Coordinating and situating resilience multiple

The resilience of resilience

As a concept, resilience is extensively used and applied across a variety of academic disciplines, and by government agencies, policymakers, non-governmental organizations and, increasingly, in everyday contexts. In general terms, resilience is found, made or situated within people, communities (human and non-human), cities and economies and has roots in ecology, psychology and engineering (Turner, 2014; Walker and Cooper, 2011; Weichselgartner and Kelman, 2015). In scanning resilience scholarship and practice, one could easily become confused about what resilience is and how it is done because of the different ways in which it is articulated and given meaning. Rather than fragmentation of a singular resilience, however, the authors elaborate how resiliences hang together: reality is distributed and practices coordinated to enact resilience multiple (Mol, 2002). An important commonality identified across the distribution of resilience(s) is it ‘names a positive future, or desirable conditions of possibility, yet makes no promises’ (Simon and Randalls, 2016). In a post-political condition, however, the desirability of resilience and positive conditions it suggests do little to challenge the existing social and political order (Derickson and MacKinnon, 2015). Indeed, neo-liberal resilience critiques draw attention to how resilience interventions can enable capitalism to flourish (Anderson, 2015; MacKinnon and Derickson, 2012) precisely because there is no requirement for things to change.

The authors propose a focus on the conditions of possibility and the interrogation of ontological politics at points of articulation to politicize difference and different ways of enacting resilience multiple. What resilience is, where it is said to be or come from and how resilience proliferates provide a means by which to reveal its world-making effects at particular moments. Consideration of the ways in which resiliences are done (Mol, 2002) has relevance for thinking about how humans ought to intervene in a changing planet (Collard et al., 2015; Derickson and MacKinnon, 2015). Whereas the authors concentrate on principles, idealizations and visualizations drawn from an extensive review of academic and non-academic literature, in the following section, I touch on two resilience projects in particular, situated contexts that demonstrate the saliency of resilience multiple and the ontological politics of specific articulations and enactments of resilience.

Situating resilience

Resilience hangs together because of the ways in which material–discursive practices are coordinated, distributed and translated across different sites (Lavau, 2013; Mol, 2002). In this section, I reflect on two resilience projects to show how the way in which resilience is articulated affects resilience practices and how resilience is imagined and deployed in two specific research interventions.

The first project, Marine Futures (2012–2014), was a collaborative research project involving geographers and ecologists in which discussions of social–ecological resilience extended to discussions of resourcefulness (Derickson and MacKinnon, 2015) in the context of New Zealand’s marine environment. In this project, the ways in which social-ecological resilience was imagined conformed, for the most part, to the line of thinking propagated by ecologists such as Hollings and Folke (e.g. Folke et al., 2004; Holling, 1973; Holling and Meffe, 1996) whereby experimentation and the ability to adapt to shocks, changes and surprises underpinned how we approached future-focused interventions with marine scientists and environmental decision-makers. Our interest was in providing space for our research participants to imagine possible futures and to articulate the conditions of possibility that different futures open up or close down. To accomplish this, scenario experiments were conducted based on two situated and particular contexts where participants were encouraged to navigate pathways to diverse futures.

The other resilience project, ‘Resilience to Nature’s Challenges’, positions resilience differently. Resilience to Nature’s Challenges is one of the New Zealand Government’s National Science Challenges, which are designed to enable a strategic approach to science investment for the benefit of New Zealand society. While not a researcher directly involved in the Challenge, I was part of a group of people asked to provide insights into stakeholder engagement in research programmes, with a particular focus on engaging Maori and accommodating Maori (indigenous) knowledge and practices into the design and implementation of research projects. In this case, resilience is deployed in terms of enhancing resilience to nature by seeking to understand the natural hazards that occur in (and threaten to destabilize) New Zealand with the intention of building a resilient (socially and economically) society. Resilience as understood from hazards and engineering (Hassler and Kohler, 2014; Manyena, 2006) provides the context for determining the conditions of possibility for the future of New Zealand.

In drawing attention to these projects, it is worth noting there are substantial differences between them. Marine Futures was a relatively small project that ran over a 2-year period and was interested in contributing to environmental decision-making processes but was separate to formal decision-making. Resilience to Nature’s Challenges is a 10-year research programme encompassing a range of themes that will organize specific research projects and interventions, which are forthcoming. Nevertheless, these projects reveal more than different interpretations of a singular resilience. Rather, they provide a means for highlighting political questions about the ‘imagined ontology of resilience’ (Simon and Randalls, 2016) and the ontological politics of resilience deployments. The debates about nature, notwithstanding (Castree, 2005) the world enacted through sets of practices to enhance nature’s resilience is a very different world to one in which practices are deployed to enhance resilience to nature. For Marine Futures, managing for resilience (Allen et al., 2011) was articulated as generating a (desirable) set of practices that enabled society to continue to benefit from the ecosystem services provided by marine environments in the face of possible shocks or surprises. For Resilience to Nature’s Challenges, research themes emphasize risk assessment and understanding geological hazards, weather hazards and fire hazards to reduce the losses associated with these hazards. Key outcomes are identified as mitigating hazard risks, improving the built environment and infrastructure to withstand failures associated with hazards and ensuring people, communities and organizations are prepared for and able to deal with hazards and risks.

In acknowledging resilience as multiple and by interrogating the ontological politics of (multiple) deployments, these resilience projects are also two examples where modern and indigenous (in this case, Maori) ontologies condition resilience possibilities. The ontological contestations and inconsistencies (Salmond, 2012) that characterize encounters between Western and Maori ontologies and epistemologies in Aotearoa New Zealand inevitably influence how resilience is enacted. Whilst investigations in to cultural resilience, or the resilience of cultures in the face of massive transformation (such as colonization) (Rotarangi and Stephenson, 2014), provide a different perspective to resilience singular, such an approach may not attend to the ontological politics and entanglements that arise when worlds collide.

Blaser’s (2009) political ontology project with its focus on worldings and generative potential of ontological conflicts provides possible lines of inquiry for future resilience work. Blaser’s political ontology project focuses attention on worldings and the continual process of worlds becoming. For Blaser (2013), the assertion of indigenous self-determination, knowledges and practices evince the rupturing of hegemonic political formations and destabilizes the hegemony of modern ontology. This has implications for the distribution and coordination of resilience in culturally, socially and economically diverse settings and provides opportunities for further investigation. This is of particular importance when resilience interventions are deployed in postcolonial and developing country contexts. For instance, resilience interventions framed in terms of community development or community adaptation to climate change have proliferated in recent years (Bahadur et al., 2013; Boyd et al., 2008; Maru et al., 2014). In these settings, where effects of resilience interventions are unevenly experienced, looking beyond the post-political promises of resilience and seeing resilience as enactive and conditioned will enhance our understanding of its world-making effects.

Futures and resiliences

The proliferation of resilience interventions has occurred at a time where crisis, uncertainty and (in)security condition thinking about how to act to ensure a (desirable) future. Neo-liberal, post-political resilience interventions have been criticized because these interventions may not enable social and political transformation and could even reinforce inequalities. Critically interrogating the relationships and practices that constitute resilience and the effects of particular articulations and deployments provides a means to politicize the way resilience is done. Since reality does not precede mundane practices (Mol, 1999), this approach makes it possible to investigate how resilience is produced, arranged and generated by people, technologies, spaces and stories (Lavau, 2011). In politicizing resilience interventions, questions arise as to what, if any, ontological conflicts might be encountered in a world of multiples and how might these be resolved. Further, if resilience is multiple and not singular and worlds can be made and remade, then what does this mean for the future?

I outlined two resilience projects in Aotearoa New Zealand to draw attention to the different ways in which resilience is imagined and articulated and the potential for ontological contestations and conflicts at points of articulation. For Marine Futures, the scenarios were thought experiments as part of an enactive research project that sought to destabilize entrenched practices and dispositions among marine scientists and environmental decision-makers operating in the marine space. By disrupting these taken-for-granted practices, social, political and ecological transformations were able to be imagined and the conditions enabling different futures could be interrogated to reveal different ways to act in, and make, alternative marine futures. As an emerging research programme, the ontological politics and enactive potential of the resilience projects developed and interventions deployed under the Resilience to Nature’s Challenges are, as yet, unknown. Both Marine Futures and Resilience to Nature’s Challenges provide a means to explore the potential for ontological contestations and conflicts to arise when resilience projects imagined within a modern ontology encounter indigenous ontologies. The importance of attending to Maori ontology and epistemology in environmental management more generally, and resilience interventions specifically, is explicitly recognized both in research interventions and at all levels of government in Aotearoa New Zealand; how this can be accomplished in practice remains an ongoing challenge. As a way forward, I suggested Blaser’s (2013) political ontology project could provide further lines of inquiry to disrupt the dominance of resilience as a modern ontological invention. This project has particular relevance, as indigenous peoples assert their rights to different ways of knowing and being and as the differentiated effects of resilience interventions are made apparent. If resilience is a solution to the crises of the Anthropocene, then further critical assessments at points of articulation must continue to be undertaken to ensure just and abundant futures might be realized.