Resilience in Fukushima: Contribution to a Political Economy of Consent

Abstract

This article is a contribution to the political economy of consent based on the analysis of speeches, declarations, initiatives, and policies implemented in the name of resilience in the context of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It argues that, in practice as much as in theory, resilience fuels peoples’ submission to an existing reality—in the case of Fukushima, the submission to radioactive contamination—in an attempt to deny this reality as well as its consequences. The political economy of consent to the nuclear, of which resilience is one of the technologies, can be grasped at four interrelated analytical levels adapted to understanding how resilience is encoded in key texts and programs in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi accident. The first level is technological: consent through and to the nuclear technology. The second level is sociometabolic: consent to nuisance. The third level is political: consent to participation. The fourth level is epistemological: consent to ignorance. A fifth cognitivo-experimental transversal level can also be identified: consent to experimentation, learning and training. We first analyze two key symptoms of the despotism of resilience: its incantatory feature and the way it supports mutilated life within a contaminated area and turns disaster into a cure. Then, we show how, in the reenchanted world of resilience, loss opens doors, that is, it paves the way to new “forms of life”: first through ignorance-based disempowerment; second through submission to protection. Finally, we examine the ideological mechanisms of resilience and how it fosters a government through the fear of fear. We approach resilience as a technology of consent mobilizing emotionalism and conditioning on one side, contingency and equivalence on the other.

Reconstruction and resilience after Fukushima: A critical analysis of nuclear risk and disaster

“…iii This expression is used by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (2012). See also Ribault (2019) who questions the mechanism of resilience applied in the context of this nuclear disaster. iv All sources written in Japanese or French and quoted in this article were translated by the author.…”

Review article: Towards a context-driven research: a state-of-the-art review of resilience research on climate change

“…Evans and Reid (2013) accuse the perspective of resilience of the character of a doctrine, according to which the resilient subject must constantly adapt to a dangerous and changing world and is willing to accept this. Ecological and societal catastrophes like Katrina (2005) and Fukushima (2011) manifest such neo-liberalized resilience that is divorced from concerns of justice (Fainstein, 2014;Tierney, 2015;Ribault, 2019). Such costly catastrophes present themselves as 'anthropological shocks' (Beck (2015: 80), in the sense that they open up a new consciousness (Fazey et al, 2018).…”

“…It tends to treat adaptive resilience as a technical property that is devoid of political and moral substance (Swyngedouw, 2011;Pizzo, 2015;Clément & Rivera, 2017;Davoudi, 2018;Glaser et al, 2018;Dryzek & Pickering, 2019). In constructivist resilience research the justice question is placed in a context of broader socio-political processes of transformation: adaptive systems can be unjust and oppressive (Fainstein, 2014;Weichselgartner and Kelman, 2015;Huang, Boranbay-Akan and Huang, 2016;McGreavy, 2016;Ribault, 2019). Short-term, incremental, adaptive response to shocks and disturbances may blur long term sustainability vision, while dominant (or dominating) stakeholders typically reify existing climate policy efforts in their (standardized) adaptive responses (Lockie, 2016;Derickson, 2016;Rothe, 2017;Estêvão, Calado and Capucha, 2017;Ribault, 2019).…”

“…In constructivist resilience research the justice question is placed in a context of broader socio-political processes of transformation: adaptive systems can be unjust and oppressive (Fainstein, 2014;Weichselgartner and Kelman, 2015;Huang, Boranbay-Akan and Huang, 2016;McGreavy, 2016;Ribault, 2019). Short-term, incremental, adaptive response to shocks and disturbances may blur long term sustainability vision, while dominant (or dominating) stakeholders typically reify existing climate policy efforts in their (standardized) adaptive responses (Lockie, 2016;Derickson, 2016;Rothe, 2017;Estêvão, Calado and Capucha, 2017;Ribault, 2019). Kythreotis & Bristow (2017) call this phenomenon the 'resilience trap' -the reinforcement of established power relations and contemporary resilience discourses (Blühdorn, 2013;Redman, 2014;Yanarella & Levine, 2014; https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2020-90 Preprint.…”

“…CC BY 4.0 License. Lockie, 2016;VanderPlaat, 2016;Schilling, Wyss & Binder, 2018;Glaser et al, 2018;Ribault, 2019).…”