The influence of climate resilience governmentality on vulnerability in regional Australia

Governmentality

Foucault illuminated historical transformations of governing that have contributed to producing distinct social subjects (Foucault, 1982, 1991, 2008). Foucault (1982, 2008) recognised that initially in Europe, sovereigns went from governing territory to governing ‘the complex of men and things’, a significant transformation of space and governmental management. Originally, sovereign power was based on the ‘right to take life and let live’, in which brute force and fear of the sovereign attempted to make subjects compliant to governors’ wills (Foucault, 1982). With the advent of capitalism, the development of nation-states, and the progression of natural and behavioural sciences, transformational change how way populations were viewed occurred (Foucault, 1982, 1991). Populations became considered productive resources that should be managed through biopower (i.e., techniques for control over whole populations) and later neoliberal power (i.e., state-driven processes that further inculcated subjectivities that aligned with free market capitalism).

Broadly, governmentality encompasses sovereign, disciplinary and governmental forms of power, which overlap and intersect (Death, 2013; Foucault, 2008). Foucault (1991, 108) suggested that governmentality is:

[T]he ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its technical means, apparatuses of security.

Neoliberalism and resilience-as-governmentality

Although there are growing critiques of the overly deterministic relationship between neoliberalism and resilience (O’Grady and Shaw, 2023), the two forms of governmental rationalities share similarities and are mutually reinforcing. Neoliberalism is, however, not only about state abandonment and economic deregulation. Indeed, neoliberalism has been a successful ideological project regardless of its economic achievements – political economists have shown that far from reducing states’ role in the market, state capitalism is arguably more important than ever (Alami, 2023). Foucault (1982) recognised the instrumental role of neoliberalism in subject formation, whereby homo economicus is a subject who is rational, self-interested and sees the market as the ontological pre-given category and priority in life. Despite strong resistance from diverse social groups (e.g., Estes, 2019), there can be little contention that this ideology is now utterly pervasive in many parts of the world. However, Foucault's (1991) concept of ‘counter-conduct’ recognised that subjects frequently resist imposed rationalities and desired transformations by those wielding power, which has emerged in the climate governmentality literature (Jackson et al., 2023a; Mills-Novoa et al., 2020).

Neoliberalism-as-governmentality has been investigated in socio-ecological fields such as conservation (Agrawal, 2005; Fletcher, 2010, 2017), climate change (Death, 2013; Oels, 2005) and environmental governance (Lockwood and Davidson, 2010). Neoliberal subjectification, through socio-ecological governance, attempts to instil new rationalities of nature and society, often premised on cost–benefit calculations, exchange over use value and technocratic and market-based solutions. Being a resilient subject means accepting these, amongst other, rationalities as common sense in the Gramscian sense. Here, resilience is a powerful policy object to produce neoliberal subjects (Chandler and Reid, 2016; Evan and Reid, 2013; Gill and Orgad, 2018; Wakefield et al., 2021). Welsh (2014, 16) writes:

Resilience discourses mark a break with the modernism of the ‘risk society’ by introducing novelty, adaptation, unpredictability, transformation, vulnerability and systems into a governmental discourse that now makes the governance of uncertainty and unpredictability a hallmark of rule.

Is there an emerging climate resilience governmentality in Australia?

In Australia, as elsewhere, the concept of resilience has become governmental dogma, infiltrating such sectors as emergency management, health and business. The Australian National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy 2021–2025 (NCRAS henceforth) (AusGov, 2021a, 8) defines resilience as: ‘The capacity of communities, environments and economies to cope with a hazardous event or disturbance, while maintaining their essential functions and structure’. Simply put, in Australia, a resilient subject, institution or – as is most frequently stated – community can withstand shocks whether they arise from political, economic or environmental domains (Aldunce et al., 2016). I will argue that in Australia, there is an emerging climate resilience governmentality. The relative retreat of governments from providing social services and personal security, relies, to some degree, on the ethos and pathos of resilience (Beilin and Paschen, 2021; Chandler and Reid, 2016). There is some contention in the literature on whether Australia has been driven by neoliberal rationalities, with Weller and O’Neil (2014) providing nuanced arguments against the dominance of neoliberalism. However, service delivery and disaster management has turned away from government responsibility towards shared and individual responsibility (Beer et al., 2005; Beilin and Paschen, 2021). This emerging climate resilience governmentality is, arguably, a strategy of subject formation to condition people to become less reliant on state support in a time of multiple overlapping crises (Beilin and Paschen, 2021; Elrick-Barr et al., 2017). However, O’Grady and Shaw (2023) challenge the prevailing trope that resilience is simplistically linked to state abandonment in the neoliberal era. They show through an example of responses to COVID-19 that governments have been playing an increasingly mediatory role in disasters and emergencies, primarily through the organisation and orchestration of non-state actors in emergency response and recovery. These observations do conform with Weller and O’Neil (2014) observations on the strong role of the Federal and more importantly the state governments in Australia in orchestrating economic and social policies, as opposed to only market rationality. These, amongst other observations, emerge throughout regional Australia in relation to climate change governance.

Historical–structural vulnerability

The story of modern Australia is one of omnicide (Celermajer et al., 2021; Crook and Short, 2019; Curthoys and Konishi, 2022). From the late 1700s, settler-colonial violence spread across the continent, erasing a plurality of lifeworlds through massacres, introduced invasive species and extractivism. British settlers saw this sovereign territory as Terra Nullius, an empty, virgin land ready for exploitation, profit and a place to send surplus labour to address the growing contradictions in the imperial core. These, amongst other colonial-linked processes, have been implicated in Australia's growing vulnerability to climate change (Ash et al., 2023).

Historical and ongoing harms to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from settler colonialism are well documented (Crook and Short, 2019; Howitt, 2020; Nethery, 2021; Watego, 2021; Wright et al., 2020). From epistemicide to political exclusion and from unequal health outcomes to educational achievement, coloniality is not an abstract concept (Sultana, 2022). It continues – through scalar, spatial and temporal processes – to produce spaces of vulnerability, which are disproportionately in postcodes with significant Indigenous populations (Howitt et al., 2012; Veland et al., 2013). One such postcode is 4871, Yarrabah, QLD. Whilst, as always, unique regarding cultures, histories, identities and politics, this empirical case illustrates some historical–structural determinants of vulnerability in majority Aboriginal communities throughout Australia.

Yarrabah was established in 1892 as a church mission. The massacres and forceful relocation of many disparate peoples to Yarrabah due to the state-sanctioned resource frontier expansion into Aboriginal lands in northern and western QLD, interrupted livelihoods, severed knowledge, obligations, responsibilities and connection to Country. One QLD academic suggested that, ‘all of those forced relocation communities were deliberated put in places where they would be marginalised from the economy’. Three Djungan Elders agreed and spoke of historical factors such as being too far away from Cairns, not being allowed in the settlement apart for specific things like school, being barred from bank accounts and owning property, and other forms of general exclusion from economic, social and political life as historical drivers of vulnerability (see Jackson, 2023b). A Yarrabah informant observed, ‘we are land rich, pocket poor. Dirt rich, pocket poor. However, you want to say it’. The fact that Yarrabah is highly exposed to storm surges and other coastal hazards and has poor services – despite a population of over 2500 people – were common themes raised, with one resident stating: ‘Any other town this size would have real services, shops and things’. The weight of the past, continued state violence, overcrowded and poor-quality housing, physical and mental ill health and crushing poverty and despondency, coupled with high exposure to coastal hazards and increasing extreme heat, helps to illustrate how historical–structural vulnerability has been (re)produced in Yarrabah (Jackson, 2023b). The increasingly frequency and severity of extreme events and ongoing slow onset processes such as sea level rise and changing seasonality (IPCC, 2022), are interacting with this accumulated historical structural vulnerability, which is undermining the capacities of Yarrabah residents to adapt to climate change.

It is not only Indigenous people who are vulnerable in Australia. Many drought-sensitive regions of Australia are in marginal rangelands (Phelps and Kelly, 2019). A senior NGO participant, who led an evaluation of a major drought relief programme in QLD (2020–2021), stated: ‘Historically governments put in policies and incentives to attract people to those rural areas [for food production] … there is a feeling among people that there's a responsibility of government to maintain services and that sort of stuff’. The perceived historical responsibility for governments to provide support was a recurring theme. In East Gippsland, Victoria, small-scale farmers reported a significant decline in services, especially in rural areas. One farmer captured this sentiment by stating ‘services have dwindled so much’. Another participant stated that there had been ‘a general decline in population and vibrancy’ in their regional QLD town. Although wealth exists in rural and regional Australia, it is unequally distributed (NRHA, 2014), with large pastoralist enterprises and mine owners and, to a lesser extent, their workers – often fly-in-fly-out – extracting the most value. Many people have been left behind. Inequality in Australia is high and rising (ACOSS, 2022; Greig et al., 2003; Morley and Ablett, 2017). Many living in rural and regional geographies have struggled to adapt to economic and social changes (NRHA, 2014). A narrative emerged amongst urban regional Australians, which indicated a perception that people who chose to live in drought-prone rural areas should move to cities instead of seeking government support. However, many rural Australians own little or no land and, due to limited formal education and capital, would struggle to move to and adapt to urban areas. This expression of immobility is especially true during an ever-worsening housing affordability crisis (ACOSS, 2022), which worsens without effective government intervention. Increasing heat, droughts, fires and flooding interact with increasingly vulnerable rural and regional geographies in Australia (Lawrence et al., 2022).

Despite relative safety narratives, urban areas in regional Australia are highly exposed and vulnerable to climate hazards. Mercantile and capitalist rationality drove settlement patterns along accessible trade routes that tended to be on the coast, along rivers and through valleys, some of which are highly exposed to natural hazards. Most major centres in regional Australia are either built on major rivers or along the coast or like Townsville both (Lloyd et al., 2020). Even when the direct need for oceanic or river freight has passed, the fixed capital in places and inertia, which is driven by, amongst other things, place attachment and long-term capital investment, means there is little appetite for planned retreat. These historical settlement and investment decisions continue to strongly influence the present-day vulnerability of urban Australians to climate change.

Intersectional vulnerability

The concept of intersectionality has become more mainstream in academia and popular culture (Salem, 2018). With this visibility, Salem (2018) explores the recent turn ‘from intersectionality as a moment of resistance to intersectionality as a neoliberal approach that erases inequality’. I acknowledge this critique and draw from more radical interpretations of intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1989), which are intrinsically linked to the previous section exploring historical–structural processes (Crenshaw, 1989; Fergerson, 2016). Intersectional analysis helps illuminate how individuals and groups differentially experience these structural processes. Amongst other things, class, race and gender intersect to create vastly different lived experiences of climate change (Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014).

Neoliberal reforms, although less complete than in other similar economies (Weller and O’Neil, 2014), have targeted and undermined the provision of social services in Australia (Beer et al., 2005) and led to further dispossession of and structural violence against already marginalised groups (Potter, 2020). Whilst socially progressive discourses related to anti-racism, gender equality and inclusivity have become more visible in recent decades, poverty, incarceration rates and inequality have worsened during the same period for specific groups such as Indigenous people and other lower socio-economic groups (ACOSS, 2022). Critical to neoliberal governmentality, discourses of inclusivity often hide the ongoing harms of state-driven neoliberal reforms. In a concrete example, a senior social services informant suggested that when an individual or family suffers from financial duress, domestic violence or disasters – or all of the above – to gain access to many social services, they must ‘reach a crisis point to access services… [and it is] unfortunately quite often a condition of ongoing support’. Key sectoral informants suggested that demand for such services as crisis housing for women fleeing domestic violence, homeless shelters, debt relief and psychological counselling were well above capacity and progressively worsening over time. This starkly contrasts to the growing societal discourse of social justice and care for women, racialised, and other marginalised groups. A financial counsellor working with vulnerable groups in Far North QLD – often Indigenous and other ethnic minorities – suggested ‘band aid solutions’ are being used to fix ‘systemic issues being faced by persistently vulnerable groups’. They indicated that the most marginalised people often do not seek this minimal emergency support and live on the ‘periphery of the periphery’.

Indigenous Australians continue to experience systematic exclusion from economic, social and political life (AHRC, 2018). Although government and non-government programmes exist throughout each state and territory to address inequities in health, education, income and housing, the interventions are paternalistic, surface level, reactive and are not meaningfully reducing vulnerability (AHRC, 2018). Growing up Black in Australia means being categorised as troublesome, a victim and hopeless, amongst other pathologies affixed to Black bodies (Watego, 2021). The normalisation of racism in regional Australia continues, with one Aboriginal social worker stating:

My other half is Aboriginal and I am too… Where I'm from is a racist town as well, but it's probably not so out there [i.e., blatant] like it is in Townsville… I don't go on Facebook anymore. But he will go on and he'll check people's comments and stuff like that. Like racist comments. Absolutely disgusting comments.

I spoke with 47 government and non-governmental social service providers across regional Australia. All contacts, from different vantage points, spoke of the ongoing social problems driven by racism, increasing disasters, rising inequality, declining services and the housing crisis (i.e., lack of social or affordable housing). A social services stakeholder said:

… we were invited to the senate inquiry [into responsible lending obligations] so that they could hear how we saw people who have lots of points of vulnerability, not just poor, not just because of exclusion from the mainstream, and not just because of location, but you compound all that together and that just increases their vulnerability over and over and over again.

Psychosocial vulnerability

Psychosocial drivers of vulnerability relate to how emotions, belonging, beliefs and knowledge influence vulnerability to climate change (Eriksen et al., 2020). These important drivers of vulnerability are often overlooked in a literature that tends to preference material conditions, but I argue they are essential to ensure a holistic understanding of vulnerability.

The harsh Australian climate, with its typical oscillation between wet and dry extremes, and the conquest by settlers who economically developed most regions apart from those most unviable, have contributed to the cultural mythos of fortitude and overcoming adversity (Bryant and Garnham, 2015). It has been documented that some Australians continue to hold a perception of having tamed the frontier (Curthoys and Konishi, 2022; Jackson 2023a). This (mis)perception is linked to a nature-culture divide that emerged in discussions with many non-Indigenous people. For example, a climate consultant suggested that they typically avoid raising extreme events when consulting local councils ‘because QLD is so exposed to extreme events, everybody has an experience of disasters. You end up having a two-hour meeting where they are just sharing war stories’. Emergency services informants often used language that elicited warfare with unruly nature. Structural vulnerability was frequently obscured, whilst response and heroism of emergency services or even local actors was illuminated and is culturally embedded (Elrick-Barr et al., 2017). A senior emergency services officer said ‘you know all our volunteers in Australia, in emergency services, seem to be constantly banded around as heroes. And people like to be a part of that’. This contributes to psychosocial dimensions of vulnerability by obscuring existing vulnerability and constraining more historical–structural adaptations.

A Mid North Coast, NSW, financial counsellor, who had been helping residents access financial assistance after disasters, captured a prevalent theme of high levels of trauma after repeated disasters:

We had the drought to start off with, then the fires, then the floods, which in some areas was a second flood but much more devastating than the first, and then, yeah, the trauma. It's been trauma, upon trauma, upon trauma for the communities and there's been a lot of mental health issues throughout the areas that have needed to be addressed.

Although some interest-based and ethnic communities have stronger ties, diverse social actors reported a breakdown of place-based communities and social cohesion, which significantly influences psychosocial vulnerability. A community resilience officer relayed, ‘in Cairns, as a community practitioner, this is just a headache for me. I’m like what community are you talking about?’ Although they suggested they had never observed a strong ‘place-based community’ culture in Cairns – apart from Traditional Owners – it had, nonetheless, become further fragmented in recent years, with COVID-19 highlighted as exacerbating this ongoing socio-cultural process. Almost everyone I spoke with – from government workers to disaster-affected people – perceived a decline in community cohesion and support.

An elderly couple in Atherton, QLD, provided a locally situated and deeper temporality of the ‘decline of rural Australia’ introduced early, linking it to the exodus of small-holder farming families after agricultural sector subsidies ended in the 1980s and markets were deregulated. The same couple also suggested that one of the main barriers to collective action is ‘The rugged individual, the capitalists’ narrative. You know as an individual we can solve anything we like on our own, we don’t need help from groups, and we don’t need help from anybody. All this sort of stuff’. Although the settler narrative of, as one participant said, ‘go at it alone’, is deeply historical and linked to identities, neoliberal governmentality has interacted with these pre-existing subjectivities and reinforced splintered Australian social relations in recent decades. However, Weller and O’Neil (2014) argue against such a black and white portrayal of neoliberalism ascendance in Australia. Indeed, instead of a stage-ist model, it is important to understand that colonial and racial orderings underpin market rule and social relations and have contributed to neoliberalism's ascendance in Australia. For instance, although today, place-based communities will often come out and help with clean-ups or provide food in the initial aftermath of disasters, an NT humanitarian worker suggested this does not typically translate into continued solidarity and intra and inter-community support. Indeed, the differential insurance cover and perceived response led to community tensions in the experience of financial counsellors after the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires.

Resilience discourses and counter-discourses

Regarding institutional conceptualisations, a resilience programme manager at the Queensland Reconstruction Authority (QRA) considered resilience as ‘understanding our risk, taking action, working together and learning’. This quote captures the widespread subjectivity of shared responsibility. A local council officer claimed resilience was ‘communities coming together, working together towards shared goals’. A financial counsellor suggested resilience ‘is not somebody sitting around waiting for someone else to rescue them… resilience is linked to self-determination’. One community development officer stated that resilience was ‘overcoming adversity’, which links to dispositional characteristics and personal coping mechanisms. An Agricultural Victoria (AgVic) stakeholder saw resilience building as a way ‘to empower [farming] communities to sell, prepare [for], and shape their own futures’. Business owners and their representatives typically saw resilience as a trait of all successful businesspeople, which linked to opportunities in crisis and the adaptability to exploit new markets. The director of the Townsville Chamber of Commerce responded to a question on building resilience to disasters, in reference to the 2019 Townsville floods, stating ‘you can’t mitigate all of life's risks, there will always be risk in anything we do… resilience is making the most from uncertainty’.

These discourses, although diverse, strongly align with federal and state government participants who typically conceptualised resilience building as a shared responsibility between governments, industry and communities. A QLD state government informant representatively stated:

[P]eople say we're going to go and make this community resilient. We can’t contribute to the resilience of that community, because to develop resilience everybody has got to be involved, all facets of government, private sector, the local community themselves and the individuals. Without all that working together there is no resilience.

Indigenous Yarrabah, QLD participants were highly critical of ‘resilience building’ interventions driven by local and state governments, which focused on individual and family responsibility such as financial counselling or family strategies to improve school attendance. During a meeting with eight Elders in a self-described Yarrabah ‘thinking group’ – composed of people representing different Peoples who shared an interest in the advancement of Indigenous self-determination – the issues of cashless welfare cards, ‘work for the dole’ programmes and mutual obligations were strong themes, despite the discussion being on climate change. The stated intention of such programmes is to discipline purchasing choices and inculcate work ethic in populations. These interventions are an example of disciplinary governmentality, one which a QLD state government contact said was needed to build ‘resilience in welfare dependent communities’. However, the Yarrabah thinking group said these programmes were having detrimental impacts on their communities, with people, for example, selling cashless cards for far lower amounts of cash, being unable to spend time on Country and build their own enterprises due to being ‘trapped in the welfare system’. The reduction of agency and self-determination in marginalised Indigenous communities through disciplinary means was emphasised as a key barrier to climate adaptation in interviews. The discourse of building resilience in Indigenous communities to climate change was a central theme in interviews with government actors, yet, in practice, policies were consistently undermining the capacities of Indigenous people.

At the National First Peoples Gathering on Climate Change (NFPGCC) in Cairns, March 2021, which I attended, scientific actors used resilience liberally and framed it as desirable traits of socio-ecological systems (e.g., persistence despite disturbance). Some scientifically trained Indigenous people used it in this way. More commonly, however, Indigenous people tended to frame resilience as resistance to historical and ongoing dispossession and epistemic erasure. At the NFPGCC, Bianca McNeair, a Malgana Traditional Owner, stated:

We are stronger together and our connection to Country is needed more now than ever in our lifetimes… We are thankful for our ancestors and our people's resilience and provide a spirit that is still strong in our knowledge and our hearts. We can face a situation of doom and gloom and still bring strength to one another (Morgan-Bulled et al., 2021: 64).

Resilience and devolution of responsibility

A regional NSW council officer stated:

Our Climate Resilience Strategy looks at the range of vulnerabilities that our community is exposed to as a shire… things like our energy security, our food security, the transport corridors through the Shire there, they're important, as is community wellbeing and community connectivity in terms of, you know, people's capacity to be able to respond to those shocks and stresses that occur that are outside of their control.

Resilience-as-mental health

A central theme reported by social services actors was that resilience-building programmes were increasingly focusing on improving mental health, which is a very real need across regional Australia. A state government actor from regional Victoria representatively explained that in response to the increasing impacts of disasters:

There's a mental health tool kit that got rolled out to all extension officers. It was also about people working with producers that got support… [a key part was asking] are you doing alright mate? There's a lot of programs that were based around that. There was a lot of extension put into resilience building and mental health.

Physicalist paradigm and competing priorities

Despite the discourses linked to building community psychosocial resilience through various extension activities, when governments and non-governmental actors sought to build resilience at the local level, physicalist disaster management was centred. After interviews with local government and emergency services contacts, they often sent through their climate resilience strategies. These strategies illuminated such hazards as sea-level rise and the likely increasingly frequent and intense storms, flooding and drought, and detailed existing or potential adaptation options. Sea walls, improved drainage, early warning systems and land planning were centred. I asked a Cairns’ government informant about the Cairns Council adaptation plan, and they responded:

It's a joke… it's mostly infrastructure kind of interventions, so don’t build here, rebuild the sand dune here, consider a sea wall here, but what's actually going to happen if we get a cyclone or storm surge? It will go through areas where people are underinsured.

Neoliberal rationalities and insurance-as-resilience

Almost all disaster-affected participants and social service providers perceived the insurance market failure as the biggest barrier to building resilience. From middle class to welfare-dependent subjects, significant sections of society struggle to pay ever-increasing insurance costs, and many properties are now uninsurable (ACCC, 2021). A senior consumer advocate wrote in correspondence: ‘87% of those insured in Lismore (NSW) do not have flood insurance due to cost. As you would agree, this is not underinsurance, this is market failure. And government intervention is needed’. Lismore flooded three times in early 2022 with devastating consequences and limited government response (ABC, 2022).

Recognising the growing problem of under-/un-insurability in northern Australia, the previous Liberal-National (Coalition) federal government proposed, with cross-bench support, a 10-billion-dollar reinsurance pool for insurance companies to prevent them from pulling out of the market due to the increasing frequency of climate hazards causing losses and damages (AusGov, 2021b). In addition to state-funded reinsurance being a form of corporate welfare, an expert expressed concerns over the ideological underpinnings of this scheme, stating:

I have a funny feeling that this reinsurance pool being from this particular federal government [Coalition] is going to be tied to resilience building. So, again, you’re going to have to spend money to save money to make yourself less vulnerable. And when we are talking about the least able to be resilient that just hits them again.

Despite recognising the importance of insurance, a rural East Gippsland resident reflected on the climate-driven Black Summer bushfires that decimated their area: ‘Some people have been resilient, some had insurance. So, here's another thing in the 60 s, no insurance. No one had anything. Nowadays, people tend to rely on insurance’. The overreliance on insurance narrative, which was stronger at the local level, linked strongly to the discourses outlined in the psychosocial vulnerability section. Many bemoaned the loss of resilience and spoke proudly of how people once ‘managed disasters without emergency services’. These subjectivities have a genesis pre-dating the neoliberal era. Yet they, like many national myths, are fuelled by modern discourses that idealise individual capabilities at the expense of collective action.