What is resilience anyway?
From the urban to the organisational, from the community to the individual, we need to understand resilience as a way of living with change
In the years preceding her death, my mum kept repeating a somewhat prescient message — “you have to be strong no matter what”. I was 14 when she passed away, all of the sudden feeling exposed on the cusp of teenagehood. What followed was a period of boundary testing intensified by the sensation that there couldn’t be a bigger loss than what I’d already experienced. I made many questionable decisions, some which led to more dangerous outcomes than others. But looking back, I realise that it was not I who was strong, nor resilient, although I did learn some useful tactics to cope with grief and anger. It was the invisible safety nets that helped me be so — from policies, social structures, and institutions to family, friends, teachers, and community ties that showed up in the hour of need.
In one way or another, last year we all lost something. We lost loved ones, the ability to hug and touch, we lost livelihoods, postponed dreams, while collectively we’re losing so much more — millions of hectares of virgin forests, entire species and habitats vanishing under our remote eyes.
I now spend my days exploring the ways in which these invisible safety nets — social, organisational or (infra)structural help create the conditions through which we might build urban resilience. As some of my explorations regarding resilience overlap with a broader shared inquiry into living change — exploring what it means to seek systemic change while living it ourselves, in this article I’ll be mapping some of the connections between the two.
As the pandemic unfolded in front of our eyes, resilience has become an even bigger buzzword as it moved out of technocratic jargon and into the realm of ‘thought leaders’ and influencers (hello Arianna Huffington). I’ve struggled with some of the narratives that have emerged to explain what it is and why it’s the best thing ever— below there’s a couple that bring me to a boiling point:
Resilience as individual
This narrative puts the onus on an individual or community to ‘be resilient’ as a universal panacea for anything that might be thrown our way. Yes, we become more psychologically resilient as a result of being exposed to traumatic events, through finding ways to overcome them or as we learn to cope with chronic conditions (#newnormal anyone?). But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take preventative action to mitigate before events become traumatic, it does not give government a license for retrenchment, nor does it let corporate accountability off the hook.
Without discounting the importance of psychological resilience, framing resilience at an individual level is a deeply ideological move and needs to be treated as such — especially when it’s being proposed as a magical solution to systemic issues.
This narrative takes a leaf from disaster capitalism playbook and depicts one of many predatory tactics through which corporations (and governments) take advantage of crisis, usually at the economic, social or psychological cost of communities, or the ecological cost to our environment. While a minority of actors win big out of a crisis (read this sobering analysis of UK’s 2020 pandemic spending), our collective coping capacity suffers.
“In most World 3 runs the world system does not run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorbing capability, it runs out of the ability to cope.” Meadows et al., 1973
The concept of coping capacity was explored by the system dynamics modelling undertaken in the early 1970s by an MIT research group. Commissioned by the Club of Rome and published under the title Limits to Growth, the modelling showed that although we might not run out of resources, across different pathways to 2030 the compounding social and environmental crises lead to a lack of coping capacity.
Looking back at the wildfires, hurricanes, extreme heat and flooding on top of the pandemic, on top of pre-existing inequalities highlights why we can’t isolate individual resilience as the silver bullet for our global woes.
Resilience as control
A second narrative I noticed is that of resilience as control, which comes to life in catchy phrases such as ‘future-proofing’, ‘build back better’, or ‘bouncing forward’. The language we use shapes the goals we seek, seeps into what we value, what we believe to be possible and narrows or widens the scope of our decisions. We can’t ‘fix’ the climate. We can’t ‘control’ climate change. There’s no ‘future fit’. Systems aren’t ‘broken’. We live in a dynamic, interconnected world, driven by emergence and adaptation — choosing not to see it as such is a problem of our own making. So much trouble stems from holding a worldview of stability and control, while resilience requires focusing on diversity and functional redundancy.
In other words, we need diverse strategies, interventions, approaches and views in the recognition that some will prove to provide (partial) solutions while others will fail. However, this is not how our systems and organisations are structured — as we’ve optimised to reward stability and continuously crave the false illusion of control.
“This creates conflict: between stabilizing structures and environmental forces; between economies that seek continuity and landscapes that are constantly migrating; between people affected unequally by change.” Holmes, 2020
The quote above is from one of my favourite 2020 articles, which argues against ‘landscape solutionism’ as knee-jerk response to climate change, while highlighting the ways in which the language of control narrows our understanding of resilience.
If we let solutions (flood infrastructure! rewilding! economic stimulus! lockdowns!) define the problem, the systemic nature of the risks we’re facing is flattened to a singular dimension.
Unfortunately, this is the prevailing wisdom that shapes the ways in which we organise — as organisational funding flows, governance structures, hiring and reward practices, project goals, delivery mechanisms, monitoring indicators, all stem from a worldview of control and stability, and are therefore incentivised to act so as to preserve the status quo.
“We must acknowledge that resilience thinking is literally a different worldview about how change happens in the world. It is a view that clashes head on with current ways of funding, designing, and managing projects that favours incremental, sectoral, local, and short-term initiatives underpinned by linear assumptions of development inputs — for example, fertilisers or new crop varieties — and proportionate economic outputs such as household income improvements.” Reyers & Moore, 2020
For example, Kian Goh illustrates this tension in the case of Jakarta’s approach to flood management, which has been based on studies that focused primarily on “biophysical indicators, methods and metrics of subsidence”. However, in the process of developing and implementing adaptation measures, different worldviews clash: on the one hand, a positivist worldview regards “dynamic biophysical ecologies” as something that can be “tested objectively” and “actively intervened in”; on the other hand, a constructivist worldview seeks to understand the underlying conditions and social values influencing uneven urban development processes. In the case of Jakarta, these diverging worldviews lead to further marginalisation of the city’s poorest inhabitants through the displacement resulted from the demolition of kampung settlements to make way for flood protection measures.
So how do we reclaim resilience as living with change?
Resisting these two pervasive narratives — of resilience as individual and resilience as control is not straightforward and some voices have even wondered whether it’s a term worth ‘redeeming’. However, the meaning we assign concepts matters; as I mentioned before, the definitions we use frame the space for intervention and shape the types of decisions that we deem possible, as well as preferable. Below I propose three approaches to reclaiming our understanding of resilience.
Resilience as negotiating trade offs
This approach has come from my work in urban resilience. I’ve been analysing the types of interventions that are being advocated for and have found that although the literature advocates for systemic change towards sustainability as an outcome of a large palette of urban interventions, little consideration is given to the means of achieving these.
Understanding resilience as negotiating trade offs means focusing on processes as much as on outcomes when advocating, devising or implementing interventions. It also means emphasising the asymmetrical resources and power dynamics that lead to an uneven distribution of winners and losers in any given change process (nevermind one in which the vested interests of industries to preserve the status quo are so high).
In a discourse dominated by understanding resilience as a (passive) characteristic or property, reframing resilience as an (active) process of negotiation helps expand what is up for grabs — from how we spend the pandemic economic stimulus, to whose livelihoods we protect as we phase out unsustainable industries, to whose recovery we subsidise.
Acknowledging resilience as negotiating trade offs centres two key questions: resilience for whom and for when?
Resilience as common good
If the first approach helps us see resilience as a process, this second approach frames resilience as a common good. This needs to take into consideration different attitudes to the roles of the state and welfare systems, while seeking to understand the impact they have on where the perceived locus of accountability lies. The attitudes to the role of the state and welfare ranges vastly among countries, which leads to different perceptions over whose role is to ensure key urban systems are resilient in the face of shocks or stressors. Although traditional welfare systems have seen a global roll back in the 2008 aftermath, Jonathan Freedland notes wryly that as “there are no atheists on a sinking ship, there are no free-marketeers in a pandemic”.
Seeing urban resilience as a common good requires rethinking the balance of accountability between local and national governments and the resource and governance flows between them. It also requires us, as residents to demand the delivery of resilience as a common good — and new initiatives such as the Cancel Rent Movement or an increase in support for an Universal Basic Income or a Four Day Week are starting to depict what these demands might look like in practice.
Resilience as living change
Finally, understanding resilience as living change seeks to integrate epistemic humility as a way of navigating uncertainty. It puts forward listening instead of fixing; holding space instead of heroism; bearing witness instead of solutionism; radical remembering instead of toxic nostalgia.
As the pandemic was unfolding across the globe last March, I happened to be reading Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. While I was brought to tears by the parallels with today’s challenges, I was left inspired by the visionary understanding of resilience as emergent strategy and living with change. Her writing eschews hero-oriented tropes in pursuit of universal and definitive solutions and instead puts forward galvanising examples of what interdependent, adaptive, resilient approaches to navigating change can look like. This is embodied by the central tenet of the Parable:
All that you touch
You Change.All that you Change
Changes you.The only lasting truth
Is Change.God
Is Change.
I’ve come back to Butler’s writing over and over in the past year as it’s helped me reflect on the ways in which we are accounting (or not) for the interconnectedness of buffers, delays, and reinforcing feedback loops in the crisis driven decision-making of 2020. It’s also been interesting to start see these notions of living with uncertainty crossing domains and seep into places such as UNDRR webinars — as perhaps a positive signal that the understanding of resilience as a way of living with uncertainty rather than a silver bullet is starting to spread.
I think back to my mother’s words and hope she’d be proud, as any daughter would. I also think of the importance of all the visible and invisible ingredients that helped me build my resilience and what this might mean for our cities and organisations. To me, this inquiry has become much more about how we create the collective space for resilience, how we acknowledge our shared vulnerabilities on this floating blue dot, how we navigate difficult decisions, how we speak truth to power and how we live out our values in the process. At times, it feels unnerving, but then I remind myself why this matters.
From where we stand we face several possible pathways for climate change mitigation. However, even if we’re to avoid the darker red pathways depicted below, we’re still having to adapt to the lagging consequences of centuries of extractive practices. Building resilience is not about future adaptation to hypothetical scenarios, it’s about centring justice in the decisions we are making today.
We might be where we are today, but it’s our choice how we get to next — whether we choose resilience as individualistic and control driven, or as a process of negotiating trade offs, as a public good, and a way of living with change.
