Abstract
The word ‘resilience’ is increasingly prominent in policy debates, yet is used in radically different ways. Indeed, Time magazine named ‘resilience’ as the buzzword of 2013 (p. 28). In this book, Katrina Brown provides a public service by analyzing these different meanings, and offering insights into how it can be understood.
Brown reviews debates about resilience from various approaches within ecological science, psychological development and sustainable development. She identifies three key meanings of resilience: the physical ability of an ecosystem to absorb disturbances; the capacity of individuals or social groups to access resources for well-being; and the ability of people or communities to overcome catastrophe (p. 7). Brown adopts a political ecology approach in order to argue that resilience should be seen ‘as a characteristic or property of complex dynamic social ecological systems that can support positive and proactive change’ (p. 30).
In terms of development policy, Brown argues that there are three distinct discourses of resilience (p. 36). One is the optimistic vision that links resilience with growth. The other two are pessimistic because they see resilience as protection against short-term disasters or long-term vulnerability. These discourses, however, are ‘often inconsistent, mismatched with scientific thinking, and in some respects, confused’ (p. 36). Brown analyzes each discourse in relation to five internal dimensions, comprising: who is resilient (and to what); assumptions about natural cause-and-effect relationships; key metaphors and narratives used to promote the discourse; agents and their motives; and policy prescriptions and normative assumptions (p. 39). For example, some documents from the World Bank or World Resources Institute promote what she calls liberal resilience, which equates economic growth with resilience (p. 48). In this same vein, the World Bank’s Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR) is based on ‘the process of wealth generation’ (p. 51). These specific approaches, however, raise tensions because they overlook important questions of equity or indeed the processes of growth that can enhance social vulnerability (p. 52). A lack of attention to how definitions of resilience are framed can mean that deve-lopment agencies might focus excessively on measuring and evaluating how their interventions have achieved a certain form of resilience, without acknowledging different approaches to resilience, or potential contradictions. She urges more attention to the normative and causal assumptions underlying work on resilience, including asking why resilience might be needed (p. 59).
Partly to address these challenges, Brown provides a broad-reaching review of literatures on resilience from different disciplines (pp. 69–99). The work of Buzz Holling and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, for example, challenged the idea within ecological science that resilience was a stable equilibrium in ecosystems, and promoted instead ideas of multiple equilibria (p. 72). Later work emphasized concepts such as the adaptive cycle, which explains transitions between long-term stability and short-term adjustments (p. 74), and panarchy, which refers to cross-scale adaptive cycles (p. 76). Brown acknowledges the ‘discursive dominance’ of the scholarly network, the RESILIENCE ALLIANCE, in recent debates (p. 12).
These largely physical models of resilience are now complemented by debates about social ecological systems and social resilience (pp. 78–80). Other debates on human development, including psychological and emotional development, have also emphasized resilience, comprising four waves of research since the 1960s ranging from the resilience of individuals and families to multilevel system dynamics within society (p. 80).
The book also analyzes social and political debates about experiential resilience, or how people actually experience resilience (pp. 100–26). This analysis discusses the structural causes of social vulnerability, and whether resilience is actually an ‘opposite’ of vulnerability or an independent quality (p. 102). She notes, ‘because much resilience research focuses on place-based analysis of particular social ecological systems, this often obscures the way in which economic and power relations are privileged’ (p. 103). Brown provides examples of experiential resilience, including HIV/AIDS in Uganda (p. 106), coastal vulnerability in East Africa (p. 109) or narratives of coastal change in Orkney (p. 111). She then proposes five elements of ‘everyday forms of resilience’ (p. 118) that might constitute resilience in different places. These elements comprise: power asymmetries and resistance, cross-scale interactions and interventions, social dynamics of resilience, contested knowledges and values; and the situated resilience arising from a sense of place.
Brown then applies these ideas to contemporary discussions of adaptation to climate change (pp. 127–55) and poverty (pp. 156–84). There are notable tensions in international funding for adaptation based on different approaches to resilience (p. 127), as well as paradoxes that resilience and adaptation to climate variability pre-exist the onset of anthropogenic climate change. Consequently, should ‘adaptation’ be considered ‘development as usual’? (p. 130). Indeed, some official responses to adaptation to climate change might undermine longer-term ecosystem and societal resilience (p. 132). Brown reviews various calls to make adaptation more sensitive to the needs and transitions of poorer people (p. 136); and to make clearer the relationships of adaptation, vulnerability and resilience (p. 139) and resilience and adaptive capacity (p. 145). She notes, ‘as an analytical lens, resilience does not prescribe a certain type of adaptation. But in emphasising capacities, it can also be fundamental to our understanding of non-incremental change and transformation’ (p. 152).
Similarly, with poverty, there is a paradox between the common discourses that poorer people are resilient versus more conventional definitions of poverty as lacking resilience (p. 157). Brown argues that the concept of resilience can enhance understandings of poverty and environmental change. In particular, there are similarities in thinking between poverty traps, and discussions of social ecological traps (and so-called rigidity traps) in the social resilience literature (p. 161). Such factors might explain persistent economic marginalization and drought in Tanzania (p. 164). In turn, this leads to discussions of how social transformation, or transformative change, can escape traps, and the extent to which social transformations are triggered by environmental change or cognitive decisions by societies to take pre-emptive action (pp. 167–74).
Brown concludes the book with a detailed analysis of the disastrous flooding in New Orleans in 2005, as an illustration of resilience as ‘resistance, rootedness, and resourcefulness’ (p. 185). Resistance, in the political sense of the word, ‘puts agency at the heart of resilience’ (p. 196). Rootedness refers to the experiential aspects of resilience by people living in specific locations (a factor that might also enhance social divisions and traps) (p. 197). Resourcefulness comprises innovation, social learning and social capital, which also contribute to adaptive capacity (p. 198). Deliberating about these three themes offer multidisciplinary insights to making resilience a useful concept in development policy.
This is a thoughtful and highly informative book. It is an important addition to debates about resilience and related concepts such as adaptation, vulnerability and sustainable development.