Decolonising the Discourse on Resilience

Abstract

This article presents a discursive critique of the Eurocentric paradigms of knowledge production that characterise much of the underlying logics in the age of neoliberal discourses on resilience, pointing out important areas not given sufficient attention. In particular, it highlights the limits of the modernist ontology of resilience, whereby extremely "vulnerable" African communities are encouraged "to become resilient" to climatic disruption and environmental catastrophe and to "bounce back" as rapidly as possible. The article moves the discussion forward, drawing from critical decolonial approaches, in alignment with Indigenous knowledges, to question and rethink meaningful alternative ontologies, ways of knowing and being, in adaptive governance. I argue that the recognition of the plurality of many worlds, rather than one world, highlighted through critical decolonial understandings of epistemic forms with Indigenous knowledges, can be counterposed to Western universality as an innovative ontology to decentre the world order in the problematic dominant development of resilience thinking.

Scorched-earth democratic South Africa: Governance utopianisms as derivatives of scientific dogma

“…In tacit support of Pareto's (1897) argument, Orrell (2010: 163) states that scientific methods of research have since the 1960s produced models that are "imperfect patches; instead of elegant proofs, or reductive formulae, they offer only fuzzy glimpses of the complex reality." Knowledge generated through fragmentary scientific dogma and binaries offers partial perspectives of the complexities of the unitary realities (Tsheola, 2012b;Amo-Agyemang, 2021). Lacking in the necessary degree of "openness," the unprecedented multiplicity of models and theories has not adequately captured "the complexity and diversity" of the unified and mutually configuring realities of human existence (Ferber & Nelson, 1993: 65).…”