Abstract:Resilience is one of the dominant tropes in contemporary policy, practice and academic debate. This paper situates resilience within historical and contemporary approaches to international intervention, governance and analysis. It contains three related arguments suggesting that resilience reflects and seeks to offer a positive alternative to the loss of modern frameworks. First, it is argued that resilience emerged in international intervention as a response to the limits of liberal internationalism in the 19… Show more
“…Moreover, the institutional context in which this disaster unfolded, particularly the structure of the response process, also imposed its own set of assumptions regarding the primacy of certain practices and modes of behavior. The spill’s official recovery framework, organized primarily by external actors, may then have differentially disadvantaged this particular community’s ability to respond to the disaster in a resilient manner, a potential outcome that is too often ignored in the resilience literature (Barrios 2014; Pugh 2014; Welsh 2014). …”
Culture plays an important role in communities’ abilities to adapt to environmental change and crises. The emerging field of resilience thinking has made several efforts to better integrate social and cultural factors into the systems-level approach to understanding socialecological resilience. However, attempts to integrate culture into structural models often fail to account for the agentic processes that influence recovery at the individual and community levels, overshadowing the potential for agency and variation in community response. Using empirical data on the 2010 BP oil spill’s impact on a small, natural resource-dependent community, we propose an alternative approach emphasizing culture’s ability to operate as a resource that contributes to social, or community, resilience. We refer to this more explicit articulation of culture’s role in resilience as cultural resilience. Our findings reveal that not all cultural resources that define resilience in reference to certain disasters provided successful mitigation, adaptation, or recovery from the BP spill.
“…Moreover, the institutional context in which this disaster unfolded, particularly the structure of the response process, also imposed its own set of assumptions regarding the primacy of certain practices and modes of behavior. The spill’s official recovery framework, organized primarily by external actors, may then have differentially disadvantaged this particular community’s ability to respond to the disaster in a resilient manner, a potential outcome that is too often ignored in the resilience literature (Barrios 2014; Pugh 2014; Welsh 2014). …”
Culture plays an important role in communities’ abilities to adapt to environmental change and crises. The emerging field of resilience thinking has made several efforts to better integrate social and cultural factors into the systems-level approach to understanding socialecological resilience. However, attempts to integrate culture into structural models often fail to account for the agentic processes that influence recovery at the individual and community levels, overshadowing the potential for agency and variation in community response. Using empirical data on the 2010 BP oil spill’s impact on a small, natural resource-dependent community, we propose an alternative approach emphasizing culture’s ability to operate as a resource that contributes to social, or community, resilience. We refer to this more explicit articulation of culture’s role in resilience as cultural resilience. Our findings reveal that not all cultural resources that define resilience in reference to certain disasters provided successful mitigation, adaptation, or recovery from the BP spill.
“…(Goal 3 of the Well Being of Future Generations Act, Department for Natural Resources of the Welsh Government, 2015 p. 6) Resilience emerges as a key framing in the Welsh Government's approach to the future, as the two extracts above highlight. This is perhaps not surprising: resilience is a notion which has taken off over the past several years and can be found in a whole host of political discourses, practices and academic debates (Pugh, 2014), particularly in relation to climate change and adaptation, in regional right through to global contexts (O'Hare and White, 2013). Resilience theorists use the term to describe a system's capacity to absorb disturbance and undergo transformation (by way of self-organization, learning and adaptation) so that it may retain essentially the same function ( Holling, 1973), or transform into a new system (Walker and Salt, 2006), and accordingly it has become a popular concept amongst many scholars thinking about sustainability transitions (e.g.…”
This article explores how the Welsh Government's recent policy innovations in climate change and environmental sustainability can be read in terms of their imaginative capacity for transformation. The Welsh Government is one of only a few governments in the world to have a legal duty to sustainable development, which includes the pioneering Well-being of Future Generations Act (2015). The legislation has received international attention and praise from the United Nations but, as yet, the Welsh Government's imaginaries of socioecological transformation have received little scrutiny regarding the kinds of ideas about the future and possibilities for change they set in motion. The article considers imaginaries as providing the very grounds of possibility for transformation, being comprised of stories and narratives about what kinds of futures are possible and desirable, intermingled with emotional-affective "atmospheres" that can promote or hinder people's engagement with environmental issues. The article focuses on three aspects of the Welsh Government's imaginaries related to socioecological transformation, namely; resilience and anticipatory discourse, linear time, and "conspiracies of optimism". A number of tensions are drawn out that highlight how the Welsh Government's seemingly progressive rhetoric risks being undermined by the conceptions of time and change it employs. Thus, the article contributes to wider critical analyses of how new politics and modes of governance of and for the (proposed) Anthropocene are taking shape.
“…La noción de resiliencia, mientras que es adoptada con entusiasmo por muchos, especialmente en la "comunidad del desarrollo" y rápidamente incorporada al vocabulario del riesgo de desastres, no deja de tener sus muchos detractores y plantea innumerables cuestiones, incluyendo la idea de que es un distractor de la consideración de las causas fundamentales (Pugh 2014; Gaillard 2016; White y O'Hare 2014). La noción de "transformación" expresa, entre otras cosas una creciente sensación de frustración por el fracaso de los esfuerzos actuales y pasados, por separado y colectivamente, para lograr resultados más sólidos en la reducción del riesgo de desastre.…”
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