Resilience for Whom? Emerging Critical Geographies of Socio‐ecological Resilience

Abstract

Resilience has fast become a popular catchphrase used by government, international finance organisations, NGOs, community groups and activists all over the globe. Despite its widespread use, there remains confusion over what resilience is and the purpose it serves. Resilience can, in some cases, speak to a desire to successfully respond and adapt to disruptions outside of the status quo. However, this conceptualisation of resilience is far from uncontested. Emerging research has shown a lack of consideration for power, agency and inequality in popular and academic use of these frameworks. Criticism has also been raised regarding the use of resilience to justify projects informed by neoliberal ideologies that aim to decrease state involvement, increase community self‐reliance and restructure social services. Despite this, resilience is being used by community and activist groups that aim to address local and global environmental and social issues. With this critical insight, the need has arisen to question what is being maintained, for whom and by whom, through these discourses of resilience. In this review, I trace the evolution of the concept in the literature. Building on this, I discuss three interpretations of the resilience paradigm in current academic, political and activist arenas. I conclude by discussing possible future directions for critical geographic perspectives of resilience.

Resilience (Republished)

“…But resilience is influencing the environmental sciences from agriculture to oceans as well as global environmental and climate change reflected in, e.g., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports (e.g., O'Brien et al 2012) and in risk and disaster management (e.g., Berkes 2007, Tidball et al 2010, McSweeney and Coomes 2011, Djalante et al 2013). Resilience thinking is raised in the development literature and in diverse ontologies and epistemologies of the social sciences and the humanities (e.g., Hamel and Välikangas 2003, Redman 2005, Hegmon et al 2008, Simmie and Martin 2010, Robards et al 2011, Crépin et al 2012, Plieninger and Bieling 2012, Ebbesson and Hey 2013, Hall and Lamont 2013, Lorenz 2013, Lyon and Parkins 2013, Barrett and Constas 2014, Chandler 2014, Tidball 2014, Bourbeau 2015, Hobman and Walker 2015, Marston 2015, Sjöstedt 2015, Weichselgartner and Kelman 2015 and with diverse reactions from excitement to those that oppose the approach for diverse reasons (reviewed by, e.g., Brown 2014, Cretney 2014, Stone-Jovicich 2015.…”

Interrogating resilience: toward a typology to improve its operationalization

“…Wilson (2012bWilson ( , 2013 and Singer et al (2015) maintain that exogenous drivers acting across institutional scales can function to either strengthen or weaken some capitals important for community resilience, and that this is significant for the practical application of resilience concepts, given that these drivers can affect policy corridors, and therefore transformational pathways. Cross scale interactions, evidenced through the likes of climate adaptation planning, also demonstrably affect community economies, cultural practices, and social networks meaning that those with particular capitals become more or less vulnerable than others (Crane 2010, Singer et al 2015, and therefore that some groups are better able to take advantage of change than others. Many community resilience assessments (e.g., Daze et al 2009, Bours et al 2013, Tyler et al 2014) now explicitly consider crossscale drivers of community resilience, particularly around governance and planning, in a perceived attempt to ensure the concept is practically relevant.…”

Improving participatory resilience assessment by cross-fertilizing the Resilience Alliance and Transition Movement approaches

“…Policy makers and practitioners in diverse fields are increasingly adopting the term "resilience" (e.g., Davoudi et al 2012, Baggio et al 2015, but interpretations range from preserving the status quo to being open for transformative change (Cretney 2014, Davidson et al 2016. Our suggestions provide a starting point for further transdisciplinary research (Lang et al 2012, Seidl et al 2013) to cocreate transformational ways of applying resilience thinking.…”

“…However, they do not explicitly address the local-regional transformations that need to happen to enhance planetary resilience (e.g., transforming to a low-carbon economy) and to avoid unwanted erosion of the resilience of other places (e.g., halting illegal ivory imports). On the contrary, the Transition Movement has adopted an interpretation of resilience that focuses on the root causes of environmental problems (Brown 2014, Cretney 2014, Cretney and Bond 2014. For example, it calls for a transformation away from societies' heavy dependence on cheap fossil fuels to avoid dangerous climate change globally (Appendix 1:1C).…”