Écosystèmes normatifs et gestion des catastrophes naturelles

Abstract: Normative Ecosystems and Natural Disaster Management

We argue in this paper that in order to enact legislation on disaster management, the legislator must take into account the fact that individuals act nomotrophically, or “in function of” norms. This is particularly the case in situations of legal pluralism, where customary institutions compete with State regulations. We provide a nomotropic analysis of these cases of pluralism, relying on the existing literature on the issues caused by the fact that some legislations on disaster management disregard customary institutions. We show that this perspective is compatible with the economic analysis of norms and that it encourages States to rely on individual tendencies to nomotropism instead of trying to overcome it.