Community Resilience

A Critical Approach

Katy Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429826931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This book provides an alternative perspective on community resilience, drawing on critical sociological and social policy insights about how people individually and collectively cope with different kinds of adversity. Based on the idea that resilience is more than simply an invention of neoliberal governments, this book explores diverse expressions of resilience and considers what supports and undermines people's resilience in different contexts. Focusing on the United Kingdom, it examines the contradictions and limitations of neoliberal resilience policies and the role of policy in shaping how vulnerabilities are distributed and how resilience is manifested.The book explores different types of resilience including planning, response, recovery, adaptation and transformation, which are examined in relation to different types of threat such as financial hardship, disasters and climate change. It argues that resilience cannot act as an antidote to vulnerability, and aims to demonstrate the importance of shared institutions in underpinning resilience and in preventing socially created vulnerabilities. It will be of interest to academics, students and well-informed practitioners working with the concept of resilience within the subject areas of Sociology, Social Policy, Human Geography, Environmental Humanities and International Development.

Chapter 1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780429448188-1

The topic of resilience has been widely debated and critiqued over recent years across academic, popular and political arenas, to the point where the concept has been declared “politically and intellectually exhausted” (Evans & Reid 2013: 154). However, this book links into a small but growing literature which suggests that it would be useful to move on from critiquing the concept of resilience to developing a critical understanding of it (DeVerteuil & Golubchikov 2016). It uses the United Kingdom as a case study to explore resilience from a critical sociological and social policy perspective, focusing specifically on the concept of community resilience, which refers to the collective ability of a social group “to sustain its well-being in the face of challenges” (Hall & Lamont 2012: 232) and/or cope with or recover from stresses. This involves exploring how people engage with ‘ordinary’ and everyday modes of vulnerability and with extraordinary events and unfolding processes, through focusing on lived experiences of adversity and examining how these are rooted within and shaped by the broader institutional and policy context of the United Kingdom. This analysis is developed through consideration of the specific configurations of vulnerability and risk which characterise contemporary Britain, including, for example, financial hardship, flooding and climate change. Bringing often-abstract resilience debates into dialogue with empirical examples of how people respond to adversity, and examining how different modes of adversity are created and distributed amongst different groups, the book provides an account of how resilience manifests in different contexts and how and why people develop particular strategies of resilience which are more or less successful. It does so through examining individual and household resilience strategies as well as collective community action and broader expressions of social solidarity. The book explores not only ‘top-down’ interventions to develop resilience in specific ways but also ‘bottom up’ actions and self-led initiatives, based on an understanding of resilience not merely as an invention of governments but as an already-existing “everyday tactic” (Ryan 2015).

As has been widely noted, the emergence of resilience in policy has been closely linked with neoliberal agendas in which resilience tends to be framed in terms of self-sufficiency and self-reliance, and is tied up with agendas of abandonment and responsibilisation of citizens in a context of state withdrawal and cuts. However, a key argument of this book is that resilience can be disentangled from its neoliberal interpretations and that, as a metaphor, it can be understood in other ways which can incorporate diverse expressions of resilience, including those which emerge and operate beyond and outside of state-led strategies and interventions. Furthermore, this book suggests that there is value in exploring the contradictions inherent in neoliberal resilience policy; namely, that far from producing citizens skilled in the “art of living dangerously” (Evans & Reid 2013), neoliberal policies of abandonment and responsibilisation create conditions within which people find it increasingly difficult to cope. In this context, resilience is little more than an “aspirational rhetorical device” (Leitch & Bohensky 2014: 14) understood as a subjectivity rather than anything related to, for example, material constraints or individual or collective agency, with a lack of resilience viewed as a personal deficit or collective inadequacy. Furthermore, as Rose and Lentzos (2016: 22) suggest, “demands for resilience without the collective and infrastructural powers and resources to realise resilience are disingenuous at best, toxic at worst”. However, viewing resilience as more than merely a passive submission to structural disadvantage opens up space for exploring transformative, disruptive and subversive modes of resilience as well as everyday modes of coping which are often overlooked.

As such, this book is based on the idea that we do want to be resilient, in the sense of being able to cope and to avoid downward social trajectories in contexts of rapid change and in the face of diverse threats. It presents a critical account which links resilience debates with critical sociological and social policy insights into vulnerability, coping and social suffering, exploring what factors shape resilience and vulnerability at local levels and in specific contexts of adversity, and examining the role of policy and government in the production and distribution of risks. The understanding of resilience which underpins the book is that it is multifaceted and complex, and the aim is to move beyond a focus on the creation of ‘resilient subjectivities’ and engage with resilience as more than something which can be reduced to a set of indicators. The aim is not to provide a ‘recipe’ for resilience but to contribute to a nuanced understanding of resilience which recognises that it is comprised of different sorts of resources and is shaped at multiple levels, as well as being collectively built, culturally mediated and historically situated. A key argument I want to make is that people are – individually and collectively – resilient in many ways, though their resilience is often misrecognised, misinterpreted or overlooked. Furthermore, resilience tends to have costs, whether these are emotional, financial, material or temporal (Harrison 2013) and this means that whilst resilience might develop or build over time – as “an upward spiral” (Magis 2010: 406), or “like a muscle which, when exercised, builds both strength and flexibility” (Wilding 2011: 27) – it can be undermined, diminished, weakened or reduced through repeated adversity and/or through a lack of necessary support. In this sense, whilst resilience is sometimes seen as an antidote to vulnerability, this book explores the relationship between the two somewhat differently and considers how increased vulnerability, meaning situational vulnerabilities created via structural causes, undermines resilience. Although resilience strategies might involve learned or developed skills emerging from contexts of struggle, this does not mean that our capacity for resilience is infinitely elastic or necessarily transferable across different contexts of adversity or struggle. Neither does it mean that introducing new forms of vulnerability or withdrawing important sources of support will necessarily produce effective resilience strategies, or that the types of resilience which emerge from conditions of abandonment are necessarily sustainable or desirable in terms of their outcomes. As such, the book aims to demonstrate the importance of shared institutions in underpinning resilience and in preventing socially created vulnerabilities.

1.1 Background

This book draws on a range of different work I have carried out with and about communities and voluntary and community organisations over the past decade. My research, which has mostly been carried out in the North of England and in South Wales, has focused on the lived experiences of local communities. It has explored the role of communities in successive policy agendas which have tried to activate and responsibilise people at local levels to tackle social problems, and the various ways they have been co-opted into governance strategies, especially through consultations, participatory initiatives and decision-making forums. I have also been interested in how ‘the local’ is approached and understood in policy and practice and in the limitations and potential of localist agendas (e.g., see Wright 2015; Wright & Davis 2017), and my research has explored different ways that communities mobilise to address problems and the informal modes of mutual aid, neighbourliness and support which people engage in (Wright 2015). I first encountered the concept of community resilience during a research project carried out in Swansea, South Wales, in which I was part of a small research team from the University of Leeds exploring the community consultation process for the proposed Tidal Lagoon renewable energy development in Swansea Bay. As part of this research, I spoke to local people and practitioners about their understanding of resilience and the kinds of issues that they felt were most pressing for the local area, which included diverse challenges such as climate change, unemployment, poverty and inequality. These issues were narrated in terms of historical legacies as well as future challenges, and the participants spoke a great deal about the challenges of balancing ongoing, everyday challenges – such as ongoing threats to local jobs, poverty and low-paid work – with emerging threats like climate change (Wright 2016). Much of what they discussed resonated with earlier research I had carried out in English towns and cities, particularly in terms of people's frustration with the difficulties of achieving positive change and having “to fight to get heard”, for example, by welfare agencies and the local authority (Wright 2016: 159). Yet little of these kinds of insight seemed to be reflected in the community resilience literature, which also tended to overlook the kinds of mutual aid and traditions of resilience and solidarity documented in my own research as well as in a wide range of other sociological and social policy literature. In government policy in the United Kingdom, the implication seems to be that communities and households are lacking in resilience, an analysis that is apparently employed as a new way of talking about dependency on state provision, and of shifting the blame for disadvantage and hardship from government to perceived individual or collective failings. Although acknowledging the validity of arguments made against resilience, which highlight how it has tended to be used in United Kingdom policy as a justification for welfare state retrenchment, I was interested to explore how it might function as a critical framework for understanding the experiences of communities. What might resilience look like if we did not start from the idea that it necessarily implies ‘self-sufficiency’ and instead thought of it in terms of interdependence and shared institutions? What if we thought of resilience not in terms of mere survival but as a dimension of ‘successful societies’ (Hall & Lamont 2013)? These are the kinds of questions which led me to write this book.

Although the book develops an account of resilience through a critical sociological and social policy lens, in it I draw on a range of literature drawn from across related disciplinary areas in order to try and incorporate different perspectives and approaches. However, the choice of what literature to draw on has been theoretically driven rather than the book being a systematic review of resilience literature. My aim in this book is to ground abstract accounts of resilience in lived experience and bring together literature which deals with different kinds of adversity and which approaches resilience from different perspectives.

1.2 Taking a critical sociology and social policy approach

Underpinning the rejection of the concept of resilience in critical social science is the assumption that it is the concept itself which is unhelpful rather than the political context in which it has been operationalised. However, the idea has a much longer and broader history than that which critics have focused on. Alexander (2013) and Bourbeau (2018), for example, trace its use back to Seneca, St Jerome and Bacon, noting that dictionary definitions first appear during the 17th century and that the term was used in 1830 to describe recovery from an earthquake in Japan. Furthermore, in recent years, the concept of resilience has been taken up and interpreted in different ways by different kinds of groups, being used colloquially as well as scientifically, and seeming to have value in its translatability and resonance across different activities and groups (Gallopin 2006; MacKinnon & Derickson 2012; Rose & Lentzos 2016). Although problems with the use of resilience in policy have been widely identified, there has been little attempt made to challenge undesirable uses through offering an alternative picture. At the same time, resilience enthusiasts have often been uncritical advocates of resilience thinking, viewing resilience merely as a social good, without acknowledging the possibility of negative manifestations, its potential downsides or its limitations, and without paying attention to how attempts to be resilient can be thwarted or undermined. Often, discussions of resilience have remained somewhat abstract rather than being grounded in real-life experiences or in the realities of daily struggles, and there has been a lack of discussion of how and why resilience is unequally distributed across different groups living in different places. For example, there is a great deal of literature focused on developing toolkits and identifying indicators for measuring or predicting community resilience, although it is not clear whether or not it is measurable, or that it has universal indicators or features, or how these might relate to specific contexts of adversity.

Perhaps because of the fact that it is ‘unappealing’ to social scientists, there has been a lack of engagement with the concept of resilience in the fields of sociology and critical social policy, and this includes debates about community resilience (Berkes & Ross 2013; Olsson et al. 2015). This is despite the obvious importance of understanding and being able to theorise collective action, social processes and the constraints that people face in tackling issues. In fact, community resilience has in general been given less attention that other types of resilience, and the social dimensions of resilience are seen to be undertheorised (Berkes & Ross 2013; Stojanovic et al. 2016). This raises questions about how we begin to theorise these social aspects, and what sociological and social policy insights can offer in terms of, for example, understanding the collective conditions which facilitate community resilience; ideas about individual and collective agency; conceptualisations of social vulnerability; the role of social inequalities; and the different kinds of resources (broadly understood) that resilience can require. We might also suggest that starting to ‘socialise’ the concept of resilience should also involve ‘humanising’ it; moving beyond abstract models and conceptualisations to be able to account for the everyday and extraordinary realities of suffering (Wilkinson 2005).

Furthermore, the topic of resilience has value in helping to broaden debates in the disciplines of sociology and social policy. This is because resilience requires us to engage with issues that are less commonly considered or that are largely overlooked, such as climate change, natural disasters, and the challenges of anticipating futures in times of rapid change. As such, discussions of the social dimensions of resilience require us to try and forge links across disciplinary boundaries and to move beyond traditional disciplinary concerns. Debates about resilience also raise epistemological questions about how we can know and shape futures and ethical questions about what kinds of futures we want, whilst engaging with resilience demands a heightened temporal sensitivity because of its distinctively anticipatory focus. Traditionally, “sociologists have found the future difficult to do something with” (Tutton 2017: 480) and Levitas (2013) has suggested that the topic of futures has been ‘repressed’ within sociology, which in part might be explained by the sense that there is no prophetic methodology or way of theorising (Bauman 2016). However, studying futures does not of course require prophecy or prediction; rather, it entails understanding how processes of change unfold, exploring potential futures and the connections between past, present and future, and engaging with political and ethical questions about potential futures. These tasks require conceptualisations of time and futures, and methodological insights and critical frameworks for understanding values, power and politics, with sociologists being well placed to engage with these dimensions of futures (Urry 2011). Resilience brings us into engagement not only with how people think about and engage with potential futures but also with how policy acts to shape and produce them.

1.3 Resilience, vulnerability and community

A key aim of this book is to explore the increasing demands for resilience placed on different groups via different modes of vulnerabilisation, framed within a broad engagement with the diverse risks we face in contemporary society and the nature of contemporary vulnerabilities, not simply in terms of dramatic, large-scale events but incorporating the ongoing conditions in which people live. The book explores the different kinds of risks that people are asked to be resilient to, and how risks are unequally distributed across different groups living in different parts of the United Kingdom. A key theme of the book is how a proliferation of increasingly complex global threats are unfolding at the same time as everyday life is becoming increasingly difficult and challenging for certain g...