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Abstract
In this paper, we respond to academic critiques of resilience that suggest an inherent affinity with neoliberalism and/or the incompatibility of resilience and critical agency. Drawing on the reflections of people who have found ‘resilience’ a helpful conceptual tool that has informed their engagement with a challenging and unsettling context, we suggest that ideas of resilience, solidarity and agency intersect in complex and interesting ways. Following a brief discussion of our methodology, we begin with an overview of how respondents to an online survey and a series of related conversations conceptualise resilience. We go on to explore how these conceptualisations might relate to critical analysis of the status quo, and to engagement with solidarity and agency. We conclude that there is potential to link these concepts, and that thoughtful engagement with this potential, and with the tensions and questions it raises, might make valuable contributions to both theory and practice.
Notes
1. A few days after this paper was finished, our immediate local area – the Calder valley in West Yorkshire – experienced some of the worst flooding in the UK in the winter of 2015/16. The experience of the many impacts on landscapes, infrastructure and people, and of the strength and diversity of community responses, has generated insights and reflections that resonate with many of the themes we explore below. It is worth briefly noting that the idea that ‘we’re a resilient lot in our valley’ (Coop, Citation2016) – the claiming of resilience in the first person (see also below) – has clearly generated rather than undermined a sense of agency and solidarity. The implications for political action seem more complicated (though no less interesting), not least because the solidarity that mattered most in the immediate aftermath crossed political boundaries. This in itself has opened up spaces for conversation about political questions that involve people from a wider range of backgrounds and political perspectives than is often the case in everyday life. Among other things, the nature of these discussions suggests that in a complex social-ecological system, the relative influence of factors within and beyond the responsibility of different actors can be genuinely difficult to disentangle, making it harder to appeal to simplistic political narratives.
2. In this context, it is also worth noting that permaculture was the original inspiration behind the transition movement, which emerged from the attempt by students on one of Rob Hopkins’s permaculture design courses to grapple with the likely implications of peak oil. Transition, as originally conceived, was Hopkins’s attempt to apply a permaculture approach to larger-scale community engagement and local planning (see Hopkins, Citation2008). Today, permaculture and transition are overlapping but not identical sets of ideas and networks.
4. In this context, it is interesting to note that searches on www.resilience.org and on www.transitionnetwork.org throw up numerous discussions of the commons/commoning, suggesting that for many involved in the spectrum of initiatives that have developed under the discourses of resilience and transition, these are related concepts.
5. The fact that this respondent seems to view this as a possibility rather than a current problem is indicative of the fact that the majority of our respondents have encountered resilience not via top-down policies or pronouncements but in spaces experienced as counter-cultural.
6. See also footnote 1 above.
7. At the same time, it is important to recognise that in some settings, resilience might require mobility more than commitment to place; see, for example, Reinert & Benjaminsen, Citation2015; Thiede, Citation2015.
8. This was the rationale for the Dark Mountain project, a movement that takes as its starting point humanity’s fundamental powerlessness in the face of converging economic and ecological crises – and whose rationale and focus on the aesthetic, we would suggest, has some resonance with Evans and Reid’s (Citation2014) suggestion that politics might now take the form of ‘life as a work of art’ (see Kingsnorth & Hine, Citation2009).
9. MacKinnon and Derickson (Citation2012) and Boke (Citation2015) suggest the alternative framings of ‘resourcefulness’ and an ‘ethics of care’, respectively, in an attempt to address some of the problems they have observed with resilience frames in the context of transition initiatives. In the meantime, the Transition Network itself is also reconsidering the story it is telling and suggesting a move away from seeing transition as a response to particular challenges (Hopkins, Citation2015) – potentially, this might lead to resilience fading into the background; whether it will also address concerns around power and inequality is less clear.
10. In fact, there is impetus for this sort of engagement within some of the networks that many of our respondents belong to. For example, the increasingly public and visible articulation of justice, especially the recognition of inequalities and decolonisation, as key to climate change activism (e.g. Klein, Citation2014; Virasami & Kelbert, Citation2015), suggests that these questions are becoming more central.