industriels. Il porte plus précisément sur la mobilisation d’une cinquantaine d’associations d’habitants en colère qui s’opposent à l’élaboration et à la mise en œuvre des plans de prévention des risques technologiques (PPRT) instaurés par la loi du 30 juillet 2003 suite à la catastrophe d’AZF de Toulouse (2001). L’immersion au cœur de ce vaste mouvement contestataire est l’occasion d’une analyse des relations entre conflit et participation qui conduit à considérer le premier comme une modalité spécifique de la seconde.

The conflict as way of participation. The example of local communities faced to technological risk prevention plansThis article presents a research on protest movements of local communities who consider to be affected in their property and participatory rights by the French industrial risks policy. It focuses more precisely on about fifty local residents’ associations which fight since 2010 against the implementation of technological risk prevention plans (PPRT). The PPRT is a specific French prevention measure created after the Toulouse (F) industrial accident (2001) which modified the approach to land-use planning around the main dangerous facilities such as chemical factories or refineries. The observation of the huge protest movement caused by those PPRT shows that conflicts can be considered as a way to participate to the public policy implementation, especially when local residents are not clearly invited to collaborate with authorities.