The Routledge Handbook of International Resilience

David Chandler, Jon Coaffee, David Chandler, Jon Coaffee

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138784321
• eBook ISBN: 9781317655985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Resilience is increasingly discussed as a key concept across many fields of international policymaking from sustainable development and climate change, insecurity, conflict and terrorism to urban and rural planning, international aid provision and the prevention of and responses to natural and man-made disasters. Edited by leading academic authorities from a number of disciplines, this is the first handbook to deal with resilience as a new conceptual approach to understanding and addressing a range of interdependent global challenges.

The Handbook is divided into nine sections:

• Introduction: contested paradigms of resilience;
• the challenges of resilience;
• governing uncertainty;
• resilience and neoliberalism;
• environmental concerns and climate change adaptation;
• urban planning;
• disaster risk reduction and response;
• international security and insecurity;
• the policy and practices of international development.

Highlighting how resilience-thinking is increasingly transforming international policy-making and government and institutional practices, this book will be an indispensable source of information for students, academics and the wider public interested in resilience, international relations and international security.

PART I

Introduction

1
INTRODUCTION

Contested paradigms of international resilience

David Chandler and Jon Coaffee

Introduction

Resilience has risen rapidly over the last decade or more to become one of the key terms in international policy and academic discussions. Whatever the subject matter of concern – whether it comes to questions of conflict management, the response to economic crisis, the mitigation of climate change, the challenges of urban poverty or disaster risk management – questions of resilience will be at the forefront. Leading international institutions, such as the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, government agencies and departments, international non-governmental organisations and community groups are all promoting the importance of resilience, formulating various conceptions of what it might be and how to achieve it and developing indicators to measure it. However, with the rapid rise of resilience has come uncertainty as to how it should be built and how different practices and approaches should come together to operationalise it (Hussain, 2013).

Advocates and critics disagree over many aspects of resilience: whether it is a new approach, capable of redirecting international policy discussions or just meaningless jargon; whether it is decentralising and redistributive of agency or maintains current structures of power; whether it opens up possibilities for radical critique and transformation or merely reproduces neoliberal understandings of self-responsibility; whether it is about maintaining stability and the status quo or encouraging risk-taking and change; whether the system- and process-based conceptualisations of ecology are suitable analogies for social and political life; whether measurements and metrics can or even should be developed to enable comparisons across time and space, or whether resilience is contextually and relationally specific; and so on.

As the reader will notice from a glance at the contents pages of this edited collection, international resilience is a multi-faceted concept and a set of multiple and evolving practices. This collection focuses on international discourses of resilience and enables the reader to engage with a range of conceptual positions from a number of disciplinary approaches. Some chapters are more conceptual, some are more empirical and case study based. We hope that there will be more than enough to feed the interests and needs of both practitioners and academics, whether they are experts in the field or approaching this issue for the first time. This brief introduction serves to contextualise the discussion of resilience in the international academic and policy developments of the last decade or so, and to contextualise the Handbook itself.

Paradigms of resilience

The world before resilience was one with a greater confidence in the capacity of states and governments to secure and control events. In this confident world, it appeared that knowledge and understanding could grow and that problems could be learned from in a universalist way: that lessons could be generalised and applied elsewhere. We suggest that the world of resilience is one with less confidence in the power of securing agency and the capacity of knowledge and generalisation. It is a world that seems less certain and more complex or contingent (Chandler, 2014). A world where clarity is less possible and separations between threats and objects to be secured, between inside and outside, human and nature, problems and solutions, past and future, seem less stable than before. Resilience is often defined in relation to this new awareness of insecurity or contingency: as a capacity to prepare for, to respond to, or to bounce back from problems or perturbations and disturbances, which cannot necessarily be predicted or foreseen in advance.

For the advocates of resilience, this new approach or new set of sensitivities enables a more open and fluid approach to the world, one which attempts to rethink or to move away from traditional approaches to problems. The characteristics of a more open approach often include a more iterative or process-based approach to problems, working with difficulties, being sensitive to feedback and not assuming that there is an immediate or fail-safe cure or solution. The reason for resilience approaches often involving less hubris and more caution is a greater awareness of unintended consequences or side-effects when acting in the world; for these reasons, resilience is seen as a more experimental and more context-dependent approach, less prone to making generalisations about what works and what does not. Advocates also flag up the shift in focus, with less of a binary ‘friend/enemy’ understanding and more of a focus on inter-relationships and mutual feedback. Problems are not always seen as something external to us, but often as symptoms or expressions of our own lack of understanding or failure to be alert to changes and shifts in our own environment.

While the general framework of resilience approaches seems to fairly coherently presage a number of shifts in awareness and policy-making in the international arena, this does not mean that resilience approaches are not necessarily problematic: in their starting assumptions; in their application; or in their attempted goals. Many of the chapters that follow seek to engage critically with certain aspects of resilience approaches and draw out the limitations, confusions, exclusions, misappropriations and power inequalities which can be involved in resilience discourses and practices. The purpose of the Handbook is to present a wide variety of engagements with the resilience problematic, to extend thinking in this field, and to develop discussion and analysis. We have no intention of closing down or limiting this developing field by assuming that discussion and debate are over; in fact, we realise that it is precisely because resilience is understood in diverse ways that the academic and policy field is so contested.

However, we think that, by way of introduction, it may be useful to draw attention to how the rise of resilience relates to contemporary political and philosophical discussions, which have problematised modernist binaries of nature/culture, subject/object or mind/matter. By this we mean that the idea of progress (in the abstract, but also in relation to specific questions of security, the environment, development or urban planning) is no longer one where the external world is seen to be uniform, linear or law-bound and unchanging: merely waiting for human knowledge to develop adequately to solve problems. Progress today is not so much about storing up, extracting and universalising knowledge but rather about being more relationally aware of our own systems of organisation – politically, culturally, socially and economically – and about the interactive effects of these forms of organisation with the external, changing environment and international context. In this sense, resilience approaches seem to be much more about relations and contexts than about fixed essences and linear causal chains. Resilience approaches are often about how to engage in processes of interaction in more aware and reflective ways.

This enables us to articulate at least three broad and inter-related framings of resilience, ranging from more conservative approaches, which seek to maintain the status quo to more radical approaches, which see the world as a much more interactive flux.

First, the approach, which may be best known: that of maintaining the status quo or ‘bouncing back’. This could be seen as a homeostatic approach, one that seeks to regulate a return to the pre-existing equilibrium. This is a resilience approach that seeks to organise internally to enable a smooth and efficient return to functioning after a disaster or setback. Within this broad framing, some ‘bounce back’ approaches might focus upon internal properties of the community or society – levels of social or communal capital; levels of redundancy, slack or spare capacity; perhaps also on questions of variety and diversity, avoiding over-reliance on particular resources, sources of supply or centres of coordination. The focus on internal properties and capacities is also sometimes connected to ‘engineering’ or ‘psychological’ vocabularies of resilience as a set of internal properties. This approach sometimes makes a distinction between the society or community – on the inside, to be made resilient – and the threat or problem – on the outside, as something to be resilient against. Here, the threat of terrorism may serve as a good example. Terrorism is often conceived as an external threat, one that is difficult to prevent and therefore necessitates ways of bouncing back to normal functioning should major infrastructural facilities be damaged or massive outrages take place.

The ‘homeostatic’ approach is concerned with bouncing back after an event, but nevertheless encourages changes in the present. These changes are geared less towards preventing risks, threats or problems from taking place (pre-resilience views of security) and more often towards recognising problems and addressing or responding to them and recovering with the minimum of disruption. So rather than working on the external world in a direct way, resilience tends to work indirectly, often starting with the process of working on the self. This is an important shift away from traditional or modernist approaches to problem solving. The ways in which this work on the self is understood are relationally orientated; not to achieve linear goals in themselves, but to be able to respond to external disturbance, much as a thermostat works on the basis of feedback and response to changes in the external environment (think about how our bodies regulate heat by perspiring on a hot day or shivering on a cold day). Approaches within this framework often involve the development and use of real time responsiveness, sometimes with the application of new technologies – referred to as Big Data, digital sensing, machine-learning and the Internet of Things – seeking to adapt to the emergence of conflict, infectious diseases, climate change or other problems or threats.

If the homeostatic approach is the first generation of resilience thinking, and still perhaps the dominant approach in many areas, then perhaps the second generation of resilience could be seen as an autopoietic approach. In this approach, bouncing back is not the aim but rather growth and development, through an increased awareness of interconnections and processes. Societies or communities are understood as being able to grow and develop through the shift towards resilience approaches, independently of whether there is a disaster, crisis or unexpected development. Resilience thereby becomes independent, standing on its own as a way of thinking about problems; creating a shift towards organising and governing on the basis of resilience per se. Here, the process of being or becoming ‘self-regulating’ is seen as key. Resilience is no longer about returning to the equilibrium or maintaining the status quo, but is seen to be a process of ongoing self-transformation that can be likened to ‘bouncing forward’.

Resilience as transformation, or as autopoietic self-growth, presupposes a very different relationship between the self (or the society or community) and the outside world. The autopoietic approach to resilience follows the earlier homeostatic approach of not working directly on an external world but focusing on internal forms of organisation in relation to the external world. In this case, however, rather than aiming for the maintenance of stasis, the aspiration is to generate new and innovative ways of thinking and organising. Judith Rodin, for example, sees this as the ‘Resilience Dividend’ (2015). Thinking in resilience ways thus enables communities and societies to ‘bounce back better’, in terms of learning more about themselves and building new forms of interconnection and self-awareness. External or outside stimuli or disruptions are therefore vital to enable this process of self-reassessment (see also, Taleb, 2012). Even if there is no disastrous event, these sensitivities to changes and reflective approaches can be applied to improve and rethink everyday processes and exchanges, discovering new possibilities in the present.

This approach of resilience as self-transformation is taken further in Kathleen Tierney’s influential book The Social Roots of Risk (2014), which argues that resilience approaches bring together the natural and social sciences, enabling forms of recursive governance, i.e. forms of governance based on the awareness of problems and threats that emerge out of interactions between the social order and the external environment. This approach moves well beyond pre-resilience perspectives of prevention, and the ‘bouncing back’ framing, as it enables a fundamental critique of modernist forms of knowing and governing that fail to take into account the unintended consequences of narrow ‘problem-solving’ approaches. Classic examples would be the construction of flood barriers or levees, tending to make water systems more volatile and undermining natural protections, or the case of antibiotics, held to facilitate more virulent and resistant strains of viruses. Thus governance is seen as a recursive process of governing the consequences of previous attempts to solve problems, being wary of the possibility that this stores up further problems for the future and attempting to break out of this loop through new, more imaginative, approaches. In these framings, problems are no longer considered as entirely external threats but also as products of social processes, with resilience practices and policies as, similarly, a matter not merely of technical but also of social and political adaptive change (see Pelling, 2011).

A third range of resilience approaches could be seen as quite different from the first two approaches, which are still very subject-orientated – thinking linearly about preparing for the future or learning from the past, where the subject or community seeks to either maintain the status quo or to develop autopoietically. The third generation of resilience approaches has less emphasis on temporality and direction and is often more concerned with rethinking contextual possibilities in the present. This framing is more focused on developing resilience at the level of micro-politics or life-politics, using more reflexive and self-aware approaches to repurpose or to re-envision ways of engaging communities. This approach to resilience is highlighted in the idea of public service ‘jams’ or civic hackathons, where Smart City Labs, the UN Development Programme or other donors invite ideas and proposals to deconstruct problems and try out prototype solutions with volunteer hackers, technologists and designers immersing themselves in the problem. These ad hoc forums are lauded as mechanisms for reaching out to citizens to develop new ideas, exposing governing authorities and international institutions to new tools and skill sets, and for re-envisioning problems – seeing issues in a different light. Hacking is an iterative, gradual approach to policy interventions, where each hack uses and reveals new inter-relationships creating new possibilities for thinking and acting. Here, resilience is an ongoing transformative process of building engaged communities through experimentation and grasping momentary and fluid connections and interrelations in a highly context-dependent way. International policy interventions on this basis thus neither seek to exercise hegemonic control and direction, nor do they seek to ignore and disengage from the problems. Instead, the problems themselves are reinterpreted as enabling and creating opportunities.

Resilience can thus be seen in a number of ways, which can easily overlap, or be seen as contradictory, depending upon our angle or level of analysis. Thus, we would argue, that rather than focusing on fixed definitions of resilience it is perhaps more useful to see resilience as forming the basis of – or cohering – a range of policy discussions in a number of fields that seek to rethink traditional policy approaches. For us, resilience begins with the assumption that problems cannot be prevented, ring-fenced, solved or cured in traditional ways (often described as reductionist or linear). Thus, resilience operates to frame discussions of a quite fundamental nature, of how we might rethink forms of social, political and economic organisation. These ways of reflecting upon social and organisational changes then range in focus, from preparatory policy-making to bounce back, to more radical calls for changes in structures and habits and forms of understanding, to calls for high-tech forms of awareness, real-time responsiveness or temporary hacking, all them involving fundamental questions of policy development, community engagement, feedback effects and interactive relationships.

The Handbook

This Handbook contains 30 chapters. For ease of reference, they are divided into eight sections, with three to five chapters in each: an introduction to the challenges of resilience thinking; a section on resilience thinking’s relationship with uncertainty and contingency; a number of chapters on resilience and neoliberalism; how resilience relates to environmental concerns and climate change adaptation; to urban planning; to disaster risk reduction and response; to issues of international security and insecurity; and to the policy and practices of international development.

The first section of chapters concerns the challenges of resilience thinking. These chapters serve to introduce the conception of resilience from a variety of different angles. Peter Rogers engages with the etymology and genealogy of the concept of resilience and looks at the complex agential interplay shaping and contesting its meaning. Philippe Bourbeau analyses a range of approaches to resilience within the social sciences and areas for its potential development. Samuel Randalls and Stephanie Simon further stretch the challenge of resilience thinking, seeking to analyse how multiple approaches and understandings hang together as a generality and need to be forced on to the plane of specifics. Lennart Olsson, Anne Jerneck, Henrik Thorén, Johannes Persson and David O’Byrne consider the implications of resilience thinking travelling from the natural to the social sciences, arguing that we should be wary of the potential depoliticising consequences of this move. Chris Zebrowski investigates the development of resilience understandings, not as the development of science and understanding but through seeing resilience as the development of a set of knowledge practices constituting the subject of its governance.

The book continues with sections on resilience as an approach to uncertainty and with resilience in relation to the knowledge scepticism of neoliberalism. There are four chapters addressing uncertainty. Claudia Aradau analyses resilience in the context of negotiating a world understood as a series of surprise events, suggesting that there has been a shift away from the promise of security. Charis Boke’s chapter is a study of how the Transition Town movement attempts to deal with the insecurity of climate change and peak oil through the use of conceptual, material and affective resources to build a bridge to the future from a romanticised past. Mareile Kaufmann analyses the application of high-tech approaches to emergency response in the digitisation of resilience, noting how this enhances existing trends towards the focus on the crowd as the source of resilience and to the pattern as the epistemological authority f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Challenges
• Part III Uncertainty
• Part IV Neoliberalism
• Part V Environment
• Part VI Urban planning
• Part VII Disaster response
• Part VIII Insecurity
• Part IX International development
• Part X Conclusion
• Index