From conflict to resilience? Explaining recent changes in climate security discourse and practice

ABSTRACT

The recent rise of resilience thinking in climate security discourse and practice is examined and explained. Using the paradigmatic case of the United Kingdom, practitioners’ understandings of resilience are considered to show how these actors use a resilience lens to rearticulate earlier storylines of climate conflict in terms of complexity, decentralisation, and empowerment. Practitioners in the climate security field tend to reinterpret resilience in line with their established routines. As a result, climate resilience storylines and practices turn out to be much more diverse and messy than is suggested in the conceptual literature. Building on these findings, the recent success of resilience thinking in climate security discourse is explained. Climate resilience – not despite but due to its messiness – is able to bring together a wide range of actors, traditionally standing at opposite ends of the climate security debate. Through resilience storylines, climate security discourse becomes something to which a wide range of actors, ranging from security to the development field, can relate.

KEYWORDS:

• resilience
• climate politics
• climate security
• discourse analysis
• United Kingdom

Introduction

In July 2015, the US Pentagon released a report investigating the national security implications of climate change (US Department of Defence (DOD) 2015). This was only the latest example of a growing discourse on climate security that found its way into different political bodies internationally as well as nationally in Western industrialised states. At a national level, for example, the United Kingdom was amongst the first countries to create the position of a Climate and Energy Security Envoy in 2009, as well as departments and working groups dedicated to the issue of climate security in core ministries such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Ministry of Defence (MOD). Internationally, the topic has been discussed three times in the United Nations Security Council: first in 2007, followed by a debate in 2011, and informally in 2013 (Boas 2015). This non-exhaustive list of examples clearly shows that since the mid-2000s, climate security has become an important theme in policymaking.

The concept of ‘climate security’ depicts a relationship between climate change and security. But this relationship is not a neutral one. It has been subjected to an array of discursive lenses (such as human security, conflict, and risk) that at a diagnostic level each problematise a different aspect of the climate security relationship, and at a prognostic level each promote different policies to tackle the threat (McDonald 2013). This relationship has often been described in quite alarmist terms, with a focus on matters of climate conflict or national security (see Bettini 2014a, Hartmann 2010, Boas 2015). But in recent years, policymakers and academics are increasingly drawing on a more subtle and illusive terminology in the debate on climate security (see Oels 2013, Corry 2014, Bettini 2014b, Methmann and Oels 2015). Climate security is discussed in terms of complexity, preparedness, decentralisation, and empowerment. What holds this new debate together is the notion of resilience (Chandler 2014, Corry 2014).

Here, we seek to further the recent debate on the rise of resilience thinking in climate security discourse. Substantiating recent arguments by Corry (2014) and Methmann and Oels (2015), we outline the multiplicity and coexistence of resilience concepts in the climate security field. We seek to refine this argument further by demonstrating how a resilience discourse rearticulates climate conflict storylines in terms of complexity and uncertainty. Second, we explain the prominence of resilience by turning towards the actor and practice dimensions of the climate security field. In doing so, we are able to show that practices of resilience promotion and practitioner’s understandings of resilience often differ fundamentally from, and even transcend, the conceptual ideal types of resilience discussed in the theoretical literature. In short, while recent literature identifies the co-presence of different understandings of climate security in the discourse, we instead trace their convergence in practice. As we will show, it is exactly the openness of resilience discourse, allowing different notions of resilience to blend and imbricate each other, which has made the concept so attractive to many bureaucrats and practitioners.

To examine and explain the recent rise of resilience, we draw on a case study of the climate security discourse in the UK. The UK case is an extreme one, given the strong resonance that both climate security as well as resilience thinking produced in UK discourse. The UK is often referred to as one of the places where discourses of climate conflict first appeared in the policy field (Trombetta 2008, Toke 2013, Corry 2014, Boas 2015). It was, for instance, the UK that initiated the first-ever UN Security Council debate on climate security. At the same time, the UK can be seen as the heartland of resilience discourse (Joseph 2013a). Many recent articles on resilience use the UK to illustrate how resilience plays out in real politics (Anderson and Adey 2012, Bulley 2013). The UK thus lets us study how resilience entered climate security discourse, as well as revealing the discourse coalitions that are active in this process. That said, the question arises as to whether the findings in this extreme case are generalisable beyond the context of the UK. We hold that although the UK represents an extreme case, it can nevertheless be seen as a prototype for similar developments in other countries. Climate security, as well as resilience discourses, has recently become prominent in other industrialised states, among them the USA, Australia, Germany, and Benelux countries (interview, climate security researcher, Berlin, 14 September 2011; interview, climate security researcher, 13 September 2011; see also Floyd 2010, Hartmann 2010, Vezirgiannidou 2013, Vogler 2013). At an international level, authorised actors in global development and environmental and security governance have adopted resilience as a core governmental principle (Corry 2014, p. 259).

We proceed in three analytical steps. First, we discuss how recent literature has treated the rise of resilience in climate security discourse. Second, we outline how the UK discourse on climate security has changed since the mid-2000s, showing that discursive changes are often messy and transcend analytical boundaries between different ideal types of resilience. Third, we seek to explain this change by examining both the actor coalition(s) in the discursive struggle on climate security in the UK and the broader discursive and material context of this struggle.

Methodologically, we draw upon a discourse analysis informed by Maarten Hajer’s (1995) argumentative discourse analysis and his notion of discourse coalitions. We study key UK policy documents on climate change and security policy, as well as documents from more specialised agencies, such as the FCO, the MOD, and the Department for International Development (DFID) from 2006 to 2014. The respective institutions were selected according to their importance in UK climate security discourse. We supplement these data with 52 expert interviews conducted with representatives of UK government departments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), think tanks, and research institutions in 2011 and 2012.¹

The rise of resilience in climate security discourse

Today, it is generally acknowledged that from the mid-2000s onwards, we have seen a securitisation of the problem of climate change (Bettini 2014a, Hartmann 2010, Oels 2013, Boas 2015, Rothe 2016). Since then, actors as diverse as Western policymakers, defence and intelligence actors, think tanks, and environmental and humanitarian NGOs have painted a dramatic picture of climate change as a potential threat to international and/or national security. In short, climate change is assumed to threaten security by destabilising already fragile countries and regions, by inducing larger waves of international or internal migration, and by fuelling conflicts over already-scarce resources (Bettini 2014a, Detraz and Betsill 2009, Hartmann 2010, Methmann and Rothe 2012, Rothe 2012, Boas 2015). As these examples prove, the referent objects in climate security discourse – that which is deemed to be threatened – are quite diverse and range from the whole planet or humanity to countries or even single individuals (as in human security storylines; Methmann and Rothe 2012). The early history of climate security discourse was marked by a rather alarmist tone (Homer-Dixon 1999, MOD DCDC 2007), and depicted a looming humanitarian crisis of climate conflicts and a mass flux of climate refugees threatening the world with chaos and menace (see Bettini 2014a). Articulations by Western politicians or scientists generally shared an emphasis on the secondary implications of climate change – also called ‘second-order threats’ (Methmann and Rothe 2012) – that put the global North in danger: the spillover effects from the global South. Thus, vulnerable communities in the global South are imagined as ‘the silenced “Other” … [that has] … no agency and [is] driven by desperation, easily becomes unpredictable, wild “other” that threatens “us”’ (Bettini 2014a, p. 70). Such climate conflict storylines have remained relevant. In July 2015, the US Department of Defence published its report, ‘National Security Implications of Climate-Related Risks and a Changing Climate’ (US Department of Defence (DOD) 2015), in which it described a series of scenarios through which climate-related insecurities in vulnerable countries might affect the defence capability and national security of the US.

Meanwhile, in recent years, a new discourse around resilience has gained ground in the fields of development, security, and disaster governance. Having its origins in mechanics as well as ecology, resilience refers to the capability of systems or communities to ‘bounce back’, i.e. to recover after external shocks (e.g. natural disasters), and to adapt to changing environmental conditions (Zebrowski 2015, p. 5). The changing landscape of security through resilience thinking has also influenced climate security discourse (Oels 2013, Corry 2014, Chandler 2014, Methmann and Oels 2015). Resilience thinking fundamentally challenges the climate conflict discourse outlined above because it rejects mechanistic understandings of causality that informed earlier storylines of direct linkages between climate change and conflict (Bettini 2014b, p. 182). Instead, it actively draws on a complexity storyline acknowledging the dynamism and uncertainties associated with socio-ecological drivers of insecurity (Corry 2014, p. 263). According to resilience thinking, state-driven policies and security guarantees appear problematic, as they limit the self-adaptive potential and creativity of a system (Reid 2013, p. 362). As a consequence, responsibility in coping with climate-change impacts is transferred from the state to networks of public and private organisations, communities, and individuals (Joseph 2013b, p. 43). Whereas alarmist climate conflict storylines are said to legitimise sovereign forms of power, such as state-driven migration management or political/military interventions in climate hot-spot regions (Hartmann 2010), resilience promotes government at a distance (Corry 2014, p. 256; Methmann and Oels 2015, p. 58).

Olaf Corry (2014) has interpreted the change in climate security discourse as a shift from a logic of defence to one of risk and resilience. Corry debunks recent critiques of resilience as a coherent neoliberal ideology. Using the climate-change case, Corry convincingly shows that there are multiple understandings of resilience, several of which challenge neoliberal versions of the concept (2014, pp. 262–263). He argues that the common denominator of different resilience concepts is that they break with the ‘dominant logic of defence as the core concept of security’ (Corry 2014, p. 267). First, whereas defence would mainly be concerned with short-term threats, resilience would stress long-term thinking, which is required in areas such as climate policy. Second, resilience includes a reflexive moment that makes it superior to defence thinking, which is completely inflexible in terms of objects and aims of security practices. Third, unlike defence, resilience discourse is not dependent on a friend–enemy logic and the dangers that follow from the creation of political antagonisms that have been criticised in the securitisation literature.

Such a reading of the shift from defence to resilience in climate security thinking, however, falls short of empirical reality. The openness and creativity of resilience discourse that Corry convincingly demonstrates in the first part of his article is foreclosed in his final analysis because here this complexity is again broken down into binary rationalities: defence and resilience (Corry 2014, pp. 268–269). Climate conflict discourse, however, although mainly concerned with the secondary security implications of climate change for Western industrialised countries, never followed a logic of defence in a strict sense. Rather, climate change has always already been securitised on the basis of a risk logic (Rothe 2011, Oels 2013). As different scholars have shown, often alarmist voices on the threats of climate conflicts were not met with extraordinary, defensive, and reactive responses but instead with relatively routine and incremental policy measures in the realm of climate adaptation and mitigation (Methmann and Rothe 2012, pp. 336–337) and with a strong demand for preventive action (Trombetta 2008, p. 594). Moreover, resilience discourse does not necessarily overcome a friend–enemy logic. The creation of political antagonisms in resilience discourses is simply shifted to a secondary level. It is right that resilience focuses on the inherent capabilities of vulnerable communities rather than on external threats or enemies. But, as it is feared, if vulnerable communities fail to become resilient, their vulnerability can become a security threat for Western nation states such as the UK (Bettini 2014b, p. 190). Hence, we follow Methmann and Rothe (2012, p. 326) who stressed that security/defence and risk should be seen as two sides of the same coin rather than as successive discourses.

Methmann and Oels (2015) have recently provided a nuanced analytical framework that can help to map the complex landscape of climate security and resilience discourse. More concretely, they distinguish between three ideal typical definitions of resilience: engineering resilience, ecological resilience, and socio-ecological resilience (Methmann and Oels 2015, p. 54). In short, engineering resilience carries the idea of a system capable of ‘bouncing back’ – of being able to return to its previous state in the aftermath of an exogenous shock. Ecological resilience, on the contrary, conceptualises resilience as adaptation: because ultimate stability or a continuous equilibrium is deemed impossible, persistence would actually require a constant adaptation and recalibration of vulnerable systems. Socio-ecological resilience, finally, stresses that even continuous adaptation is insufficient to guarantee resilience. To become resilient, systems instead need to reinvent or transform themselves constantly by forging new connections and by reorganising in creative ways. Drawing on this typology, Methmann and Oels (2015, pp. 55–59) trace recent shifts in security discourses on climate-induced migration.

This work indicates a shift from more narrow understandings of security and (alarmist) discourses on climate-induced migration towards a discourse on transformational resilience – a shift similar to the one from defence to resilience diagnosed by Corry for climate security in general. The most recent Western documents on climate-induced migration present the temporary migration of communities at risk from climate impacts as a positive transformational adaptation measure (Methmann and Oels 2015, p. 59). In this respect, temporary migration of community members is taken as a way for communities to transform themselves by generating new forms of cultural or economic capital (e.g. in the form of remittances). Methmann and Oels (2015, p. 58) stress that all three understandings of resilience are still present in the discourse on climate-induced migration. They argue against understanding the discursive changes as a succession of different types of resilience. Rather, these types interact in creative ways. However, their empirical study – a genealogy of climate-induced migration – does not show this creative interplay in detail. This is entirely appropriate for Methmann and Oels’ aims to sketch out a typology of different governmental ideal types, but analyses need to move beyond the level of discourse and the study of policy documents to account for the messiness of resilience in practice. Through an analysis of a wide range of in-depth interviews, our case study will demonstrate how the actual practices of resilience differ considerably both from the theoretical debate on resilience as well as from the discourse visible in policy documents only. As Zebrowski has argued:

While suggesting that multiple senses of resilience could exist, the conviction that different senses may be clearly distinguished and differentiated across a static table nevertheless fail to account for the varied ways in which resilience is used by practitioners. In practice, the meaning(s) of resilience continue to escape the categorical structures developed by academics’. (2015, p. 6)

The misfit between resilience discourse and practice is something that has been theorised by, for example, Marieke de Goede and Stefanie Simon (2015, p. 82) with their notion of ‘bureaucratic vitalism’. Drawing on the case of cyber security, they show how the adaptation of resilience by bureaucratic actors results in ‘perilous and flawed translations of resilience that largely remain locked into prior registers of linearity and un/predictability’ (2015, p. 83). In the following analysis, we will describe exactly such a case of the integration of resilience language into the prior registers of UK policymakers and ministerial bureaucrats. We will show that, just as observed by Corry and Methmann and Oels, a discourse of resilience becomes increasingly dominant in UK discourses and practices of climate security. However, as we will also show, resilience thinking did not replace older storylines revolving around concepts of climate conflict and a narrow understanding of security. Rather, bureaucratic actors and practitioners in the climate security field have linked the new discourse to their already established routines and in that way rearticulated climate conflict storylines and measures through resilience discourse.

Towards climate resilience in the UK

The climate security discourse has clearly gained traction in the UK’s political establishment. As early as the late 1980s, then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher framed climate change as the main risk for humanity, arguing in a speech in front of the UN General Assembly that ‘it is life itself that we must battle to preserve’ (Thatcher 1989). During the 1990s, however, public attention to the issue of climate change decreased. It was not until the mid-2000s before it regained its prominent position in the UK’s public and political discourse. In this section, we focus on the appearance of climate security discourse, as well as the actor coalition promoting it, from the mid-2000s onwards. We demonstrate that earlier discussions and related policies on climate security informed by climate-conflict storylines are increasingly being rearticulated in terms of climate resilience.

The rise of climate conflict discourse in the UK

The UK-based discourse coalition promoting the climate conflict discourse is comprised mainly by actors in the strategic security community, including representatives of the MOD and the FCO, on the one hand, and a range of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and think tanks, on the other. These government-related think tanks, such as the Royal United Services Institute (telephone interview, UK climate security analyst, 14 December 2011) and the London-based organisation Third Generation Environmentalism (E3G; e.g. Mabey 2008), made up the nucleus of the UK discourse coalition on climate conflicts. E3G, led by former or seconded FCO employees, for example, started working on the linkages between climate change and security right after its establishment in 2004 (telephone interview, UK climate security analyst, 20 October 2011). Another crucial NGO has been the peace-building organisation International Alert (Smith and Vivekananda 2007). This NGO has been in regular contact with UK governmental actors, such as the FCO and DFID, through meetings and discussion groups on the theme of climate change and security (interviews in 2011 with International Alert, and with an attendee of such a discussion group). What brought these actors together was the understanding that climate change would produce instabilities and fuel migratory movements or conflicts in overseas regions, thereby producing spillover effects which would negatively impact UK’s national security.

As a result of the growing discourse coalition, including many actors with close ties to government and ministerial employees, the storylines of climate conflict discourse began to spread into governmental circles and were increasingly taken up by representatives of the MOD and FCO. For example, the MOD’s 2010 Climate Change Strategy argued that climate change can affect the UK’s interests, ‘both at home through increased migration, and abroad as climate change acts as a threat multiplier, destabilising areas of the world that are of strategic importance to the UK’ (2010a, p. 12).

Following the problematisation of the secondary implications of climate change, the main policies promoted by UK conflict discourse were overseas conflict prevention taking consideration of climate-change impacts (Cabinet Office 2010, p. 44, DFID, FCO, MOD 2011), and international efforts to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions to prevent climate change (Trombetta 2008). For instance, the latter was the UK’s key objective when initiating the UN Security Council debate on climate change and security of April 2007 (interview, FCO Official, 6 October 2011, London). As commented by Margaret Beckett, representing the UK delegation in this debate:

The United Kingdom proposed this debate during our presidency, because we felt that by facing up to the implications of climate change for that collective security, the world will take wiser decisions as we begin to build a low-carbon global economy…. (in UNSC 2007, p. 19)

Considerations of overseas climate conflict prevention, on the other hand, were included in the UK’s Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS), produced by DFID, the MOD, and the FCO. The BSOS argued for a preventive approach to conflict, based on a ‘consolidated effort, using all our diplomatic, development and defence capabilities as well as drawing on external expertise’ (DFID, DECC, and DEFRA 2011, p. 2). It warned that ‘Resource scarcity, population growth and climate change may increase the potential for conflict over disputed land and water’ (DFID, DECC, and DEFRA 2011, p. 10). As a starting point, it commissioned ‘systematic reviews of the evidence’ which include the impact of climate change (DFID, DECC and DEFRA 2011, p. 34).

But the prominence of the climate conflict storyline becomes less evident if we turn the focus from policy discourse to the actual policy tools and practices in the fields of development and security policy. While the FCO strategically applied climate conflict narratives to bring climate change onto the agenda of global security governance, DFID has thus far not been willing to embrace the notion of climate conflict in its conflict-prevention work: ‘[W]e are reluctant to make specific links between climate change and actual wars. We are not convinced that the evidence is really there’ (telephone interview, DFID Official, 4 April 2011).

Such criticism within DFID has complicated the possibility for the climate conflict discourse to enter policymaking on conflict prevention structurally (interviews with officials, DFID and UK Stabilisation Unit, held in 2011 and 2012). This is reflected, for instance, in the Joint Assessment on Conflict and Stability (JACS), a newly developed conflict assessment tool to provide a more proactive approach to conflict as requested by the BSOS. It has been proposed to include climate change in the conflict assessments under the JACS, based on the rationale that climate change can add to instability and conflict (telephone interview, Head Lessons Team, Stabilisation Unit, 19 July 2012; telephone interview, Official Stabilisation Unit, 20 August 2012). Many DFID officials, however, have been reluctant to link climate change to conflict due to a lack of empirical evidence of this relationship. As commented by a UK official involved in the development of the JACS, ‘It is an issue that people do not yet see as strongly related to conflict and stability. Issues of political economy and human rights are given much higher priority’ (telephone interview, Official Stabilisation Unit, 20 August 2012). For that reason, discussions on climate change and conflict prevention have not yet resulted in any substantial policy responses as part of the JACS and the BSOS (interviews, officials in UK Stabilisation Unit involved in the development of the JACS, July–August 2012), leaving the climate conflict discourse relatively powerless.

Rearticulating climate security discourse through resilience

While members of the development community were reluctant to include climate security considerations in policymaking on conflict prevention, this changed when resilience thinking entered the stage. Resilience discourse stresses rationales and practices such as adaptation to risk, shared responsibility, and self-capacity to achieve human security. In line with such a discourse, empowerment of vulnerable communities by funding adaptation projects in the global South became reconsidered as a part of a broader security strategy. Exactly this rationale stood behind the establishment of the UK International Climate Change Fund (ICF; DFID, DECC and DEFRA 2011, p. 2). For example, the National Security Strategy Update 2009 explicitly mentioned the ICF and the funding of resilience projects as a measure to build capacities and stability overseas (Cabinet Office 2009, p. 53). The goal of preventing climate conflicts should not be accomplished by direct governmental interventions, but through a broader societal endeavour: ‘We aim to create new partnerships with the private sector … We will share the risks of climate-resilient investments and show that they can be profitable’ (DFID, DECC and DEFRA 2011, p. 9).

Notice here that resilience thinking did not totally replace older climate-conflict storylines. Instead, DFID reinterpreted climate conflict prevention in relation to an understanding of resilience as adaptation (Methmann and Oels 2015, p. 54). Climate finance and investments were now considered as means to increase the adaptive capacities of vulnerable communities in overseas regions.

The UK discourse on climate-induced migration is another example of the re-articulation of climate security through resilience discourse. As a reaction to alarmist voices predicting waves of climate migrants that could flood the UK (e.g. MOD’s DCDC 2007, p. 29), the Home Office in cooperation with the Department of Energy and Climate Change initially sponsored a Foresight Project on Global Environmental Migration that commenced in October 2009 (Government Office for Science 2009). ‘We heard about large numbers of migrations going around, and there was a lot of media speculation. So we wanted to know where we would stand’ (interview, Home Office Official, 11 November 2011, London). But the Home Office realised shortly after the start of the project that there was a lack of evidence supporting claims that climate migrants would come to the UK. Crucial for the Foresight Project was that it turned away from a threat discourse on climate migration and instead discussed migration as a possible adaptation measure (Bettini 2014b, p. 189; Methmann and Oels 2015, p. 59): ‘In particular, planned and facilitated approaches to human migration can ease people out of situations of vulnerability’ (Government Office for Science 2011, p. 10). Subsequently, in line with the resilience discourse, the Home Office presented climate migration as a local strategy through which humans adapt themselves, and thus not an issue that fits its mandate: ‘People could not afford to come to the UK and why would they? People’s adaptation strategy is to move upstream, locally, and then move back to their places’ (Interview, Home Office Official, 11 November 2011, London). Yet, it is not that climate conflict storylines here completely disappear from the scene. For example, as Methmann and Oels (2015, p. 61) notice, the report signals the risk of unplanned and chaotic migration, as it could lead to people being ‘trapped’, e.g. in urban slums. In such situations, turmoil, radicalisation, and even violent conflicts could follow. According to this logic then, promoting resilience by endorsing planned migration in high-risk regions is in the national interest of the UK, as it can help prevent potential future conflicts.

A final example of the recent policy impact of climate resilience discourse is the MOD’s increasing focus on its own vulnerabilities to climate change. For example, a MOD official leading the next Global Strategic Impacts Reports by DCDC argued:

I think we will focus [in the forthcoming DCDC Global Strategic Impacts Reports] more on the increasing frequency of storms and cold snaps, for instance in central Europe, and how that affects the defence equipment requirements, as they have to function in higher extremes. (Interview, Assistant Head Futures Team, DCDC, MOD, 9 November 2011, Shrivenham)

Ideas on ‘greening the military’ and on the resilience of the MOD’s estate and equipment find more resonance within the MOD compared with policy proposals to address climate conflicts by military means (interview, Official MOD Strategy Unit, 23 January 2012). The MOD approaches resilience through its own Climate Impact Risk Assessment Method. The aim of this approach is to preserve the UK’s defence capabilities by increasing its resilience to ‘…the risks to global security presented by the complex geopolitical interactions resulting from a changing climate, as well as the risk to our own establishments and equipment from the impacts of climate change’ (MOD 2010a, p. 2). The result of this assessment is the production of a Climate Resilience Risk Register (MOD 2010b, p. 5). The Risk Register compiles, prioritises, and scores any current climatic risk for MOD’s defence estate or infrastructure, and combines this risk assessment with scenarios of the UK climate projections. Again, climate resilience here does not replace established rationales and routines in the defence sector. Instead, the MOD draws on an understanding of engineering resilience – with the aim of maintaining its infrastructures and operations – and recombines it with its already-established routines of risk assessment. The MOD’s Climate Resilience Risk Register is a hence a perfect example of bureaucratic vitalism (De Goede and Simon 2015, pp. 82–83). When resilience discourse meets with the lumbering routines of bureaucracies, it becomes stripped of much of its emphasis on transformation and emergence. What the MOD calls resilience is actually nothing other than very classical, probability-based risk assessment (Rothe 2011, Oels 2013).

In sum, from the late 2000s onwards, the signifier of resilience increasingly structured UK climate security discourse. The strong influence of resilience rationales is perfectly exemplified by the fact that actors in the defence and homeland security sector do not actively use climate security discourse to extend their influence in the climate-policy field or to promote a militarised approach to cope with climate risks. Instead, even the MOD aims to increase the resilience of the defence estate and its operational practices. A second piece of evidence of the discursive shift was the diminishing influence of the FCO, the strongest proponent of a climate conflict discourse, in the overall discourse coalition. The focus shifted from the FCO to DFID and the development community (telephone interview, member Oxford Research Group, 9 November 2011). However, climate-conflict storylines did not totally disappear. Instead, they were creatively reinterpreted and merged with storylines of climate resilience. Also, resilience thinking did not replace a logic of defence in climate security discourse, as suggested by Corry (2014, p. 268). As the examples here show, resilience discourse sits comfortably with UK defence aims and rationales.

Explaining the success of climate resilience

In the following, we discuss two factors which together help make sense of the success story of resilience in the UK: the context of climate security discourse and its strategic selectivity, and the ability of the resilience concept to produce consent. We do this by drawing on secondary literature and primary data collected via our interviews.

If we understand the rise of resilience as the outcome of a discursive struggle over the meaning and content of climate security, a first factor that influences this struggle is its broader discursive as well as material context (Hajer 1995, p. 60). By taking into consideration this broader context, the rise of resilience can be partially explained as a reaction to a crisis of (global) climate governance (Methmann and Oels 2015, p. 52). Whilst in the late 2000s scientific findings about anthropogenic climate change became ever more robust, its impacts became ever more present. Various natural disasters worldwide, such as the 2010 Pakistan floods, have been ascribed to global climate change. Paradoxically, with increasing scientific knowledge about climate change came increasing uncertainties about its impacts: ‘unpredictability is the new norm’ (Dalby 2013, p. 41). Given these growing complexities in climate science, the UK government questioned the possibility of addressing climate-change impacts in a planned, top-down manner:

In Britain, basically [amongst] senior officials in the Cabinet Office, MOD, FCO, DFID, there is a sense that climate change is going to be an important issue in future … The problem though as an issue it offers no real access points for someone operating in that world, partly because the consequences are long-term and not easily isolatable, which means that the action is always going to be through another range of issues. (Interview, UK senior government official, 11 November 2011, London)

Simultaneously to these scientific developments, it became apparent to UK representatives that international climate politics would fail to deal with this fundamental threat (Dimitrov 2010). The failure to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol during the Conference of the Parties 2009 at Copenhagen was increasingly seen as indicative of an insurmountable government impasse. As expressed by the Resilience Alliance, problems such as climate change are so complex that we are caught in an ‘ingenuity trap’ – human actors simply lack the ingenuity required to solve them (Schmidt 2015, p. 407). The resulting disbelief in state power and multilateral negotiations opened the way for non-state actors and alternative governance arrangements to arise (see also Dyer 2014).

At the same time, as David Chandler (2014) has recently argued, the rise of resilience can be interpreted as a reaction to the failure of neoliberal policy programs, such as Emissions Trading or the Clean Development Mechanism. Such policy programs suffer from an inherent contradiction. Other than suggested by neoliberal ideology, the establishment of carbon markets is not an evolutionary process but actually requires a considerable amount of government intervention: the measurement and commodification of CO₂, establishing and maintaining the material and legal infrastructure of emission trading – all this requires governmental action (Stephan 2012). Market-based climate governance hence faces the same governmental impasse that characterises command-and-control climate political measures.

The growing prominence of resilience as a governance paradigm could thus be seen as a reaction to these inherent problems of market-based and state-led climate-governance mechanisms (Chandler 2014). Thus, a resilience rationale is used to challenge existing marked-based adaptation policies of the UK, by problematising them as being too technical and reductionist:

At the moment, adaptation and finance is very technical and is predicated on no social science analysis. It tends to ignore the social science impact of investments. The people who do it are, in the UK, in the Department for International Development, are very aware that that is wrong … One of the big issues is: ‘How does this change what we do in terms of our investments?’ If you want to caricature that debate, on the security side I would say climate and security makes you focus more on social resilience rather than hard engineering issues. (Interview, member of E3G, 21 October 2011, London)

Instead of goal-oriented policymaking, such as mitigating climate change, we see the rise of adaptive governance: approaches that are collaborative, flexible, and learning based (Schmidt 2015, p. 407). For example, in the time of the climate conflict discourse’s dominance, the FCO used its storylines to convince other states – such as emerging economies – of the need to take mitigation action (Boas 2015, pp. 86–95). But once these storylines became increasingly criticised, the FCO instead relied on narratives of risk and resilience (interview, Official of the British High Commission Delhi, 19 August 2011). Without giving up its general objective of preventing climate security risks for the UK, it moved away from a top-down lecturing style in foreign-policy exchange with emerging economies and instead pursued a strategy of dialogue and collaboration (Boas 2015, pp. 163–166).

A second reason for the growing prominence of climate resilience is its ability to produce consent between opposing camps in climate security discourse. As shown, climate security discourse received considerable critique. There are two types of skepticism towards climate conflict storylines that emerged in the mid-2000s. The first one is an epistemic skepticism, referring to arguments that challenge the epistemic foundation on which climate conflict linkages are built. Many UK ministerial representatives of the Home Office as well as the DFID have voiced such concerns. As argued by a DFID official:

The FCO is often jumping to conclusions on climate security while DFID thinks we need a more evidence-based approach. The FCO sees climate change as a security risk. It is basically asking itself the question whether the UK has to arm itself against climate wars. While we at DFID think it is not as clear cut as that. (Interview, DFID official, 9 December 2011, London)

The Home Office noted that ‘there is no evidence for it [climate migration] being a security issue. There is no evidence that it will affect the UK. Yes, there may be more urbanisation in non-EU countries, but that is just simple development just like we had our industrial development. So that is normal’ (interview, Home Office Official, 11 November 2011, London).

A second form of skepticism is a normative one. It is made up by articulations of critical academics and some NGOs that have warned against the dangerous implications of linking climate change to security (Hartmann 2010). They fear that this discourse would produce aversive policies, focussed solely on short-term and reactive measures to secure national survival and state interests (Detraz and Betsill 2009, Hartmann 2010). As argued by the Coordinator of the Climate Change and Migration Coalition of the UK-based NGO COIN:

I do not think using that frame would be beneficial as it focuses on the idea of threats, protection, fortifying borders, and border controls. It can have a positive effect by increasing cooperation but it may also be negative as it makes the focus on interests more important. And then the interests of the many may supersede the interests of the few, as happens all the time. (Interview, Coordinator, Climate Change and Coordination Network 2009–2012, Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN), 23 November 2011)

Resilience discourse was able to pacify this discursive struggle. Consider the following quote, in which the interviewee uses the consent-producing power of resilience as a universal demand to counter critics of climate security arguments:

…every now and again I bump into people from different environmental constituencies, if you like, who are very uncomfortable, who accuse us of – whatever this means – trying to securitise climate change … I’ve never understood that … Of course, it’s in everybody’s interest to build as much resilience as possible to climate stress – and indeed, to other stresses – into the economy, and into other people’s economies as well. Climate change increases the risk of failed states, which is one of the transmission mechanisms of climate insecurity. So a focus on resilience and – I hate the word and I avoid using it as much as possible – a focus on adaptation to climate change is important there. (Interview, member of International Alert, 20 October 2011, London)

This quote shows how the climate security discourse has been able to reframe key objectives often promoted under climate conflict storylines – such as notions of stress and failed states – in more subtle and acceptable resilience language.

The discourse furthermore shifted the focus away from simple causalities of climate conflict narratives towards stressing complex interdependencies of social, ecological, and economic factors behind conflicts (Brock 2012, p. 4). This point is perfectly expressed by an interviewee:

I think there was a consensus that the kind of research on environmental change, scarcity and conflict was too linear. It was trying to directly attribute scarcity to conflict … I think – or maybe this is more what I hope – that the current thinking is much more about understanding the complexity. (Telephone interview, Foreign Office member, 15 December 2011)

Taken together, this opened the door for developmental actors critical of a narrow national-security framework to support climate security, such as DFID, as well as developmental and humanitarian NGOs such as OXFAM (Corry 2014, pp. 265–267.). The rise of resilience could hence be explained by the growing impact of the development community, or as a developmentalisation of the climate security discourse in the UK. This observation is shared by many of our interviewees:

…a lot of the policy issues around the security dimensions of climate change have become the domain of our international development ministry. Our Department for International Development has become one of the main players in climate change adaptation and in climate change resilience debates … government resources for international development have actually increased while the budgets for many other ministries have been reduced for reasons of public finances. (Telephone interview, climate security expert, University of East Anglia, 2 November 2011)

Furthermore, an FCO official perfectly illustrates how the language of resilience has been used to attract former critics of climate conflict storylines (in this case, the Indian government):

Traditionally it was about mitigation, but increasingly it is focused on resilience as well. In terms of India, for the UK the aim is to help India to move towards low carbon economy and to help build resilience among the community. But … [using explicit security arguments] turned out not to be an effective way. India rather talks about issues like resilience, energy efficiency, energy access, sustainable development. So it is better to discuss climate change in those terms rather than in terms of security as we are basically talking about the same thing. (Interview, FCO Official, British High Commission New Delhi, 19 August 2011)

Freed from the alarmist tone of climate conflict storylines, and acknowledging the complexity of socio-ecological drivers of insecurity, climate security discourse becomes something to which developing and emerging states, actors from the development field, and critical academics can again relate.

Conclusion

We have sought here to explain the rise of the concept of resilience in climate security discourse. Drawing on the paradigmatic case of the UK, we were particularly looking at the actor coalitions and discursive struggles behind the discursive changes. Our analysis adds to the recent debate on climate security and resilience in three important ways.

First, we contribute to the recent debate on climate security and resilience discourse by shifting the analytical focus from discourses and policy programmes to the practitioners in the field of climate security. By doing so, we not only trace the emergence of a discourse coalition promoting the idea of resilience, but also show that practitioners’ understandings of resilience often differ fundamentally from the conceptual debates on resilience. In this diversity of different understandings of resilience, climate-conflict discourse has not disappeared from the scene. Rather, it has been rearticulated in relation to complexity storylines. For example, climate finance and the investment into adaptation projects have been reframed as a conflict-prevention measure. In this respect, we agree with Corry (2014) in that resilience in practice often differs from a neoliberal logic of self-responsibilisation. Yet, at the same time, the ambiguity of resilience in practice also means that we do not see a turn away from a logic of defence as suggested by Corry – it is just so malleable that, for example, the MOD can adopt it and easily reinterpret it in relation to their national defence and security rationales.

Second, not despite but due to its messiness, resilience opens up climate security discourse to a variety of opposing actors. The discourse succeeds in forging a broad discourse coalition on climate security, and in that manner becomes hegemonic in the debate on climate security. By promoting ideas of self-capacity, learning, reflexivity, and empowerment, it appeals to a wide group of actors: traditional security actors (e.g. the MOD), development policy actors (DFID), humanitarian NGOs (e.g. OXFAM), and the climate-change community (e.g. academics). The rise of resilience could hence be understood as the discursive evidence of a broader developmentalisation of climate security, which manifests itself materially in a shift of resources and responsibilities towards DFID and related developmental NGOs.

Third, we concur with Methmann and Oels (2015) and Chandler (2014) that the rise of resilience cannot be understood without taking account of the broader material and discursive context. A fundamental dislocation marked the late 2000s: while the negative impacts of climate change became ever more present, so too did the radical epistemological uncertainty that hinders reliable predictions of future climate risks. A growing mistrust in both state-driven as well as market-based climate governance accompanied this new norm of uncertainty. Taken together, these developments produced a strong bias against goal-directed climate-mitigation policies, as pursued by climate conflict discourse, and in favour of the adaptive governance promoted by resilience.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a postdoc scholarship of the Centre for a Sustainable University Hamburg, and by a UK Economic and Social Research Council PhD studentship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our interviews were conducted after the discursive changes discussed here set in. This approach is legitimate, since our aim is not to trace the discursive shifts within the interview data themselves. Rather, our interviewees – all participants in the discursive field studied here – have provided us with important insights about the origins and core storylines, about changing actor coalitions, as well as critical discourse moments.