Researching resilience: An agenda for change

Abstract

Drawing on a wide range of research – including disaster management, security studies, international relations and social sciences – this article offers a critical perspective on the current state of play in international research on disaster resilience. Some suggestions are made on how academic approaches can better interface with policy solutions to the wicked problem of disasters. The goal of this paper is to offer one potential roadmap of how research on resilience can help, not hinder, the broader policy agenda for increased societal security and disaster resilience.

Keywords::

• disaster resilience
• communication
• participation
• typology
• governance
• governmentality

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend my thanks to David Chandler and to both the editorial and peer-review team who have been integral to the development of this paper, as well as to James Bohland and Paul Knox at the Global Urban and Regional Resilience Forum (Virginia Tech) where this work was presented and discussed in October 2014. The combined feedback has significantly improved the analytical framing and scope of the final paper, and I am grateful for your support.

Notes

^1. See the first edition of Resilience (see Chandler, 2013), also the recent special edition of Globalizations on Crisis, Movement, Management: Globalizing Dynamics (Goodman & Marshall, 2013).

^2. It should also be acknowledged that this is nothing new but in fact a claim made at different times in different languages. The term used in the 1980s was integrated emergency management, topically and thematically with many similarities to today's ‘resilience’ agenda (McLoughlin, 1985).

^3. For example, evacuation plans, fire or flood defence plans for the home, survival kits etc (Cretikos et al., 2008).

^4. Such as buying the appropriate insurance, assessing household risk etc. Such consultations rarely involve community voices or participants but rather are direct consultations with the service providers in the private sector by legislative and policy professionals. Due to the closed door nature of such consultations little empirical research is available.

^5. For details on Zombie neoliberalism, see Peck (2010).

^6. Anecdotes from some bushfire-affected communities in Australia have talked about ‘surviving the recovery’ as well as surviving the disaster itself. There is little or no research into this aspect of recovery and the long-term after effects of disasters in developed countries.

^7. Research on this as a security issue has been conducted in the USA (see Brower & Chalk, 2003). In the UK, we can find work on food-related disease and resilience from UK Resilience (2009).

^8. This combat agency approach is typical of Australian states and federal practice. There are regional and national variations: in the USA, command and control is centralised under the Federal Emergency management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, in the UK, this is decentralized through the Civil Contingencies Secretariat for preparation and planning, but during response and recovery decentralised through Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, throughout different phases this is managed across scales using local resilience forums, which operate across organisational boundaries.

^9. See, for example, Kaufman (2011).

^10. This has been discussed to some extent in relation to the welfare state (Rogowski, 2011) and also in relation to criminal justice (de Lint & Chazal, 2013) but a tight focus on the neoliberalism underpinning negative resilience practice has not yet been established, rather the broader critique of neoliberal resilience remains largely geo-political and generalised, though work in this area is developing (Filion, 2013; Jessop, 2014).

^11. See also Cigler (2007).

^12. See, for example, Handmer and Dovers (1996) and Bruneau et al. (2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Rogers

Peter Rogers is Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, he is the co-director of Climate Futures and a member of the Societal Security Initiative (in the Risk, Response and Resilience theme).