The Language of Resilience: Ideas and Action in Contemporary Policy-making

ABSTRACT

It is difficult not to have noticed that in the last decade or so the notion of resilience has been adopted by many practitioners in Anglophone nations as part of a strategy for political engagement. Very often, those who advocate a resilience agenda concede that the insidious effects of globalized forms of capitalism cannot effectively be resisted and therefore it is necessary to accommodate to this reality by adapting and becoming resilient to any shocks that might arise. The aims of this paper are to explore not only some of the reasons why resilience has such appeal, but also to make some critical observations about policy responses at a time of increasing uncertainty. Amongst the questions addressed are: what might the use of resilience by policy-makers reveal about the conduct of government? Can its popularity within government agencies provide some insights as to why tangible reform remains elusive? Is there a form of resilience strategy that could serve to counter the pernicious effects of austerity and neoliberal policy responses? Amongst the arguments proposed is that, at best, resilience has only limited utility and at worst serves as a distraction to developing more incisive and lasting forms of political engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• Policy
• Housing
• Governance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Our arguments refer to resilience within Anglophone governmental discourses. In other languages, the deployment of resilience is less common. The authors are grateful to an anonymous referee for alerting us to this point.

2. This noted, resilience can also be viewed as a positive attribute, as in the case of dealing with the demands of child-rearing or caring for aged parents etc.

3. Although whether resilience, and terms like it, are therefore to be understood as “useful fictions” in Vaihinger’s sense (1952) is another matter.

4. We are mindful that there is an extant literature within both psychology and organizational fields of study that offer a more sympathetic account of the utility of resilience to the one advanced here (see for example: Burnard and Bhamra 2011; Richardson 2002; Rutter 2012).

5. See Critchley (2012) and Mirowski (2014) for studies that consider the disillusionment in the efficacy of government as an agency for reform.

6. See Hacking (1990) for a similar claim to explain the development of probability theory and statistics in the enlightenment period.

7. Modern computerised systems undoubtedly allow greater capacity for data analysis, but what is often forgotten is that digitized analysis itself depends on decisions made independently of the analysis, and so on some prior capacity already to have understood, in some sense, what is to be analysed. Even digitized analysis is subject, therefore, to the initiations of the understanding, and the decision-making associated with it, on which it depends.

8. Swanstrom (2008) writes that policy-makers often see resilience as an opportunity or pretext for withdrawing resources.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FT120100471].