Abstract
Resilience has become one of the single most important concepts driving contemporary discourse and praxis around the globe as we strive to grasp and address the increasingly complex and overlapping challenges confronting the modern world. At the same time, resilience has been the subject of intense debate across the social sciences owing to tensions around precisely how the term should be interpreted and applied in a variety of different contexts and disciplinary settings (Folke, 2006; Grove, 2014; Manyena, 2006; Matin et al., 2018). This book has done a fantastic job in examining the history and implications of this explosive interest in resilience on academic thought and practice. Kevin Grove takes on the difficult task of mapping the explicit and circuitous ways resilience has been transforming the way we think about human–environment relations, particularly the way resilience thinking transforms the relationship between, what he refers to as, ‘truth and control’ (p. 4). Truth, being the kinds of things we can know (and not know) about the world we live in; and control, being the ways we intervene and manipulate the world to achieve certain desired outcomes. In other words, resilience represents a particular way of knowing and exploring the interconnectedness of humans with the nonhuman world, and the nestled and contested socio-nature relationships driving biophysical and economic change across the globe. In general, Grove’s goal is not so much to shed light on what resilience is, as to critically explore the kinds of work resilience does and can do.
Like Grove, I also grapple with resilience in my own research, particularly how it relates to other crosscutting concepts such as vulnerability and socio-ecological transformation, and the kind of work it does both discursively and materially. My research contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship that points to the tendency for resilience programming to encourage the preservation of the status quo by directing attention and resources away from addressing the persistent and underlying structural inequities that render social and ecological systems vulnerable in the first place (Pelling, 2011). In the disaster literature, for instance, the idea of ‘bouncing back’—a key tenet in mainstream discourses on resilience—suggests a return to a pre-disaster state, which predisposes the system to the same or similar kinds of vulnerabilities and threats.
Recent attempts to retheorize resilience has seen the term becoming more closely aligned with notions of ‘bouncing forward’ or ‘build back better’ (see e.g. Aldunce et al., 2014). In this regard, resilience facilitates the transition to a new and potentially improved configuration of an impacted socio-ecological system through the identification and deployment of calculated techniques, technologies and strategies of governmental control. Again, resilience does a specific kind of work; as Grove puts it, ‘one that configures thought and practice on human-environmental relations around a will to design’ (p. 4, emphasis added). This will to design—with its roots in cybernetics and design theory, is less concerned with analysis and the production of truth and certainty. Instead, the will to design synthesizes different forms of bounded knowledge to solve immediate and practical problems. At its core, then, resilience implies that change, disruption and vulnerability provide potentially beneficial conditions for a system to transition to an improved state, without losing its essential identity and functions. Environmental disasters and other catastrophes therefore provide a unique opportunity for society to not only learn and reorganize itself but to pursue longer term strategic adaptation goals (Adger et al., 2005; O’Brien et al., 2010). In other words, disaster resilience becomes a catalyst for development and innovation, for not only doing things better but also for promoting positive and transformative change by ‘doing [things] differently’ (O’Brien et al., 2010: 499).
Despite these attempts to challenge and retheorize the meaning of resilience, it is still unclear how well these translate into transformative practices on the ground (Pelling, 2011). More importantly, the ways power (and more specifically, biopower) gets mobilized, negotiated, contested, and exercised in resilience programming is still largely underexplored, and thus provides fertile ground for future academic enquiry. Grove actually points to the depoliticizing ideological and biopolitical effects of resilience-building initiatives, especially their tendency to normalize and integrate vulnerability and risk as integral parts of everyday life. This effectively serves to expand and reinforce neoliberal socio-ecological relations and logic, where responsibility is passed on to vulnerable populations to manage the effects of social and ecological insecurities and disruptions.
For the most part, these debates have shed light on the need to unpack and unsettle the inherent biopolitics embedded in resilience thinking and practice, and the work this does both materially and discursively in different geographic and contextual settings. Studies have shown, for instance, how community-based resilience initiatives increasingly produce forms of collective life that tend to live with, rather than challenge underlying insecurities (Grove, 2014; Reid, 2012; Walker and Cooper, 2011). Ericson (2005) describes this as ‘governing through risk and uncertainty’, where policies and programs are deployed to govern and control populations through linking life with either material or abstract risk.
As my research in the Caribbean has shown, disasters often provide a platform for the deployment of techniques, discourses, and technologies aimed at controlling individual and collective life. This has become very evident in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, where notions of resilience and ‘build back better’ have emerged as the hallmark for post-hurricane reconstruction efforts across the Caribbean. While these post-hurricane efforts are premised on a desire to rethink existing development paradigms in affected nation-states, much remain to be seen as to their potential to effectively advance a radical and transformative politics. As we have seen repeatedly, vulnerable and marginalized populations often benefit the least from post-disaster redevelopment efforts. This tendency for resilience thinking to consolidate rather than challenge the status quo has been one of the main sources of contention among critical scholars in human geography and other related fields. Linked to this are ways resilience has often work to constrain individual and collective action to ‘bring about possibilities for different forms of life not organized around institutions such as private property, the market, and the territorially-based nation state’ (p. 21).
Yet, in this book, Grove reminds us that all is not lost and encourages us as critical scholars to foster and develop a more complex account of the ethical and political possibilities of resilience thinking. He points to the dangers and limiting effects of approaching resilience simply as a discourse, or a unified and coherent governmental logic or ideology. Instead, Grove sees resilience as a diagram, that gains meaning and purpose as it gets mobilized in specific contexts to address specific problems. This pliability allows resilience to be applied in very different and distinct ways across a variety of settings. Resilience is therefore a socio-techno-nature abstraction that has been mobilized in specific contexts, thought and praxis to produce and bring about desirable outcomes. This mobility and pliability have often allowed a wide and diverse range of actors (researchers, policy makers, technocrats, lay persons etc.) to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world, but more importantly, to live with, embrace and manage its inherent uncertainties and insecurities.
So how then can critical scholarship better engage resilience thinking to unlock its ethico-political possibilities? Grove argues that the solution (and problem) lies with critique itself and calls for a more careful and reflexive engagement with resilience. One that reorients, reinvents and repurposes critique in a way that opens resilient thinking to radically new and subversive alterities. Critique thus becomes an ethico-political practice, that evokes a distinct form of topological sensibility that always leaves open the potential to become other than we are. Topological thought can be mobilized to destabilize present ways of thinking and being, to both demonstrate and envision difference within the present, and to illustrate that things could always be otherwise. In this sense, resilience and its underlying will to design offer an opportunity to be disruptive and transgressive. By demonstrating other ways critical scholarship has engaged issues of complexity, emergence, and uncertainty, Grove does an excellent job of highlighting new and subversive ways of engaging resilience. For him, this is largely a matter of ethics, one that recognizes and is attentive to, the ways conventional thought and practice are embedded in ‘wider struggles over how to order, make sense out of, and govern social and ecological phenomena’ (p. 25). Equally important is an ethical commitment to constantly demonstrate that things could always be other than they are, not to inhibit action but to show there is always opportunities for doing things better or differently. Fostering and making known new ways of being that are attentive not only to future uncertainties and complexities but also to the various forms of modern-day violence, injustices, and inequalities that shape the experience for many humans and nonhumans alike.
My own research contends with some of these very issues. I also maintain the need for more sustained and critical explorations of how resilient thinking translates into practice and the kinds of work it does (and can do) both materially and discursively. Like Grove, I believe it is equally dangerous for critical scholars to turn away from resilience. The challenge of course is that we are yet to envision a suitable alternative framing for resilience—partly owing to how deeply entrenched the term has become with mainstream neoliberal logic, and partly due to our inability to make sense of the liminal and precarious spaces it often occupies. It is these liminal and fragmented geographies that we often overlook or downplay when we apply binary or normative notions of resilience in our work.
There is indeed a lot we could learn from recent trends in security studies. Patricia Noxolo and David Featherstone’s commentary in Transactions (Noxolo and Featherstone, 2014) draws attention to the complex ways security and insecurity are co-produced through a variety of scalar and relational practices and highlights how people’s in/securities are inherently political and are based on everyday struggles and negotiations between multiple actors who might have differing priorities and ideas of what constitute a threat and how that threat should be addressed. Equally important is the shift from seeing insecurity as resulting solely from large discrete external events such as hurricanes or terror attacks, to seeing negotiations between security and insecurity as more of a persistent and diffuse feature of everyday life. Accepting this approach could potentially change the focus from one that seeks to measure people’s resilience based on normative notions of what resilience ought to look like, to one looking more critically and reflexively on resilience as an everyday relational practice that is co-constituted and exists alongside the everyday strategies people employ as they negotiate their own in/securities and vulnerabilities.