![Sample our Environment & Sustainability journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5935/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Environment-Sustainability.jpg"})
Abstract
“Resilience” is booming. No longer a mere metaphor or abstract reference to dispositional properties, the resilience of communities or social-ecological systems is increasingly grounded in specific first-order properties. Consequently, resilience now constitutes a contentful and achievable partial conception of a good society. Yet political philosophers have taken little notice. The current article first discerns within recent social-scientific literature a set of attainable and measurable first-order properties that constitute “community resilience” or “ecological resilience.” Then, specifying “resilience” as the resilience of high-HDI democratic societies to environmental disasters, infrastructure failures, and economic collapse, the current article argues from within a liberal framework that both “classical” (Lockean) and “egalitarian” (Rawlsian) liberals must treat resilience so understood as a necessary condition of legitimacy and justice; and this conclusion forces an overhaul of these liberal theories. Taking community resilience seriously requires both methodological and substantive revisions of the liberal enterprise.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Karen Christopher, David Imbroscio, Alejandra Mancilla, Cara Nine, and the anonymous referees for careful reading of and helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Tony Arnold and Justin Mog for discussions of resilience in theory and practice.
Notes
12 Matrix based on Bruneau et al., Citation2003; examples based on Bruneau et al. as well as Cutter et al., Citation2010 and Norris et al., Citation2008.
1. EBSCOhost (searching ‘resilience OR resiliency’) turns up over 19,500 articles since 2000, yet only about 1000 more in the 54 years previous; 3338 have appeared just since the beginning of 2014. The vast (and growing) majority of these articles is scholarly. See www.ebscohost.com (accessed 2 November 2015). Philosopher’s Index finds 120 results, 99 of them since 2000. See http://search.proquest.com/philosophersindex (accessed 2 November 2015).
2. For an overview see Wissenburg, Citation2006. For more extended discussions see de-Shalit, Citation1995; Dobson, Citation1998; Eckersley, Citation2004; Hailwood, Citation2004; Hayward, Citation1998, Citation2009; Valdivielso, Citation2004.
3. For example, Buchanan, Citation2004; Nussbaum, Citation2006. One of the most prominent liberal theorists of global justice, Thomas Pogge (Citation2000), regards our contemporary political economy as implicating citizens of ‘rich’ countries in the greatest crime against humanity ever committed. Nor do contemporary classical liberals endorse corporate capitalism. See Lomasky, Citation1987; Schmidtz, Citation2006.
4. Indeed the anti-capitalist critique of resilience, discussed above, might better be understood as a critique of neoliberal anti-fragility – a critique of the fact that neoliberalism works by forcing individuals and natural systems to absorb the fragility of capitalism itself. I think this is right. But it is not a critique of resilience.
5. Bruneau et al. Citation2003, pp. 737–738. The four ‘Rs’ are from Bruneau et al. (Citation2003) but the brief quoted definitions are from the gloss in Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, and Pfefferbaum (Citation2008, p. 134)
6. Hereinafter unless otherwise noted, by ‘resilience’ I mean this gloss on resilience.
7. For an especially perspicuous articulation and defense of this orientation, see Russell, Citation2004. Simmons (Citation1992, ch. 6), however, denies that Locke’s theory is compatible with libertarianism. For a valuable recent articulation of ‘left-libertarianism’ paying particular attention to environmental issues, see Roark, Citation2013.
8. Klein, Citation2008. Zack (Citation2009, pp. 116–117) criticizes Klein for engaging in ‘Manichaeanism’ and ‘conspiracy theory.’ See also Zack’s (Citation2012) discussion of disaster capitalism as depredation.
9. I have added the italicized word to Rawls, Citation1999b, p. 266.
10. ‘Chain Connection’ and ‘Close-knitness’ guarantee that everyone rises or falls together. For definitions see Rawls, Citation1999b, pp. 69–72.
11. See also Daniels’ critique of the analogous strategy of adding health or health insurance as a primary social good, in Daniels, Citation2008, pp. 56–57.