Next week I’m talking about resilience at a university event (with food and wine: those are the best kinds of event). I’m planning to be a ‘devil’s advocate’ – putting out some challenging, debatable suggestions. Resilience is an ideal topic to treat in this way. Here are a few spoilers about what I might say.
If the concept of resilience didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. It’s only the latest iteration in series of attempts (by academics and operational organisations) to implement more holistic approaches to tackling the scale and complexity of disasters. The resilience concept is so broad that almost anyone can buy into it; but it’s also a bit fuzzy and elastic, which encourages debate. The explosion of resilience thinking and writing has taken the subject into all sorts of directions.
Is resilience no more than a changing fashion or a rebranding of existing ideas and approaches? Arguments that are given for adopting resilience are often very similar to those made previously for adopting DRR – and some of the programming approaches are identical – yet DRR is now often said to be outdated.
Resilience sounds great as a principle, but is it actionable? How do you operationalise it? Ideas like this are mediated by institutions. Inevitably the ideas become adapted or fitted to those organisations’ capacities, ways of working and operational practices. We can’t escape this: the institutional architecture of disasters doesn’t change that much, and the political and economic realities that underpin it are largely immovable.
Resilience sounds neutral in academic papers, but in reality it isn’t. Perhaps that is why decision-makers like it (rather than the more political overtones of vulnerability and exclusion in disaster discourse) – does it depoliticise the disaster problem? Writers have also pointed out the ‘dark side’ of resilience: in reality, it is contested, with winners and losers; and it is inherently conservative, seeking to preserve a status quo (which could include preserving the undesirable, e.g. organised crime).
Resilience is not the sole property of the disaster community: it’s also a broader development issue – which is why Oxfam’s approach is explicitly one of ‘resilient development’. We need to remember (though we often forget) this is fundamentally about addressing people’s needs and aspirations.
John Twigg's blog on disaster risk reduction 