Resilience

The Governance of Complexity

David Chandler

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317682547
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Politique et relations internationales
• Thema: Relations internationales

Resilience has become a central concept in government policy understandings over the last decade. In our complex, global and interconnected world, resilience appears to be the policy 'buzzword' of choice, alleged to be the solution to a wide and ever-growing range of policy issues. This book analyses the key aspects of resilience-thinking and highlights how resilience impacts upon traditional conceptions of governance.This concise and accessible book investigates how resilience-thinking adds new insights into how politics (both domestically and internationally) is understood to work and how problems are perceived and addressed; from educational training in schools to global ethics and from responses to shock events and natural disasters to long-term international policies to promote peace and development. This book also raises searching questions about how resilience-thinking influences the types of knowledge and understanding we value and challenges traditional conceptions of social and political processes.

It sets forward a new and clear conceptualisation of resilience, of use to students, academics and policy-makers, emphasising the links between the rise of resilience and awareness of the complex nature of problems and policy-making.

1 INTRODUCTION The rise of resilience

DOI: 10.4324/9781315773810-1

Introduction

Resilience has become increasingly central to international and domestic policy-making over the last decade. In fact, it has been argued that resilience is the ‘guiding principle’ of policy governance and ‘one of the key political categories of our time’.¹ Resilience is now the top priority for the sustainable development and international development aid agenda,² key to international security concerns, from cyber conflict to the war on terror,³ and vital for disaster risk reduction,⁴ conflict prevention,⁵ climate change⁶ and social, economic and institutional development.⁷ Over the last few years, resilience appears to have become the policy buzzword of choice.⁸ This is so much the case that it is not unusual to find commentators querying whether resilience can really be the solution to such a diverse range of governance questions and, if so, how this might work. This book is concerned with precisely these questions of resilience as part of a governance agenda and how resilience-thinking impacts on how politics (both domestically and internationally) is understood to work and how problems are perceived and addressed. In the following chapters, a range of issues and questions will be analysed in terms of resilience frameworks, from educational training in schools to global ethics and from responses to shock events and natural disasters to how resilience has been discussed in the context of international policies to promote peace and development.

I have been interested in the rise of resilience-thinking for some time, and I am lucky enough to be the editor of the first international journal devoted solely to analysing the policies and practices which go under the title of resilience. Yet, I must confess that the diversity of approaches to resilience across a large number of policy and academic fields means that, although resilience seems to be ubiquitous, how the concept operates and the uses to which it is put are not always clear. Even policy practitioners who advocate the need for resilience do not always seem clear on how resilience works or can be developed.⁹ As a recent Overseas Development Institute paper argues: ‘The concept of resilience is at the centre of current debates in development, climate change adaptation and humanitarian aid. However, it is not clear what resilience is, or how it can or should be promoted during and after crises’.¹⁰ Even though resilience-thinking is emerging across the policy spectrum, its outlines are not clearly demarcated. It does not necessarily help to word-search resilience in policy documents, as it is used in diverse ways and contexts. Nor does it necessarily help to turn to academic and more conceptual works which tend to squeeze resilience into whatever theoretical boxes the researcher works within.¹¹

This book is designed to bring some analytical clarity to the rise of resilience-thinking, but it is not a survey of the diverse uses of the concept of resilience in policy-documents, nor is it a conceptual history of the term. Analytical clarity will be sought through engaging with a specific problematic: the rise of resilience-thinking as a response to the problem of governing in a world which appears to be more complex to us. While resilience as a concept has a history that lends it a certain range of meanings, this book is concerned with its meaning as a policy response to policy problems as they are increasingly perceived today. In this sense, the book is a ‘history of the present’; it seeks to engage analytically with what resilience appears to be doing today and how the rise of resilience-thinking enables us to reflect upon shifts in the understanding of governance. To put it another way: if resilience is the answer, suggested by policy interventions in every area, from education to the environment to conflict-resolution and poverty-reduction, what does this tell us about the questions we are asking of the world and how we understand ourselves in relation to this world?

I do not wish to suggest that all policy-understandings start from the perspective of resilience as a governing response. Rather, I merely want to emphasize that this framing is becoming increasingly dominant in both international and domestic policy-making, as previous approaches appear to become less and less viable today. In order to develop this conceptual analysis of resilience-thinking, the study of resilience will not be narrowly confined to a set of empirical policy practices, developed to work on resilience (as a set of capacities) in the face of crisis or threats. This book is not a handbook for policy-makers,¹² and, more importantly, resilience-thinking operates at a much broader level of political thinking about governance than that covered in policy documents. The key aspects that define resilience approaches to policy-making are methodological assumptions about the nature of the world, the complex problem of governance, and the policy processes suitable to governing this complexity. It is thus quite possible to chart a rise in resilience-thinking as a governing rationality without mentioning the word ‘resilience’ and, equally, to see the word ‘resilience’ crop up many times in a policy paper without this being evidence that a clear conceptualisation of resilience forms the basis of understanding.

Teaching resilience

Complex economic, social, political and environmental problems no longer seem amenable to old-fashioned or top-down, state-based, interventions of government operating at a macro-level. It seems that some of the most intractable problems of government are being re-thought in a more people-centred or ‘bottom-up’ way. A recent example, which caught my eye when I was preparing the manuscript for this book, was a call for resilience to be taught in all UK schools (from an All-Party group of Members of the House of Commons and House of Lords, supported by children's charities and the Open University).¹³ The call for mainstreaming resilience in the school curriculum was a response to the recognition of the problems of social mobility: the reproduction of entrenched patterns of economic and social deprivation, which is a particular problem for the UK when international standards are considered.¹⁴ Interestingly, the All-Party's focus was not upon how young people could achieve success but upon how they could change their approach to failure.

As we will see in the course of this book, changing our approach to failure is a central tenet of resilience-thinking. Using failure productively – that is, seeing failing as an opportunity for growth rather than as a final judgement – in this case, was understood to be essential for social mobility, especially for children from more deprived backgrounds who need to be able to ‘deal with life's problems without being knocked off course’.¹⁵ As the head of the All-Party group argued, schools in the UK were unintentionally undermining UK social and economic development by focusing on success rather than on failure:

Whatever your GCSE results or other qualification, how do you make the most of the opportunities that come along? How do you bounce back once things go wrong? How do you believe that you can achieve? Over quite an extended period of time, we've had a real focus on examination results – not quite to the exclusion of all else but to a really great degree. But some schools also go on about how developing the character of the young person is absolutely core business.¹⁶

Schools were focusing on the educational attainments of students and encouraging competition based on succeeding and passing rather than on thinking about how failure can be seen more positively. For this reason, competitive sports were seen as important – not in terms of emulating the success of Britain's Olympic team the previous summer – but for children to learn that ‘not everybody is going to win everything’. The head of the All-Party group argued that ‘failure is going to happen at some point in life. The question is how early you start being prepared for it’.¹⁷

This snapshot of resilience as a policy approach tells us a few things about the rise of resilience-thinking. First, there is the appearance of an intractable and complex policy problem – in this case, that of ‘social mobility’. The problem is understood to indicate lessons for governance through tracing this problem as the outcome of processes of social interaction. Second, rather than starting at the top of the policy ladder, reactively intervening to attempt to address the consequences, resilience traces these processes backwards to deal with them at the level of root causes. These roots are seen to lie deep within the social texture of society. Social problems are thereby re-presented as problems which are deeply social, rather than as problems of social policy-making at the level of state regulation or intervention. This is why schooling is often considered a vital area of governance intervention today. Third, resilience policies seek to work with existing capabilities and practices and to enable them to operate more efficiently and effectively.

The implication is that children have capacities that are not being developed adequately in schools – which merely focus on upon achieving exam results or on the acquisition of knowledge – these are the vital personal and emotional qualities of resilience. So what is resilience and why is it needed? According to the All-Party group, acquiring knowledge can be seen as a core educational value in a modernist world, which is assumed to remain static. However, in a rapidly changing world, success is not based so much upon a store of acquired knowledge but upon the capacities for self-reflection and reflexive understanding of how one needs to adapt in an ever shifting environment. The experts thought that children from deprived backgrounds were not being adequately taught how to develop these qualities of self-reflexivity and therefore could not cope with failure. In a complex world, the limits of what we know and expect are seen to be more important than what we know: coping with these limits – with failure – enables us to see ‘failure’ as part of the learning process based on adaptation and self-reflexivity. Failure plays an entirely different role in this approach to the subject, to knowledge and to the world. Not only is failure to be expected in a complex world, but the key point is how we use failure or limits to enable progress. Failure is the starting point for personal and societal growth. We learn more about ourselves and how to govern from failure than we do from success, which merely defers this process of learning and growth.

Classical and post-classical resilience

There is very little consensus on the concept of resilience. This lack of consensus reflects our difficulties in coming to terms with the limits of knowledge and with the implications of these limits for how we rethink the world and our relationship to it. Despite its ubiquitous use in policy documents, it seems to have manifold meanings. Is it about responding (‘bouncing back’) from disaster or crisis?¹⁸ Is it a process through which crises make us stronger, more flexible, and more open to new opportunities?¹⁹ Is it about how we can act preventively and proactively to minimise the effects of crises or problems?²⁰ What is the relationship between resilience and the event, crisis or problem?²¹ How does resilience understand the subject?²² Is the subject interpellated as strong and independent, capable of surviving the toughest tests? Is the subject seen as flexible, adaptable and autotelic, thriving on self-growth and self-direction? Is the subject passive and reactive, disciplined to adapt to external changes and dictates? How we understand resilience depends a lot on the disciplinary fields in which we work and, to a certain extent, on the era in which we were brought up.

Resilience appears to cover a wide spectrum of meanings, in terms of both its temporal relation to the event, crisis or threat and its interpellation of the subject from active and self-creating to passive and responsibilised. This is no coincidence because the concept of resilience has itself been transformed: this transformation can be read through different understandings of the relation between the human subject and his or her environment. A concept that started out as clearly distinguishing the subject and its inner strengths and capacities has become transmuted into a concept which emphasises the interrelationship between subject and object. This is somewhat counterintuitive as resilience in its initial formulations was very much subject-centred. This is clear in classical understandings of the resilient subject as an isolated individual withstanding the severe tests and pressures of nature. Think, for example, of the Robinson Crusoe figure, the resilient shipwrecked sailor living off his own wits and resources on a deserted island, or an Arctic explorer, surviving the extreme cold and hunger, traversing a barren wilderness. The resilient subjects overcame the barriers of the environment (classically constructed in natural terms rather than social) through their inner strengths and capacities. In social terms, the resilient subject could withstand oppressive conditions. In these cases it was usually women who were understood to be resilient, withstanding the pressures of poverty and abuse, calling upon their inner strengths and capacities to cope with pain or deprivation.

These human or subject-based understandings of inner capacities for survival – through inner strengths and capacities to withstand trauma or pressure – came to be applied to objects or to nature in the engineering and environmental sciences. When these concepts were transferred, it was this classical understanding that was taken on board. External pressures could be withstood through inner strengths. In this framing, especially in psychology and engineering, resilience came to mean ‘bounce-back ability’ – the tensions of metal to withstand stress or the capacity of individuals to recover from loss or trauma. In ecology, it came to mean the rejuvenating capacities of ecosystems to withstand both natural and human stresses. The etymological history of resilience is therefore one of a strong subject/object divide and thereby reflective of the world of liberal modernity. The focus was on the subject's internal capacity to withstand pressures or stresses which were understood to be externally generated. This – let us call it ‘classical’ – understanding of resilience also came to the fore in security discourses, especially in relation to post-9/11 discussions of the impact of terrorist attacks. These discussions concerned the possibility of preparedness and response to possible attacks, causing major social disruption, and focused upon the ability of society to ‘bounce back’, to maintain basic operational capacity and to cope with disaster, which was seen to be as inevitable as it was unpredictable.²³

The rise of resilience would have been limited, however, if it had merely reflected the need to cope or to survive in a world of fluidity and uncertainty: if the concept was merely about inculcating and developing the capacities and properties needed for subjects to cope with external shocks and set...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: The rise of resilience
• Part I Thematics
• Part II Resilience and the international
• Part III The politics of resilience
• References
• Index