Abstract
In this book, Grove raises important questions about the booming interest in the notion of resilience and its associated concepts. One central argument in the book is that this boom is a symptom of an entirely new style of thought, a ‘will to design’, that comes in contradistinction with Foucault’s ‘will to truth’ (1971). Grove argues that the popularity of resilience thinking signals a fundamental shift in the relation between (scientific) truth and control: the acceptance of indeterminacy and surprise in resilience thinking, leads to scientific studies and techniques of government that favour adaptation, rather than command and control, and that require other than simply scientific knowledge forms to grasp. This openness is ground-shifting, and Grove remarks that it has depoliticizing effects, but he invites us to get passed this kind of critique. He proposes a genealogy of resilience thinking as a way to precisely imagine its transformative political potentialities. This is an important project, and my response here aims to think forward with it, maybe towards what could be imagined as ‘critical resilience studies’. My point is that issues of politics and power could be brought into such a scholarship field precisely by building upon, rather than moving passed, critiques in related fields.
A good place to start is with what seems to me an obvious parallel between resilience and development, and between Grove’s ‘will to design’ and Tania Li’s seminal critique of development built around the idea of the ‘will to improve’. One key basis for Grove’s argument towards the ‘will to design’ is in the relationship that resilience thinking entertains with its own critiques. He argues that the popularity and endurance of resilience thinking comes from its ability to absorb critique. Because of the openness to uncertainty and indeterminacy within resilience thinking, ‘critique becomes the motor rather than the saboteur of governmental practice’ (2018: 24). For example, while resilience critiques often flag how conflicts in resource uses are smoothed over in resilience as a way to demonstrate its apolitical framing, Grove argues that under resilience thinking such conflicts become ‘an indicator of opportunities to intervene in a system in order to “improve” (cf. Latour 2004) that system’s functionality’ (Grove, 2018: 213). Conflict becomes new information to factor in. Critique is absorbed, and somehow, rendered moot. I am convinced that resilience thinking is able to perpetuate itself in this way of absorbing critique, but it is not an entirely new phenomenon.
Li’s (2007) ‘will to improve’ made a similar point. She was interested, as Grove is with resilience, in the stubbornness of development, considering its conceptual fuzziness and wide-ranging critique. Like Grove also, she invited us to take development seriously, rather than to dismiss it for all its impractical flaws and limits in meaningfully challenging existing power relations. Her work is not mentioned by Grove, maybe because he makes the case for seeing resilience as more than a Foucauldian discourse, whereas Li, through her critique of governmentality, presents development as a particular kind of discourse, and the ‘will to improve’ as its mode of operation. However with resilience thinking, ‘adaptation’ seems to be a new mode of improvement. It is a certain kind of truth – a ‘right manner of disposing things’ as Foucault once wrote underlies the ‘will to truth’ – through which an increasing amount of governing takes place. So rather than a ‘will to design’, I should think that we are in the presence of a ‘will to adapt’. The point here is not that Grove’s argument is offside. On the contrary, it is precisely his initial rapprochement between the ‘will to’ and resilience thinking that could advance critical resilience studies.
The similarities and differences between resilience and development could be tapped into as a way to bring the politics of resilience thinking into view. Like Grove, Li was suspicious of critiques that argued development has ‘depoliticizing effects’. She rather argued that development renders politics technical, but that this has important political effects – in the way its impracticalities reproduce specific relations of domination, and also produce actual contestations. A similar vein of questioning could be advanced in empirical studies about resilience. For example, what kinds of conflicts of interests do adaptation and resilience schemes render technical, and what kinds of contestations do they give rise to, by comparison to conventional sustainable development ones? Adaptation can be considered as a subfield of development – adaptation and resilience language and frameworks increasingly populate development schemes – but it also overflows development – resilience concerns also pop up in places other than those typically portrayed as needing development. So what different sites, places and populations are brought into view within resilience’s ‘will to adapt’ compared to conventional development? For example, development relies on an enduring global North/South dichotomy and associated stigma, but resilience focuses on vulnerabilities (to flood, drought, food shortages) that occur in areas that cut across the North/South divide. The ‘will to adapt’ may constitute an opportunity to theorize from other places than the Global North as the ideal-typical point of analytical departure, and there may be an interesting conversation to be started with scholars pushing forward a kind of science that aims to ‘decolonize knowledge’ (Todd, 2016). Such a potentiality is not automatic of course – it relies on the emergence of critical resilience scholarship that debunks existing dichotomies but that is also attentive to new ones. For example, how does the politics of making adaptable social and environmental subjects differ from that of making developed ones? What different kinds of ethics underlie the will to adapt by comparison to the will to improve? These are just some of the questions that could be asked within critical resilience studies, and that may shed light – maybe by hacking – on resilience’s ‘potential to become otherwise’ (Grove, 2018: 271).
I agree that the notion of design is central, and politicizing the ‘will to adapt’ could build further on existing critiques in related fields. As Grove’s convincing genealogy shows, resilience thinking emerges from its fundamental recognition that science operates from a position of ‘limited knowledge’ and encourages the integration of non-scientifically produced knowledge about environment–society relations. The political potentialities of such an integration are ambiguous however, as he points out (in Chapter 6 mainly). On the one hand, the acceptance of partial knowledge opens up scientific analysis to different ways of knowing environment–society relations, but on the other, it does not account well for the hierarchies between them, for what knowledge about environment–social relations becomes adopted to shape policies, and what knowledge is obscured and subjugated. For example, the vague definition of ‘uncertainty’ that underlies resilience thinking makes for a powerful heuristic, but a weak analytical tool – whose uncertainty matters? How does design deal with cases when the lay uncertainties of resource users are not of interest to experts’ concerns for adaptation? The ‘will to adapt’ blurs politics out of focus if we do not ask about whose uncertainty and indeterminacy preoccupy our designs.
To bring politics into focus, critical resilience studies could build on related critical scholarly fields, especially around advances in conceptualizing knowledge. Nightingale (2011), for example, draws a useful distinction between knowledge and rationality in her invitation for us to go ‘Beyond design principles’. In a response to the way Elinor Ostrom’s work has been picked up, she argues that an openness to other ways of knowing is not enough if we do not also unearth the assumed rational/emotional dichotomies underlying dominant ways of apprehending knowledge. She shows that fishermen’s organization of collective action in Scotland draws upon apparently irrational and emotional connections that escape design because they are difficult to scale up. She also shows that fishermen’s lay knowledge is intricately linked to the context in which it is enunciated (and therefore extractable by the scientist) – information about collective action shifts depending on whether it is elicited in the harbour, the home or the negotiating table of official fishing agreement negotiations. Her work clearly shows that to consider other ways of knowing is not enough. If the ‘will to adapt’ conceptualizes the ‘limitedness of knowledge’ as how much we know about society–nature relations, which can be fixed by adding in other ways of knowing, Nightingale’s work on the other hand invites questions about how we know. Her work points out that knowledge is not only limited, but it is also selective in a number of different ways. I wonder if this insight is not precisely the sort of ‘hack’ that Grove has in mind – and if so, the large body of existing feminist political ecology work may be a productive interlocutor to Grove’s ‘unworlding’ project.
Resilience, like development, is a heuristic that operates under the specific structural constraints of governmental techniques. The latter assume that multiple epistemologies are messy and that a common and unique epistemology can be found, but epistemological differences are useful. They allow us to ask different questions about a single problem, when we bring them together in ‘productive tension’ (Yeh, 2016: 39). Adaptation recalls what Bourdieu called ‘an invention under structural constraint’ (2012: 218). One important structural constraint of science is objectivation – its entire raison d’être is its ability to produce new knowledge that can be used beyond the context in which it is produced. It requires a sort of ontological translation into the closest approximation of the dominant culture of experts, scientists, designers. This translation is often conjured up by making experts disappear so that they can ‘speak for’ (Spivak, 1988) other ways of knowing. One last key question that Grove’s book brings on for me is to what extent does the will to adapt, with its fundamental openness to other forms of knowledge, transform the structural constraint of objectivation? Speaking more closely with Grove’s argument, how does the sequence ‘anthropocene-hacking-transition’ address such constraint within a will to adapt?
To conclude, if resilience thinking has been critiqued (and sometimes criticized) for being a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the challenge for resilience critiques is to avoid being sheep in a wolf’s clothing – making critical incisions that shut the door of a productive dialogue and simply reproduce the walls, rather than connections, between epistemological differences. I am therefore very sympathetic to Grove’s project to invite us to take resilience seriously – as more than a fad. It has brought me to sharpen my critical take on resilience as a ‘will to adapt’, and the resonances with Li’s and Nightingale’s work suggest to me that there is a vast space for productive critique that is uncharted as yet. It has convinced me to think more carefully about the new kinds of knowledge politics it brings into being, not least because resilience thinking carries the political potential for us to ask difficult questions that can travel over multiple sites and issues. Politicizing the will to adapt seems to me an important step towards imagining more just, im/possible futures – anthropocenic or otherwise.