Resilience in the Anthropocene

Governance and Politics at the End of the World

David Chandler, Kevin Grove, Stephanie Wakefield, David Chandler, Kevin Grove, Stephanie Wakefield

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138387447
• eBook ISBN: 9781000052121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology

This book offers the first critical, multi-disciplinary study of how the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene have combined to shape contemporary thought and governmental practice.

Faced with the climate catastrophe of the Anthropocene, theorists and policymakers are increasingly turning to 'sustainable', 'creative' and 'bottom-up' imaginaries of governance. The book brings together cutting-edge insights from leading geographers, international relations scholars and philosophers to explore how the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene challenge and transform prevailing understandings of Earth, space, time and knowledge, and how these transformations reshape governance, ethics and critique today. This book examines how the Anthropocene calls into question established categories through which modern societies have tended to make sense of the world and engage in critical reflection and analysis. It also considers how resilience approaches attempt to re-stabilize these categories – and the ethical and political effects that result from these resilience-based efforts.

Offering innovative insights into the problem of how environmental change is known and governed in the Anthropocene, this book will be of interest to students in fields such as geography, international relations, anthropology, science and technology studies, sociology, and the environmental humanities.

1

Introduction

The power of life

Stephanie Wakefield, Kevin Grove and David Chandler

Framing the problem

This book originated out of our collective concern with prevailing treatments of the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene in critical geographic thought, and critical theory more broadly. Although both concepts are relatively novel, coming into prominence largely over the past 10 to 15 years, there are already certain tendencies that are beginning to calcify. First, there is a tendency to treat resilience as simply an outgrowth of neoliberalisation – a tendency that has begun to come under sympathetic critique from some quarters (Chandler 2014; Anderson 2015; Wakefield 2017; Grove 2018). Similarly, there is a tendency to embrace the Anthropocene as a provocation to move beyond modernity’s confining spatial and temporal imaginaries – a tendency that has likewise begun to receive critical scrutiny (Colebrook 2012; Chandler 2018; Wakefield, 2019). This text seeks to highlight and amplify those ‘minor’ (after Deleuze and Guattari 1986) critiques, to ask what we might learn about our contemporary condition by juxtaposing those critiques with each other.

Just as this book attempts to move beyond dominant tropes on resilience and the Anthropocene, so too do we take a slightly different tack to our introduction. Rather than presenting a broad overview of core topics and summarising the contributors’ essays, we have assembled here our collective reflections on three major themes inspired by our editorial engagements with the contributions. Thus, while this introduction is positioned at the opening of the collection, it is more a reflection on the major themes that, in our reading, emerge out of the essays. Accordingly, rather than creating an authoritative summary of each contribution, we offer here one tracing of how the essays speak to each other in provocative ways that go against the grain of conventional critical thought on resilience and the Anthropocene. Other tracings are surely possible, but our hope is that our reflections that follow on resilience, the Anthropocene and political subjectivity, respectively, will highlight key areas for further conceptual development as critical scholars continue to grapple with the challenges resilience in the Anthropocene poses to critical thought.

Resilience

To claim that the concept of resilience lacks clarity is, by now, a well-worn refrain among critical and applied scholars alike. Research from a variety of disciplines over the past two decades has detailed multiple contradictory and incompatible definitions of resilience that circulate within diverse policy and academic fields (Grove 2018). This has resulted in bipolar debates over the concept’s political efficacy and pragmatic utility. On one hand, for many critical scholars, resilience is nothing more than the latest iteration of neoliberal governmental rationalities. Pointing to the way resilience initiatives often attempt to decentralise decision-making and fashion subjects capable of living and thriving with risk, these critics are quick to dismiss the concept on ideological grounds (MacKinnon and Derickson 2012; Watts 2015). On the other hand, for many applied (and some critical) scholars, resilience offers a potentially innovative approach to social and environmental governance, but its lack of conceptual clarity impedes practitioners’ ability to operationalise the concept. Resilience thinking offers novel ways of integrating the social and environmental and increasing public participation and long-term planning in decision-making, but realising this potential requires more precise definitions of resilience to guide practitioners’ reform efforts (Meerow et al. 2016). Thus, while ideological critiques know all too well exactly what resilience is, and can thus confidently dismiss the concept accordingly, application-oriented research does not know what resilience is, and thus seeks definitional clarity to realise the concept’s value.

Our introduction, and this collection as a whole, does not attempt to adjudicate between these paradoxical readings. Instead, we seek to historicise the concept by positioning its emergence alongside the contemporaneous emergence of the Anthropocene. While resilience has circulated on the margins of fields such as engineering, psychology and ecology for decades (each, of course, with distinct and contradictory understandings of the concept), it began to gain prominence within policymaking circles during the late 1990s and early 2000s, as scholars and practitioners alike grappled with a series of social, geopolitical, technical and political economic events that exceeded modernist technologies of security premised on boundaries, prediction, stability, linear temporality and control. The end of the Cold War and the identification of non-traditional security threats, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s naming of dangerous climate change as a threat to development and well-being, the events of 11 September 2001 and their impact on national security planning, the conduct of warfare, and international financial and reinsurance markets, the 1998 Asian financial crisis, and increasingly catastrophic hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons throughout the tropics – to name but a few – formed the backdrop in the early 2000s against which Paul Crutzen, Will Steffan and other scientists began naming the Anthropocene as a distinct geological era. Since then, the Anthropocene has come to stand in for all manner of conditions that, we are told, reveal humanity’s embeddedness within complex social, environmental and technical systems that threaten Earth’s habitability.

Resilience became an increasingly influential governance principle alongside and through this growing recognition among scholars and policymakers alike that the stable, predictable environment many attributed to the Holocene, like the stable, predictable world of European modernity, were untenable assumptions. Its influence lies in the way the concept transvalues modernist security (Chandler, 2014). As Simon Dalby’s chapter in this volume details, through his discussion of the links between earth systems science, the planetary boundary framework and thought on global security, resilience offers a theory of growth, development and improvement through embracing change, diversity, surprise and disruption, rather than banishing these conditions beyond the limits of the sovereign subject. It seeks the sources of security within the threatened object itself: it focuses attention inward, to life’s systemic capacities for self-organised adaptation to external shocks, rather than outward to borders and bordering practices that attempt (and inevitably fail) to prevent disruption. Those spatial and temporal boundaries that attempted to purify this subject do not provide the socio-political conditions for development; instead, the modernist pursuit of stability, purification and control only increases the likelihood of catastrophic systemic collapse. Thus, at the moment the Anthropocene annihilates modernity’s metaphysical fantasies of security-as-stasis, resilience arrives to reconstitute security as a problem of affirming rather than rejecting worldly connectivity and emergence.

For us then, the Anthropocene brings into focus resilience as a coherent body of thought. Our use of the term thought merits brief clarification. We follow Stephen Collier’s (2009: 93) engagement with Foucault’s College de France lectures to identify thought not as a ‘passive response to discursive structures and power/knowledge regimes that define conditions of possibility for certain modes of understanding and acting’, but rather as ‘an as active response to historically situated problems … [that] shape new technologies of power’. Collier’s specification of thought gets around the thorny problem of trying to give resilience a coherent definition. Thought is not uniform, unitary or coherent across time and space. It cannot be deductively read off of a discursive regime, ideological project or ontological affirmation. Instead, it is a situated, creative and technically mediated practice of reflecting on the limits of the present – those material-discursive-technical elements whose arrangement constrains the possibilities for thought and action in some way – in relation to problematic situations. As Paul Rabinow (2011: 12) emphasises, thinking involves clarifying situations, and is oriented towards ‘achieving a degree of resolution of what was problematic in the situation in the first place’.

In this light, resilience names a problem-space where critical reflection on the limits of the Anthropocene present is possible. Resilience thinking engages problematic situations that exceed modernist practices of security, such as problems of non-linear ecosystem change and collapse (Holling 1973; see Grove 2018). It offers a critique of modernist planning practices oriented around logics of centralisation, control and prediction as causing those environmental problems centralised planning sought to prevent in the first place, and instead offers a variety of governmental reforms designed to reconfigure social and environmental governance around principles of reflexivity, adaptive management and institutional change. Importantly, however, these practices of critique and intervention are not coherent across time, space or professional field. The critiques resilience thinking engenders can and do produce contradictory and incompatible styles of engaging with spatial interconnection and temporal emergence: while urban security practitioners present resilience as a problem of infrastructure hardening designed to prevent surprises – such as terrorist bombings – that threaten urban circulations, urban ecologists promote resilience as a means of living with and developing through emergent disruptions (Coaffee et al. 2009; Evans 2011).

Focusing analytical attention on these contextualised and situated practices of thought thus allows us to inductively examine resilience in the Anthropocene without relying on the deductive identification of the formal qualities of resilience. The formal similarities between resilience and neoliberalism – a common scepticism of centralisation, the production of risk-bearing subjects – matter less here than more subtle practices of critique that reconfigure multiple strategies, rationalities, techniques and practices of government in response to qualitatively novel experiences of time and space. The latter enable us to explore how resilience emerged out of specific historical situations, in response to specific problematisations of government engendered by social and environmental processes we now mark as ‘the Anthropocene’. This is a key theme in the chapters in this volume from Sara Nelson and Kevin Grove and Allain Barnett. Nelson analyses C.S. Holling’s early work on ecological resilience with the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis to situate resilience within the wider trajectory of systems theory, and its systems-cybernetic governmentality. Grove and Barnett, in turn, demonstrate how the cybernetic behavioural science of Herbert Simon shaped influential resilience thinkers’ understandings of complexity and adaptation. Both of these analyses demonstrate the ‘environmental’ qualities of resilience: that is, the way resilience initiatives operate through the problematisation and instrumentalisation of ecological relations. While resilience and neoliberalism may both mobilise environmental forms of power, these analyses each demonstrate, in their own way, how resilience is irreducible to neoliberal governmental rationalities. Nelson demonstrates how the modes of knowledge production associated with the systems sciences – and which Holling’s work in ecology helped shaped – emerged through collaborations between scientists in capitalist and socialist countries, in which group scientists worked through contextually specific problems of the relation between markets, state planning and decentralisation. Grove and Barnett argue that resilience recalibrates the study of nature-society relations around a cybernetic will to design. Rather than attempting to reveal the objective (and thus predictive) truth of social and ecological phenomena, resilience initiatives focus on developing pragmatic and partial solutions to indeterminate problems of complexity.

As a body of thought, resilience thus opens on to a problem-space where social and environmental governance are reconfigured around cybernetic and designerly strategies and rationalities. These strategies become the pivot around which resilience plays with the limits of modernity, that series of inside/outside divisions that structure modernist understandings of self, subject, agency, the state, politics and expertise, to name but a few. For example, the problem for governance is no longer about developing predictive knowledge that enables human control of complex social and ecological phenomena, but rather how to work with and through the emergent ‘environmental’ powers of life itself (now given, in the Anthropocene, in terms of complexity). This is a problem of how to interiorise the exterior: how to recalibrate governance, politics and science for a world where emergence and interconnection make up the weft and weave of the bios. In the process, and as Lauren Rickards’ chapter in this volume details, the boundaries that artificially separated the state, science and the public are becoming reworked through new practices of adaptive management and adaptive governance that design-in reflexivity to decision-making processes. Governance and expertise become more provisional here (Best 2014): not only do these practices horizontally redistribute authority and render technical expertise circumspect, they also expand governance to nominally include input and participation from end users formerly grasped as passive recipients of public service provision.

This play runs in the opposite direction as well. Even as resilience asserts that complexity decentralises expertise, redistributes authority and thus demands provisional and reflexive styles of governance, as Stephanie Wakefield’s chapter in this book demonstrates, it also re-affirms a unified vision of the world – a ‘one-world-world’ of complexity. Imaginaries of world as a self-contained biosphere extend visions of coherence and harmony – modernity’s visions of a stable, interior bios sheltered from a wider world of emergence – to the whole of planetary existence (see Fagan, this volume). This effectively exteriorises modernity’s interior: faced with the Anthropocene’s radical asymmetry between human and earthly powers, resilience affirms a coherent world of complexity that elides any form of division or asymmetry between the social and the natural, or within the social itself. And as Madeleine Fagan’s chapter here explains, for ecologists, overcoming of the problems that complexity generates requires a radical escapism, the revolutionary transformation of this complex world into new, more sustainable configurations. The world itself becomes open to new forms of geo- and eco-constructivist interventions, new efforts to transform both macro-scale planetary systemic dynamics (geo-constructivism) and micro-scale ecosystems (eco-constructivism) in the name of resilience (Neyrat 2019).

Situating resilience in relation to the Anthropocene thus complicates the easy equation between resilience and neoliberalism that many first-cut critiques of resilience offered (Grove and Barnett, this volume). While there may indeed be formal similarities between the two, there are more nuanced differences and continuities that cast broader trends in contemporary critical theory in new light. For example, resilience scholars’ affirmation of complexity as an ontological and biopolitical foundation for resilience initiatives, a move denounced by critical scholars for uncritically re-asserting a post-Cartesian ontology, mirrors recent critical affirmations of an ontologically prior power of life itself: both attempt to shore up their grounds for analysis and truth claims through recourse to an unassailable world of facts (Chandler 2014; 2018; Barnett 2017). And both respond to the loss of modernist grounds for truth: whether the affirmation of an objective world open to totalising, calculative rationality, or the affirmation of a world determined by objective class interests, both resilience thinking and new materialist thought grapple with the challenge of how to ground truth claims in the face of indeterminacy. Resilience proponents’ affirmations of a world of complex systems and creative emergence can be read as mirroring that of decolonial scholars’ affirmations of the pluriverse and its displacement of the ‘one-world-world’ (Law 2015; de la Cadena and Blaser 2018): both attempt to create space for multiplicity and difference; the world of complexity, like the world of the pluriverse, is a world that exceeds the knowledge of the individual and can only be grasped through partial, reflexive engagements with often irreconcilable difference (Wakefield, this volume). The distance between a critical ethic of care for difference and ontological multiplicity is thus not as far removed from neoliberal political economists’ pragmatic ethic of institutional design as it might first seem (for examples of this designerly ethos, see Ostrom 1990; Ostrom 1997, Buchanan 1959; see Collier 2011; 2017 for overviews). Despite important ontological and methodological differences, both advocate an ethics of experimental and reflexive engagement with an indeterminate world. The recent critical embrace of experimental governance and experimental politics thus resonates in curious – and largely under-explored – ways with neoliberal affirmations of institutional design (see Rickards, this volume; Chandler 2018).

Situating resilience in the Anthropocene thus opens new conceptual, ethical and analytical challenges for both applied scholars and critical theori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1. Introduction: the power of life
• 2. Resilient Earth: Gaia, geopolitics and the Anthropocene
• 3. Security for a fragmented world: ecology and the challenge of the Anthropocene
• 4. The end of resilience?: rethinking adaptation in the Anthropocene
• 5. Colliding times: urgency, resilience and the politics of living with volcanic gas emissions in the Anthropocene
• 6. Resilient arts of government: the birth of a ‘systems-cybernetic governmentality’
• 7. Destituting resilience: contextualizing and contesting science for the Anthropocene
• 8. Ironies of the Anthropocene
• 9. ‘Primordial wounds’: resilience, trauma and the rifted body of the Earth
• 10. More of the same?: Life beyond the liberal one world world
• 11. What would you do (and who would you kill) in order to save the world?: Dialectical resilience
• Index