Organising community resilience: an examination of the forms of sociality promoted in community resilience programmes

Abstract

Communities have emerged as a principal strategic target for contemporary resilience programmes. Going beyond community preparedness campaigns, which aimed to responsibilise individual citizens to their dangers, community resilience programmes aim to intervene in, and enhance, the social relations binding a community together in order to promote resilience. The benefits of resilience for communities, it is claimed, go beyond emergency preparedness and recovery, promising to enhance development, wellness and equality. This article examines the forms of sociality valued and promoted within the discourses and practices of community resilience programmes. We begin by examining how 'communities' emerged as a site for post-social forms of neoliberal governance. Next, we turn to examine the ideas of community, the forms of sociality and the modes of resilience enacted within community resilience programmes. We conclude with a discussion of how 'community resilience' could be enacted otherwise through a critical examination of alternative organizations.

Acting local, thinking global: Globalizing resilience through 100 Resilient Cities

“…CS Holling explicitly discussed resilience as a kind of ‘ecosystem capital’ underpinning the capacity not just to bounce-back from crises, but also to realize new potentials (Holling, 2001: 394–395). ‘Social capital’ – an abstract measure of the degree of connectivity and richness of the social networks comprising a community – is likewise regularly championed as a means of achieving community resilience (Mulligan and Rogers, 2017; Zebrowski and Sage, 2016). In business and management literature, ‘human capital’ has been identified as the key to maximizing individual and organizational resilience within increasingly dynamic work environments (Luthans et al, 2004; Luthans et al, 2006; Youssef and Luthans, 2007).…”

“…As a philanthropic initiative organized through a network of international cities, 100RC demonstrates how the spread of resilience thinking has been dependent on exploiting changes in the structures and processes of global governance afforded by neoliberal globalization. To date, the majority of research into the politics of resilience has been conducted at familiar scales of analysis: international (Joseph, 2016; Reid, 2012), national (Joseph, 2013; Lentzos and Rose, 2009) and municipal (Collier et al, 2016; Rademaker et al, 2018; Zebrowski and Sage, 2016). By concentrating on these reified scales of analysis, such studies tend to overlook the ways in which resilience ideas are increasingly being promoted through novel political channels that have been opened up by neoliberal globalization.…”

“… 3. A definitive answer as to the extent to which resilience may be reframed outside of, or beyond, dominant neoliberal enframings is beyond the scope of this article. Some initial thoughts on its possibility can be found in Grove (2019), Anderson (2015) and Zebrowski and Sage (2016). …”

Addressing power and scale in resilience programming: A call to engage across funding, delivery and evaluation

“…It is therefore critical to consider who bears the burden for being resilient, and what role resilience narratives may play in legitimising inadequate responses by the State or others responsible for providing services (Blythe et al, 2018; Chandler & Reid, 2016; Matyas & Pelling, 2015). Although community resilience is often a target of resilience programming, Zebrowski and Sage (2017) provide a critical analysis of “community resilience,” arguing that resilience is presented as a solution to a heterogeneous range of community problems ranging from crime to bullying, climate change, and terrorism, but these solutions tap into imagined “nostalgia” and rely on the construction of community to shape social relations in support of neoliberal ideals. While building individual and community resilience is a critical goal for resilience programming, assessing whether projects/programmes are shifting responsibility to the most vulnerable is essential.…”

Protracted crisis, food security and the fantasy of resilience in Sudan

“…Rather than focussing on individual responsibility, there may also be collective forms of resilience. Groups or cooperatives may be able to develop alternatives to neoliberal market-based resilience responses or to resist them (Cavelty et al, 2015; Zebrowski and Sage, 2017).…”