Resilience

Kevin Grove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138949027
• eBook ISBN: 9781317340003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Is resilience simply a fad, or is it a new way of thinking about human–environment relations, and the governance of these relations, that has real staying power? Is resilience a dangerous, depoliticizing concept that neuters incipient political activity, or the key to more empowering, emancipatory, and participatory forms of environmental management?

Resilience offers an advanced introduction to these debates. It provides students with a detailed review of how the concept emerged from a small corner of ecology to critically challenge conventional environmental management practices, and radicalize how we can think about and manage social and ecological change. But Resilience also situates this new style of thought and management within a particular historical and geographical context. It traces the roots of resilience to the cybernetically-influenced behavioral science of Herbert Simon, the neoliberal political economic theory of new institutional economics, the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, and the modernist design aesthetic of the Bauhaus school. These diverse roots are what distinguish resilience approaches from other ways of studying human-environment relations. Resilience thinking recalibrates the study of social and environmental change around a will to design, a drive or desire to synthesize diverse forms of knowledge and develop collaborative, cross-boundary solutions to complex problems. In contrast to the modes of analysis and critique found in geography and cognate disciplines, resilience approaches strive to pragmatically transform human–environment relations in ways that will produce more sustainable futures for complex social and ecological systems.

In providing a road map to debates over resilience that brings together research from geography, anthropology, sociology, international relations, and philosophy, this book gives readers the conceptual and theoretical tools necessary to engage with political and ethical questions about how we can and should live together in an increasingly interconnected and unpredictable world.

1
Resilience and Geographic Thought

The Promise of Resilience

My shoes were not resilient. Although we had only been standing in the rain for fifteen minutes, the mid-afternoon pop-up shower had already soaked them through. I had anticipated this event, dutifully spraying my footwear with a waterproof treatment and packing an umbrella, but to no avail. The deluge overwhelmed my careful planning and transformed my comfortable shoes into waterlogged blister-generating machines. They had lost their form, function and identity in the face of an external shock. Definitely not resilient. But a short distance away from where we stood as I contemplated my situation, the pumps continued humming as cars splashed past. I was standing with a group of scientists and city planning officials in the middle of a Miami Beach road next to one of several new pumping stations the city government had recently begun installing in flood-prone locations. The officials were graciously giving us a walking tour of the city’s resilience initiatives. As the rain continued to fall, a city engineer described how the pump collected storm water runoff and pumped it back into nearby Biscayne Bay. After a short slog, we stood in front of a construction zone where crews were raising low-lying roads to drier elevation three feet higher. Between the pumps and road-raising efforts across the low-lying city, Miami Beach’s resilience efforts are ambitious, creative and costly. The price tag for the pumps alone topped US$400 million, which the city funded through a monthly surcharge to all residents’ sewer and water bills. “The cost of a cell phone bill,” one official often quipped at various meetings (field notes, 18 January 2016; see also Cox and Cox 2016). Miami Beach is fortunate in this regard. Notwithstanding pockets of poverty, the city enjoys a wealthy tax base, skyrocketing real estate values, and a booming tourism industry. In an era of global budgeting austerity, this relative prosperity gives the city financial leeway to experiment with different resilience-building efforts. Indeed, many commentators suggest that in the last instance, the pumps will be a futile gesture. The city simply cannot barricade itself behind higher seawalls and pump out the water as the ocean rises, because it sits on top of porous limestone that allows water to seep in from the ground up. If sea levels follow experts’ predictions and continue to rise over the next century – and there is no reason to doubt them – the city, much like my shoes, will become a waterlogged, increasingly uncomfortable place to inhabit.

Our tour guides were grappling with an increasingly common challenge: how to design a more resilient city that can survive and thrive despite looming climate change impacts, even if survival involves transforming into a new and unrecognizable aqua-urban form? In this sense, the pumps cannot be dismissed as a futile gesture. They also embody a new kind of promise, the promise of resilience (Aradau 2014): the possibility that even as sea levels rise, even as the world changes around us, we might be able to adjust to these new realities, survive, and even prosper. In a world seemingly overrun by complex threats such as global environmental change or international terrorism that defy modern security strategies premised on spatial division and temporal prediction, this promise has made resilience a cornerstone of both academic research and professional practice. Over the past twenty years, the rising tide of resilience has seeped out of isolated corners in ecology, psychology, engineering and organizational management, and now inundates research across the disciplines. International development and humanitarianism (Chandler 2014a), disaster studies (Manyena 2006; Cannon and Müller-Mahn 2010), urban security (Coaffee and Rogers 2008), environmental management (Gunderson and Holling 2002), community development (Wilson 2012), economic geography (Dawley et al. 2010), urban planning (Davoudi 2012) and climate change studies (Eakin and Leurs 2006; Nelson et al. 2007), to name but a few, have all seen notable growth in work on and about resilience. Professional fields are no different. Resilience guides emergency planning in the US Department of Homeland Security – whether this involves technical fields of critical infrastructure protection (DHS 2013) or the capacity-building “Whole Community” strategy (FEMA 2011). It shapes decision-making and planning in international disaster management and development frameworks (UN 2005, 2015; DFID 2011), and has thus been exported to emergency management planning agencies around the globe (Grove 2013a). In the UK, it has become the centerpiece of planning for urban security (Coaffee and Rogers 2008; Coaffee 2013), community development (Rogers 2013), regional development (Welsh 2014; Zebrowski 2016), as well as the underlying framework for the turn to Third Way, “soft paternalism” that shapes all manner of governmental practice (Chandler 2013; Chandler and Reid 2016). It lends its name to 100 Resilient Cities, an ambitious philanthropic network sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, which seeks nothing less than reforming urban and regional governance within a complex and catastrophe-prone socio-ecological milieu. And of course, it has been the keystone of alternative environmental management strategies stretching back to formative publications on the theory and practice of adaptive management (Holling 1978; Walters 1986; Lee 1993).

This promise of resilience drove us all into the Miami Beach rain. We were conducting background research on integrative and holistic approaches to urban resilience. But we were far from the only group active in the city. A few months earlier, the mayor announced a new partnership with Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, which would give the city a chance to explore innovative design-based resilience initiatives. The city had also recently hired a Chief Resilience Officer and Assistant Chief Resilience Officer, and contracted with design and engineering consultants AECOM to begin drafting a city resilience plan. These moves anticipated the selection of “Greater Miami and the Beaches” for the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program. GMTB, as it is now called, is a coalition of Miami Beach, the city of Miami, and Miami-Dade County governments. Their joint selection provides financial support for Chief Resilience Officer positions, facilitates the development of a region-wide resilience plan with guidance from the Foundation and their consultants (including AECOM), and also provides the governments with discounted or free consultancy work from a “menu” of national and international agencies that work on all manner of urban resilience-related issues. In Miami Beach, the demand for resilience is practically unlimited. There is no such thing as too much resilience, and city officials have a remarkable number of paths – ours included – to explore how they might realize the promise of resilience in practice.

This book will examine the history and implications of this explosive interest in resilience on academic thought and practice in general, and within the discipline of geography in particular. I depart from the assumption that resilience cannot be dismissed as simply the latest academic and policy fad, a flash in the pan that will soon run its course and fall out of favor. Nor can it be written off as mere ideological cover for continued neoliberalization of social and ecological relations, a fashionable charge I will dissect below. Instead, I take seriously the challenge resilience poses to conventional ways of thinking about human–environment relations (and socio-spatial relations more generally) and practicing social and environmental management. As I will demonstrate throughout this book, resilience is slowly transforming thought and practice in ways that often fly under the radar of conventional forms of analysis and reflection, both critical and applied. My goal is to map these transformations and unpack the opportunities for thinking social and ecological change and uncertainty they introduce – but also their limitations.

I am thus less concerned with what resilience is than what resilience does. Any attempt to give resilience a clear and concise meaning is problematic, as critics and proponents alike acknowledge (Brand and Jax 2007; Anderson 2015; Dunn-Cavelty et al. 2015; Simon and Randalls 2016). Instead, I am concerned with the way resilience thinking transforms the relationship between truth and control. Truth: the kinds of things we can know (and not know) about the world around us. Control: strategic interventions in the world designed to shape possible outcomes. Since the dawn of European modernity, the relation between truth and control – in the Western world, at least – has been defined as what the French historian Michel Foucault refers to as a will to truth: the notion that truth should be objective and lead to reliable prediction, unsullied by subjective values and tastes; predictive knowledge will enable humans to bend nature to their will. But since the early twentieth century, the growing assertion that we live in a complex world beyond total knowledge and control has begun reconfiguring this relation into what I call here a will to design. If a will to truth is premised on objective knowledge, a will to design recognizes that knowledge will necessarily be limited or “bounded,” to play on behavioral scientist Herbert Simon’s (1955) Nobel Prize-winning phrase. For Simon and other complexity theorists, total knowledge of a complex world exceeds human cognitive capacities. Prediction is impossible in such conditions, because complexity implies that change will be nonlinear and often unforeseeable. But this does not mean control is impossible. Instead, intervention requires constant monitoring and reflection that will allow humans to adjust (or more precisely, adapt) their interventions to the unpredictable effects that result. A will to design signals the effort or striving to intervene in and adapt to a complex world from a position of necessarily partial knowledge.

What does resilience do then? I will argue that resilience reconfigures thought and practice on human–environmental relations around a will to design. As I will demonstrate below, Herbert Simon and other scholars of complexity and human artifice shaped the thought of influential resilience scholars, especially C.S. Holling (1978; 2001), Elinor Ostrom (1990; Kiser and Ostrom 1982) and Kai Lee (1993). Although contemporary research has largely written out these influences, excavating their formative role draws out a will to design’s continued impact on contemporary developments and debates on resilience. To the extent that the need to become resilient is reshaping thought and action in any number of fields of study and professional practice, then a will to design is the mold around which these activities are re-formed.

However, the ties that bind resilience theory and a will to design are buried deep beneath decades of work on resilience in fields such as ecology and psychology. The proliferation of interest in resilience across the disciplines has only added more dirt to the pile. Excavating these connections and exploring their continued influence requires us to sift through these layers. This means that as we dig through topics and debates that preoccupy current research on resilience, we also must remain somewhat outside or external to them. In other words, we need to aestheticize resilience (Groys 2016), or approach resilience thinking as an object of study itself, whose modes of truth-telling about the world and prescriptions for how to live within and manage this world need to be unpacked and analyzed, rather than taken for granted as the starting-point of analysis. The next section considers these points.

Aestheticizing Resilience

Resilience is a notoriously slippery concept to pin down. It shifts meaning, function, and efficacy as it flows from one context to the next. Sociologist and disaster studies specialist Kathleen Tierney (2014) recently identified over forty distinct uses of the term in academic and professional literature. While we can trace the concept’s roots to engineering, psychology, organizational management and disaster studies, ecologists developed what is arguably the most influential understanding of the term (Welsh 2014; Brown and Westaway 2011). Since C.S. Holling’s (1973) path-breaking work on multiple-equilibrium ecosystems, ecologists typically understand resilience as a social or ecological system’s capacity to adapt to exogenous disturbances and reorganize itself in ways that maintain existing function and identity (Walker and Salt 2012). This seemingly paradoxical condition of staying the same while changing is one of the reasons resilience has attracted so much attention from geographers and researchers in related disciplines: in a world of complex interconnections and unpredictable, emergent phenomena humans can neither control nor prevent, resilience asserts that change, disruption, and vulnerability are potentially beneficial conditions (Walker et al. 2004). Resilience focuses on identifying and improving conditions that enable systemic adaptations following disturbances, whether adaptation is a matter of ‘bouncing back’ to a previous state or ‘bouncing forward’ to a new and potentially improved configuration.

This understanding of persisting within and through change has made resilience attractive to policymakers and practitioners grappling with different expressions of complex, interconnected social and ecological phenomena. However, this popularity has also sparked a backlash from critical scholars. For example, some disaster studies researchers have argued that resilience brings little new to the table; it simply puts a new name to processes and issues their field has studied for decades (Manyena 2006). In the process, its “scientistic” slant on vulnerability and adaptation detracts attention and resources from underlying socio-economic inequalities that cause vulnerability in the first place (Cannon and Müller-Mahn 2010; see also Gaillard 2010; Pelling 2010). Outside disaster studies, other critical scholars have drawn attention to the depoliticizing ideological and biopolitical effects of resilience-building initiatives (Chandler 2014a; MacKinnon and Derickson 2012; Grove 2013a, 2013b, 2014a; Welsh 2014; Cretney 2014). For these critics, resilience initiatives facilitate the spread and consolidation of neoliberal socio-ecological relations – that is, they normalize vulnerability, seek to make individuals responsible for managing the effects of social and ecological insecurities and disruptions, and thus provide discursive justification for further cuts to social welfare provisioning (Walker and Cooper 2011; Duffield 2011; Evans and Reid 2014). While some researchers suggest resilience might provide a foothold for subversive action (Grove 2013b; Nelson 2014), others argue we should abandon resilience in favor of other concepts with less ideological baggage (MacKinnon and Derickson 2012; Neocleous 2013).

Beneath its waters, the rising tide of resilience generates turbulent debate. Is it a beneficial concept that can help scholars address intractable problems of social and ecological complexity? Does it simply provide neoliberal reforms with ideological justification? And how might we study and make sense of a concept that has clearly become central to research and practice in a number of fields, but that nonetheless is characterized by a lack of conceptual clarity and coherence?

Ecologists Fridolin Brand and Kurt Jax’s 2007 Ecology and Society article, tellingly entitled, “Focusing on the meaning(s) of resilience: resilience as a descriptive concept and boundary object,” provides one provocative solution. They begin by reviewing ten distinct ways influential studies have used “resilience,” which they then classify into three categories. First, some studies in ecology utilize resilience as a descriptive concept that represents an ecosystem’s capacity to reconfigure itself following a disturbance in ways that maintain identity and function. Second, studies in ecology and cognate fields such as environmental studies and geography use resilience as a normative concept that conveys implicit or explicit judgments about how complex social and ecological relations should be organized. Third, other publications utilize it as a hybrid concept that blends elements of both descriptive and normative uses. In their diagnosis, this incoherence presents a grave threat to further research: “both conceptual clarity and practical relevance [of resilience] are critically in danger” from the concept’s growing popularity in the ecological, social, and biological sciences (Brand and Jax 2007: unpag.). For them, only the descriptive usage found in ecological studies offers a “quantitative and measurable concept that can be used for achieving progress in ecological science” (ibid.). In contrast, other uses fail to prevent normative judgments from coloring objective scientific analysis, and dilute the original meaning of the term in ways that enable ambiguous and divergent uses. They propose a so-called “division of labor in a scientific sense” (ibid.) in response. On one hand, ecologists – and ecologists alone – should be able to lay claim to resilience as a descriptive concept, since a purified, objective and descriptive understanding offers a “clear, well defined, and specified concept that provides the basis for operationalization and application within ecological science” (ibid.). But this does not mean other disciplines cannot contribute to research on complex social and ecological systems. They also suggest that normative and hybrid uses “foster communication across disciplines and between science and practice,” a trait they see as quite desirable (ibid.). Thus, to promote integrative, cross-boundary research, they suggest that researchers outside of ecology should utilize resilience as a “boundary object” that enables interdisciplinary analysis of complex social and ecological systemic dynamics.

Brand and Jax’s formulation of resilience as a boundary object certainly helps us conceptualize how resilience has emerged from provincial corners of ecology and psychology (among other fields) to become one of the most influential concepts in contemporary social and environmental research (Zimmerer 2015). However, for my interests here, their efforts to promote resilience as a means of facilitating cross-boundary research point us towards a distinct style of thought about social and environmental change, a certain way of posing problems and devising solutions to these problems that I am here calling a will to design.

Resilience and a Will to Design

With the concept of will to design, I am signaling an ethos of sorts, a drive or desire to synthesize otherwise distinct forms of knowledge in order to develop collaborative and cross-boundary solutions to contextually specific problems of complexity. My use of this term draws heavily on work in design studies. At first glance, this may appear to be an odd pairing. For the most part, design is an alien concept in geography. The term does not have an entry in the encyclopedic Dictionary of Human Geography (Gregory et al. 2009). And yet, as I hope to show throughout this book, the path towards understanding how resilience is shaping contemporary possibilities for thought on social and ecological change takes us through the cybernetic roots of design theory.

The influential design studies scholar Victor Margolin defines design in the following terms:

[d]esign is the conception and planning of the artificial, that broad domain of human made products which includes material objects, visual and verbal communications, organized activities and services, and complex systems and environments for living, working, playing, and learning.

(Buchanan and Margolin 1990; quoted in Margolin 1995: 13, emphasi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• 1 Resilience and geographic thought
• 2 Resilience as essentially contested concept
• 3 Resilience as subjugated knowledge
• 4 Resilience as critique
• 5 Resilience as design
• 6 Resilience as control
• 7 Un-worlding resilience
• 8 Conclusions: re-designing resilience?
• REFERENCES
• INDEX