1 Self-reliant resiliency and neoliberal mentality
A critical reflection
Simin Davoudi
Forget sustainability. Itâs about resilience
â(Zolli, 2012)
The above headline in a New York Times article is an indication of the extent to which resilience has side-lined sustainability in political agendas, popular imaginations and academic writings. The academic literature on resilience, which has shown a steep rise in the last decade, ranges from engineering and ecology to economics, socio-technical studies, public policy theories, disaster management, climate change adaptation and urban planning. Seeking resilience has become a global agenda involving international institutions and public and private organisations. These have developed a growing array of evaluation frameworks and indicators to assess the resilience of cities and communities in the face of a multitude of uncertainties from financial crises, to extreme weather events and terrorist attacks. For example, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction launched a campaign in 2012 on How to Make Cities More Resilient. In the same year, the World Bank published guidance on Building Urban Resilience in East Asia. Building on its 2008 Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network, the Rockefeller Foundation launched its much-publicised campaign for 100 Resilient Cities in 2013 to help âcities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st-centuryâ (Rockefeller Foundation, 2014, no page number). Working with major consultancy firms such as Arup, the Foundation has also developed a toolkit for making cities more resilient.
Multiple meanings of resilience
Despite this rising popularity, resilience remains a contested concept with multiple meanings. It has been framed as persistence, adaptation and transformation. Persistence is one of the oldest definitions of resilience used by physical scientists and engineers to denote the capacity of systems to withstand external shocks and to âbounce-backâ to the original stable equilibrium. According to this engineering resilience, âthe resistance to disturbance and the speed by which the systemâ snaps back are âthe measures of resilience,â (Davoudi, 2012, p. 300). Defining resilience as adaptation was pioneered by the work of Buzz Holling in the field of ecology. He suggested that âResilience ⌠is a measure of the ability of these systems to absorb changes [âŚ] and still persistâ (Holling, 1973, p. 17). He later called this ecological resilience and defined it as âthe magnitude of the disturbance that can be absorbed before the system changes its structureâ (Holling, 1996, p. 33). In this perspective, the measure of resilience is ânot just how long it takes for the system to bounce back, but also how much disturbance it can take and stays within critical thresholdsâ (Davoudi, 2012, p. 300). These two understandings of resilience share a common view based on the existence of a stable equilibrium in complex systems, âbe it a pre-existing one to which a resilient system bounces back (engineering) or a new one to which it bounces forth (ecological)â (Davoudi, 2012, p. 301).
The idea of a stable equilibrium is rooted in Newtonian mechanical understanding of how the world works. This has been challenged by the complexity theory that considers systems as âcomplex, non-linear, and self-organising, permeated by uncertainty and discontinuitiesâ (Berkes and Folke, 1998, p. 12). New approaches to resilience including the more recent work by Holling and his fellow ecologists in the Resilience Alliance use the term socio-ecological resilience to âadvocate that the very nature of systems may change over time with or without an external disturbanceâ (Davoudi, 2012, p. 302). Some scholars have used the term âevolutionary resilienceâ (Simmie and Martin, 2010; Davoudi, 2012; Davoudi et al., 2013) suggesting that evolutionary resilience is not about a return to normality, but about âthe ability of complex socio-ecological systems to change, adapt, and crucially, transform in response to stresses and strainsâ (Davoudi, 2012, p. 302, drawing on Carpenter et al., 2005). Here, the emphasis is on transformation, and on breaking away from undesirable ânormalâ.
From ecology to society
The evolutionary conceptualisation of resilience is now advocated by the Resilience Alliance as a general systems theory which can integrate society, economy and ecology. Hence, the notion of resilience has been extended beyond its engineering and ecological roots into the realm of society. This âtotal complex systemâ is often dubbed as âPanarchyâ and defined as:
the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g. forests) and of humans (e.g. capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g. institutions that govern natural resources use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal.
(Gunderson and Holling, 2002, cover text)
In this Panarchy model, systems function in a series of nested adaptive cycles that interact at multiple scales, speeds and timeframes. This means that, âsmall-scale changes [âŚ] can amplify and cascade into major shifts (reflecting Edward Lorenzâs idea of âthe butterfly effectâ) while large interventions may have little or no effectsâ (Davoudi, 2012, p. 303). Therefore, âpast behaviour of the system is no longer a reliable predictor of future behaviour even when circumstances are similarâ (Duit et al., 2010, p. 367).
As I have suggested elsewhere, âthe significance of Hollingâs work lies in his departure from Newtonian and mechanistic assertions of equilibrium â typical of the post-war cybernetics and closed systems theory â and his adoption of complexity science in the field of ecologyâ (Davoudi, 2016, p. 156). Given the unknowability of contingent outcomes, it is argued that there is a need for âa qualitative capacity to devise systems that can absorb and accommodate future events in whatever unexpected form they may takeâ (Holling, 1973, p. 21). Evolutionary resilience is a great step forward in systems thinking but when it is applied to the social context it is conceptually problematic and normatively contested. Conceptually, it is problematic because it overlooks human agency which is manifested in our ability to displace the effects of a crisis in time and space; the unequal distribution of power which can disrupt channels of communications and feedbacks; our ability to imagine and perceive âchanges at a larger scale and longer term than our sensory abilities and immediate experience allowâ and put in place mitigating measures; and our capacity to undertake organised collective action (Davidson, 2010, p. 1114). It is normatively contested because it raises questions of justice, fairness and inclusion depending on how it is interpreted as discussed below.
Self-reliance and neoliberal mentalities
The overemphasis on self-reliance, which is a misguided translation of self-organisation in complex systems, resonates closely with the neoliberal mentality and its emphasis on individualisation of responsibility (Davoudi and Madanipour, 2015). Indeed, it is this ideological fit with neoliberal mentality which has made resilience a favourable concept in public policy (Davoudi, 2016). Self-reliance implies that people and places should âpull themselves up by their bootstraps and reinvent themselves in the face of external challengesâ (Swanstrom, 2008, p. 10). This means that to build resilience, the public sector should leave people and places to their own devices and resist supporting them. Officials claim that âif the government takes greater responsibility for risks in the community, it may feel under pressure to take increasingly more responsibility, thereby eroding community resilienceâ (RRAC, 2009, p. 6). The principle of self-organization, extracted from the complexity theory, offers a convenient match with both liberal understanding of responsibility and the freedom from the state intervention as well as the conservative value of self-help. Furthermore, it creates a contingently shared platform with communitarianâs advocacy of self-sufficiency as an alternative to global capitalism. Such an alignment makes resilience a powerful discourse in which self-reliance is cast as âa common sense, neutral and universal measure of the resilient self; one that a responsible citizen should aspire to in the face of radical uncertaintiesâ (Davoudi, 2016, p. 162). The move from the welfare to neoliberal modes of government in the late 1970s has been coupled with the liberal advocacy of individual responsibility which above all is aimed at entrepreneurship.
The intuitive fit between this interpretation of resilience and neoliberal values is not coincidental. According to Walker and Cooper (2011), the ideas that influenced Hollingâs ecological resilience run in parallel with the birth of neoliberalism. In the 1970s, when Holling was working on his ecological resilience, Friedrich Hayek was developing his theory of âspontaneous orderâ. Similar to the idea of self-organization, this theory asserts that social order emerges from the interaction of self-serving individuals who rationally utilize the price systems to adjust their plans (Hayek, 1976). Like Holling, Hayek drew on complex systems theory to criticise âthe state-engineered equilibria of Keynesian demand managementâ and called for the reform of âall social institutions in accordance with the self-organizing dynamic of the marketâ (Walker and Cooper, 2011, p. 149) which, he believed, could better maintain social order.
The overemphasis on self-reliance overlaps with the liberal view of society and the place of the individual within it. As Norberto Bobbio (1990, p. 43) put it, âliberal individualismâ âamputates the individual from the organic body ⌠plunges him into the unknown and perilous world of the struggle for survivalâ. He distinguishes this from âdemocratic individualismâ which âjoins the individual together once more with others like himself, so that society can be built up again from their union, no longer as an organic whole but as an association of free individualsâ (ibid). The appropriation of resilience by the neoliberal agenda has turned the concept into a measure of the fitness of people and places to survive in the turbulent world; reiterating âthe Darwinian law of natural selection and its interpretation as the survival of the fittestâ (Davoudi, 2016, p. 164). It is claimed that âresilience, seen as an innate capacity of the biological species will diminish if people are exposed too much to dependency-inducing state welfareâ (Davoudi, 2016, p. 163). Self-reliance is prescribed as a primary measure of resilience and a key âexistential yardstickâ (Rorty, 1999). It reproduces the wider process of âexistential politicsâ by which âselective meanings and understanding of human subjectivityâ are identified and institutionalized (Raco, 2009, p. 437, original emphasis). Living with threat, insecurity and vulnerability and standing on our own two feet is what the neoliberal interpretation of resilience is advocating. People are, therefore, expected to âcarry the weight of the world on their shouldersâ and become âresponsible for themselves as a way of beingâ (Sartre, 1957, p. 51). Such a view has major implications for social democratic values of social justice, solidarity and inclusion. There is a danger in accepting resilience as a universally âgoodâ idea to promote and to which everyone should subscribe.
To avoid the pitfalls of resilience building ideas and activities, we should question their intended outcomes and ask: resilience for whom, âresilience from what to what, and who gets to decide?â (Porter and Davoudi, 2012, p. 331). If resilience is a âbuffer capacity for preserving what we have and recovering to where we wereâ (Folke et al., 2010, p. 20), we need to ask: is what we have a desirable condition that is worth preserving and returning to? Or, should we seek an alternative, more desirable path to move towards. We also need to be mindful of how âdesirableâ is defined and by whom? Democratic procedures and inclusive decision making are, therefore, critical for ensuring that the outcome of resilience building is not prescribed by a few and applied to all.
Evolutionary resilience reflects a paradigm shift in science where nothing is certain except uncertainty itself. However, contrary to its dominant interpretation, the existence of uncertainty does not justify the acceptance of the status quo or inaction, because complexity and uncertainty provide the opportunity for trying an untried beginning. The contributions to this book provide a rich array of case study examples that demonstrate the opportunities and pitfalls of resilience building. They highlight the transformative potentials of resilience thinking, while at the same time unearthing the challenges of operationalising a concept which carries multiple meanings and risks being co-opted into the dominant neoliberal agendas. I share both the editorsâ enthusiasm for the opportunities which might arise from the application of resilience thinking in vulnerable places and their cautions about its potential challenges.
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