“…At heart lies the political and ethical question of how resilience programming relates to adaptive capacity: is it something to be technocratically managed, an object of disaster management's liberal will to truth (see Grove, 2013), or can it be allowed to flourish in whatever direction it may take? There is a small but growing body of provocative research within disaster studies and environmental management that is beginning to raise these questions.…”
Resilience has become a foundational component within disaster management policy frameworks concerned with building ?cultures of safety? among vulnerable populations. These attempts at social engineering are justified through a discourse of agency and empowerment, in which resilience programming is said to enable marginalized groups to become self-sufficient and manage their own vulnerabilities. This paper seeks to destabilize this political imaginary through a critical analysis of participatory disaster resilience programming in Jamaica. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Jamaica's national disaster management agency, I argue that resilience operates through an affective economy of fear, hope, and confidence that enacts an immunitary biopolitics. The object of this biopolitics is excess adaptive capacity that results from affective relations between participants and their socioecological milieu. Participatory techniques such as transect walks, focus groups, and education programs attempt to encode and manipulate these affective relations in order to construct an artificial and depoliticized form of adaptive capacity that does not threaten neoliberal order. Recognizing the immunological logic at the heart of disaster resilience opens up new ethical and political imperatives in disaster management that value adaptive capacity as the vital force of new socioecological futures, rather than as an object of governmental intervention and controlPeer reviewe
“…At heart lies the political and ethical question of how resilience programming relates to adaptive capacity: is it something to be technocratically managed, an object of disaster management's liberal will to truth (see Grove, 2013), or can it be allowed to flourish in whatever direction it may take? There is a small but growing body of provocative research within disaster studies and environmental management that is beginning to raise these questions.…”
Resilience has become a foundational component within disaster management policy frameworks concerned with building ?cultures of safety? among vulnerable populations. These attempts at social engineering are justified through a discourse of agency and empowerment, in which resilience programming is said to enable marginalized groups to become self-sufficient and manage their own vulnerabilities. This paper seeks to destabilize this political imaginary through a critical analysis of participatory disaster resilience programming in Jamaica. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Jamaica's national disaster management agency, I argue that resilience operates through an affective economy of fear, hope, and confidence that enacts an immunitary biopolitics. The object of this biopolitics is excess adaptive capacity that results from affective relations between participants and their socioecological milieu. Participatory techniques such as transect walks, focus groups, and education programs attempt to encode and manipulate these affective relations in order to construct an artificial and depoliticized form of adaptive capacity that does not threaten neoliberal order. Recognizing the immunological logic at the heart of disaster resilience opens up new ethical and political imperatives in disaster management that value adaptive capacity as the vital force of new socioecological futures, rather than as an object of governmental intervention and controlPeer reviewe
“…Their political effects emerge through the field of force relations in which they are deployed. In this light, a biopolitical perspective highlights how vulnerability has been progressively depoliticized since the mid‐1990s (Grove ; see Cannon and Mueller‐Mann ; Gaillard ; Middleton and O'Keefe for similar critiques from different theoretical slants). The newest fold in this depoliticization is the emergence of resilience approaches, to which we now turn.…”
Section: Vulnerability: the Production Of Logistical Lifementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Participatory approaches, in turn, allow practitioners to constantly work on and modify adaptive capacities in desirable ways. Together, these techniques enable resilience to realize the liberal will to truth that underpins applied approaches to hazard studies (on this will to truth, see Hewitt ; Grove ). Discussing the benefits of adaptive management, Kai Lee suggests that, Adaptive management recapitulates the promise that Francis Bacon articulated four centuries ago: to control nature one must understand her [sic].…”
This paper brings together Foucauldian approaches to biopolitics and recent developments in climate change and disaster studies on vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience to develop a biopolitics of adaptation. I approach climate change impact assessments, vulnerability approaches, and resilience approaches as distinct systems of knowledge with biopolitical effects. This means that each renders life amenable to governmental intervention and control through specific sets of techniques and rationalities that produce “truths” about emergent life and how to secure this life. A biopolitical reading offers a critical alternative to conventional narratives of these fields' development, which suggest that the emergence of vulnerability and resilience approaches provide progressively more complex accounts of risk that shine new light on the “vulnerability puzzle.” In contrast, this review suggests that the emergence of vulnerability and resilience approaches allow researchers and practitioners to target increasingly intimate levels of socio‐ecological life, the affective relations between people and their environments. In drawing attention to the often under‐acknowledged politics of life at play in climate change and disaster studies, this review seeks to highlight possibilities for a subversive and affirmative biopolitics of adaptation that transgresses rather than sustains existing political ecological order.
“…The rise of vulnerability studies in particular began shifting the focus of disaster studies to addressing immediate vulnerabilities and suffering rather than long‐term structural change (Grove ; Middleton and O'Keefe ). As a result, participatory disaster management became de‐territorialized from radical categories, techniques, and rationalities, and re‐territorialized around less overtly political forms of conventional participation (Grove ). For example, categories such as social capital allow researchers to envision affective relations among vulnerable peoples in ways that open these relations to subtle forms of cultural engineering (cf.…”
The politics and ethics of participatory development have been a topic of vibrant debate since the 1990s. While proponents assert that participation emancipates and empowers marginalized people, critics assert that it enacts new forms of control and regulation. This paper reads these debates through the analytical lens offered by assemblage thinking. Assemblage allows us to foreground affective relations between people and things, and the diagrams of power, or ideal sets of force relations, that attempt to direct these affective relations. On this basis, we characterize different participatory approaches in terms of their relation to the constitutive power of affective relations: modernist participation enacts a will to truth that attempts to objectify and control constitutive power through categories such as social capital and vulnerability; performative participation recognizes that participatory activities, while still entangled in power relations, may develop in ways that might challenge existing power relations, and the designs of the project organizer. This characterization helps us identify a politics of life enacted through participatory activities: on one hand, a negative biopolitics that problematizes constitutive power; on the other, an affirmative biopolitics that creates new possibilities for individual and collective life. Assemblage thinking can thus reconfigure participation around an affirmative biopolitics that positions the researcher as one resource among others marginalized people might use in their struggles against insecurity and suffering.
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