Dynamique du consensus

Among all the processes for collective decision-making, consensus reasoning is actually the most used by consultative authorities, especially in public health care. However consensus seems to be more a process than a procedure: no methodology is defined despite effective uses of consensus for decision-making. The contribution tries first of all to show that consensus indicates as well three stages of the process itself as the whole process. It presents then the weaknesses and the limits of this approach (e.g., pluralism and fragmentation, charismatic membership to the community, withdrawal of any individual responsibility and alienation of each member of the community). It exposes finally the conditions of foundation of a decision-making procedure by consensus: explicitation of the routines in which all the convictions of a group are usually mobilized (common places, values, faiths); invention of secondary rules bounding the field of the standards which will be the object of the consensus; the adjustment of these standards in a new situation in coherence with the previous routine. The decision by consensus is thus a hermeneutic movement of re-seizure of the practices of the community by itself.