Governing for Resilience in Vulnerable Places

Elen-Maarja Trell, Britta Restemeyer, Melanie M. Bakema, Bettina van Hoven, Elen-Maarja Trell, Britta Restemeyer, Melanie M. Bakema, Bettina van Hoven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138216495
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351596053
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Governing for Resilience in Vulnerable Places provides an overview and a critical analysis of the ways in which the concept 'resilience' has been addressed in social sciences research. In doing so, this edited book draws together state-of-the-art research from a variety of disciplines (i.e. spatial planning, economic and cultural geography, environmental and political sciences, sociology and architecture) as well as cases and examples across different spatial and geographical contexts (e.g. urban slums in India; flood-prone communities in the UK; coastal Japan). The cases present and explore challenges and potentials of resilience-thinking for practitioners and academics. As such, Governing for Resilience in Vulnerable Places aims to provide a scientifically robust overview and to generate some conceptual clarity for researchers, students and practitioners interested in the potential of resilience thinking as well as the application of resilience in practice.

1 Self-reliant resiliency and neoliberal mentality

A critical reflection

Simin Davoudi

Forget sustainability. It’s about resilience

—(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 “cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st-century” (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 ‘bounce-back’ to the original stable equilibrium. According to this engineering resilience, “the resistance to disturbance and the speed by which the system” snaps back are “the measures of resilience,” (Davoudi, 2012, p. 300). Defining resilience as adaptation was pioneered by the work of Buzz Holling in the field of ecology. He suggested that “Resilience … is a measure of the ability of these systems to absorb changes […] and still persist” (Holling, 1973, p. 17). He later called this ecological resilience and defined it as “the magnitude of the disturbance that can be absorbed before the system changes its structure” (Holling, 1996, p. 33). In this perspective, the measure of resilience is “not just how long it takes for the system to bounce back, but also how much disturbance it can take and stays within critical thresholds” (Davoudi, 2012, p. 300). These two understandings of resilience share a common view based on the existence of a stable equilibrium in complex systems, “be it a pre-existing one to which a resilient system bounces back (engineering) or a new one to which it bounces forth (ecological)” (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 “complex, non-linear, and self-organising, permeated by uncertainty and discontinuities” (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 “advocate that the very nature of systems may change over time with or without an external disturbance” (Davoudi, 2012, p. 302). Some scholars have used the term ‘evolutionary resilience’ (Simmie and Martin, 2010; Davoudi, 2012; Davoudi et al., 2013) suggesting that evolutionary resilience is not about a return to normality, but about “the ability of complex socio-ecological systems to change, adapt, and crucially, transform in response to stresses and strains” (Davoudi, 2012, p. 302, drawing on Carpenter et al., 2005). Here, the emphasis is on transformation, and on breaking away from undesirable ‘normal’.

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 ‘total complex system’ is often dubbed as ‘Panarchy’ 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, “small-scale changes […] can amplify and cascade into major shifts (reflecting Edward Lorenz’s idea of ‘the butterfly effect’) while large interventions may have little or no effects” (Davoudi, 2012, p. 303). Therefore, “past behaviour of the system is no longer a reliable predictor of future behaviour even when circumstances are similar” (Duit et al., 2010, p. 367).

As I have suggested elsewhere, “the significance of Holling’s work lies in his departure from Newtonian and mechanistic assertions of equilibrium – typical of the post-war cybernetics and closed systems theory – and his adoption of complexity science in the field of ecology” (Davoudi, 2016, p. 156). Given the unknowability of contingent outcomes, it is argued that there is a need for “a qualitative capacity to devise systems that can absorb and accommodate future events in whatever unexpected form they may take” (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 “changes at a larger scale and longer term than our sensory abilities and immediate experience allow” 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 “pull themselves up by their bootstraps and reinvent themselves in the face of external challenges” (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 “if the government takes greater responsibility for risks in the community, it may feel under pressure to take increasingly more responsibility, thereby eroding community resilience” (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 communitarian’s 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 “a common sense, neutral and universal measure of the resilient self; one that a responsible citizen should aspire to in the face of radical uncertainties” (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 Holling’s 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 “spontaneous order”. 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 “the state-engineered equilibria of Keynesian demand management” and called for the reform of “all social institutions in accordance with the self-organizing dynamic of the market” (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, ‘liberal individualism’ “amputates the individual from the organic body … plunges him into the unknown and perilous world of the struggle for survival”. He distinguishes this from ‘democratic individualism’ which “joins 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 individuals” (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 “the Darwinian law of natural selection and its interpretation as the survival of the fittest” (Davoudi, 2016, p. 164). It is claimed that “resilience, seen as an innate capacity of the biological species will diminish if people are exposed too much to dependency-inducing state welfare” (Davoudi, 2016, p. 163). Self-reliance is prescribed as a primary measure of resilience and a key “existential yardstick” (Rorty, 1999). It reproduces the wider process of “existential politics” by which “selective meanings and understanding of human subjectivity” 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 “carry the weight of the world on their shoulders” and become “responsible for themselves as a way of being” (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 ‘good’ 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, “resilience from what to what, and who gets to decide?” (Porter and Davoudi, 2012, p. 331). If resilience is a “buffer capacity for preserving what we have and recovering to where we were” (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 ‘desirable’ 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 editors’ enthusiasm for the opportunities which might arise from the application of resilience thinking in vulnerable places and their cautions about its potential challenges.

References

Berkes, F. and Folke, C. (eds.) (1998) Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bobbio, N. (1990) Liberalism and Democracy, London: Verso.

Carpenter, S. R., Westley, F. and Turner, G. (2005) Surrogates for resilience of social-ecological systems, Ecosystems, 8(8): 941–944.

Davidson, D. J. (2010) The applicability of the concept of resilience to social systems: Some sources of optimism and nagging doubts, Society and Natural Resources, 23(12): 1135–1149.

Davoudi, S. (2012) Resilience: “A bridging concept or a dead end?”, Planning Theory and Practice, 13(2): 299–307.

Davoudi, S. (2016) Resilience and the governmentality of unknowns, in M. Bevir (ed.) Governmentality after Neoliberalism, New York: Routledge.

Davoudi, S., Brooks, E. and Mehmood, A. (2013) Evolutionary resilience and strategies for climate adaptation, Planning Practice and Research, 28(3): 307–322.

Davoudi, S. and Madanipour, A. (2015) Localism and post-social governmentality, in S. Davoudi and A. Madanipour (eds.) Reconsidering Localism, London: Routledge, 77–103.

Duit, A., Galaza, V., Eckerberga, K. and Ebbessona, J. (2010) Governance, complexity, and resilience, Global Environmental Change, 20(3): 363–368.

Folke, C., Carpenter, S., Walker, B., Scheffer, M., Chapin, T. and Rockstrom, J. (2010) Resilience thinking: Integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability, Ecology and Society, 15(4): 20–28.

Gunderson, L. H. and Holling, C. S. (2002) Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, Washington, DC: Island Press.

Hayek, F. A. (1976) Law, Legislation and Liberty, The Mirage of Social Justice, Vol. 2, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Holling, C. S. (1973) Resilience and stability of ecological systems, Annual Review of Ecological Systems, 4: 1–23.

Holling, C. S. (1996) Engineering resileince versus ecological resilience, in Schulze, P.C. (ed.) Engineering within Ecological Constraints, Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Porter, L. and Davoudi, S. (2012) The politics of resilience for planning: A cautionary note, Planning Theory and Practice, 13(2): 329–333.

Raco, M. (2009) From expectations to aspirations: State modernisation, urban policy and the existential politics of welfare in the UK, P...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures and tables
• Information on contributing authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Self-reliant resiliency and neoliberal mentality: a critical reflection
• 2 Governing for resilience in vulnerable places: an introduction
• 3 Resilient energy landscapes: a spatial quest?
• 4 Resilience to what and for whom in landscape management
• 5 Resilience thinking – is vagueness a blessing or a curse in transdisciplinary projects? experiences from a regional climate change adaptation project
• 6 Flood resilience and legitimacy – an exploration of Dutch flood risk management
• 7 Flood groups in England: governance arrangements and contribution to flood resilience
• 8 Meta-decision-making and the speed and quality of disaster resilience and recovery
• 9 The Resiliency Web – a bottom-linked governance model for resilience and environmental justice in the context of disasters
• 10 Changing stakes: resilience, reconstruction, and participatory practices after the 2011 Japan tsunami
• 11 The value of participatory community arts for community resilience
• 12 “If we are not united, our lives will be very difficult”: resilience from the perspective of slum dwellers in Pedda Jalaripeta (India)
• 13 Riding the tide: socially-engaged art and resilience in an uncertain future
• 14 Resilience in practice – a transformative approach? a conversation with Henk Ovink, first Dutch special envoy for international water affairs
• Index