Abstract

In an environment where daily survival requires the mobility of populations and where official reactions to the advance of Covid-19 have been faster than in the countries of the North, and truly appear more rigorous; that is to say, the authorities in Benin closed the borders and imposed various forms of confinement, isolation, quarantine, ban on gatherings, wearing masks; It is clear that the daily experience of the population is far removed from this image of the effectiveness of public authorities. Immersion in such an environment over a period of two weeks (from April 18 to 25) during peak hours reveals how populations in these public mixing environments experience the health crisis outside the cordon demarcated by the authorities, which shows of the existence of a contrast between formal norms and practical norms. The particular choice of observing the behavior of the population of Parakou in large places of public mixing, social environments through which the qualitative investigation made it possible to cumulatively scrutinize national and local action measures reveals that public decisions do not do not, in fact, present identical characteristics in all political societies. Each regime, each national or local institutional order has its specific style of public action

Keywords

Benin, Covid-19, formal norms and practical norms, political society, parakou population, regulatory policy