Resilience

International Policies, Practices and Discourses

ISSN: 2169-3293 (Print) 2169-3307 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/resi20

Resilience as embedded neoliberalism: a

governmentality approach
Jonathan Joseph
To cite this article: Jonathan Joseph (2013) Resilience as embedded neoliberalism: a
governmentality approach, Resilience, 1:1, 38-52, DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2013.765741
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2013.765741

Published online: 14 Mar 2013.

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Resilience, 2013
Vol. 1, No. 1, 3852, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2013.765741

Resilience as embedded neoliberalism: a governmentality approach

Jonathan Joseph*

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Department of Politics, University of Shefeld, Shefeld, UK

This article looks at resilience as a form of governmentality. In particular, it is
concerned to show that resilience, despite its claims to be about the operation of
systems, is, in practice, closer to a form of governance that emphasises individual
responsibility. It traces this line of argument through looking at a range of documents
and policy statements. The Anglo-Saxon understanding of resilience, in particular, is
best understood as a neoliberal form of governmentality that places emphasis on
individual adaptability. It ts with neoliberalisms normative way of mobilising social
agents. This account is defended against a more philosophical claim that resilience is
part of a post-liberal shift.
Keywords: resilience; governmentality; neoliberalism

Introduction
In this contribution, I wish to argue that the recent enthusiasm for the concept of resilience
across a range of policy literature is the consequence of its t with neoliberal discourse.
This is not to say that the idea of resilience is reducible to neoliberal policy and
governance, but it does t neatly with what it is trying to say and do. A brief glance at the
concepts origins shows it to have certain ontological commitments that make it ideally
suited to neoliberal forms of governance. Having briey examined these philosophical
aspects, I move on to dene this relationship to governance through the concept of
governmentality. This also requires a particular understanding of the dominant forms of
governmentality as specically neoliberal in nature. I then defend this interpretation
of both resilience and governmentality against the claim that resilience is part of an
emerging post-liberalism. Instead, I argue that we are witnessing two connected but
distinguishable processes the rolling-back of classical liberalism and the rolling-out or
embedding of neoliberalism. To give a slightly optimistic tone to the argument, I suggest
that this is a contested process and that the perceived end of classical liberalism is as much
an effect of the neoliberal discourse as it is an actuality.
The concept of resilience has entered the political vocabulary from literature on the
adaptability of ecological systems. Unlike engineering resilience which emphasises how
things return to a stable steady state, ecological resilience is far from stable. Instabilities
may change the system leading to signicant restructuring.1 There may even be multiple
stable states. These ideas come from applied mathematics and resource ecology and are
used to examine the interaction of ecological resilience and human adaptability in
complex large systems.2 This approach emphasises such things as complexity, self*Email: j.joseph@shefeld.ac.uk
1
Lance H. Gunderson, C.S. Holling, Lowell Prichard Jr., and Garry D. Peterson, Resilience of
Large-scale Resource Systems, in Resilience and the Behavior of Large-Scale Systems, ed. Lance
H. Gunderson and Lowell Prichard Jr. (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 3 20.
2
Ibid., 8.

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

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organisation, functional diversity and nonlinear ways of behaving.3 Ecological and social
components are linked by complex resource systems such as economic systems,
institutions and organisations. Resilience provides these complex systems with the ability
to withstand and survive shocks and disturbances. It also emphasises the capacity for
renewal.4
Resilience, therefore, can be related to the way that societies adapt to externally
imposed change. The ecology literature is concerned with the impact of global
environmental change, but this could also include economic crisis and terrorist threats.
The adaptive capacity of social systems depends on the nature of their institutions and the
ability to absorb shocks.5 Crises can actually play a constructive role in resource
management, forcing us to consider issues of learning, adapting and renewal.6 This idea is
picked up in the political literature. A pamphlet from the British think-tank Demos
suggests that we think of the concept of resilience, not just as the ability of a society or
community to bounce back, but as a process of learning and adaptation.7 Similarly, the
World Resources Institute denes resilience as the capacity of a system to tolerate shocks
or disturbances and recover and argues that this depends on the ability of people to adapt
to changing conditions through learning, planning, or reorganization.8 The document
even goes so far as to dene resilience as the capacity to thrive in the face of challenge.9
Elsewhere,10 I have argued that most contemporary social theories contribute to an
ontology that renders the world governable in certain ways. These ontological
commitments are certainly not reducible to the political practices and indeed can be
found across a range of disciplines including ecology, geography and various intersections
of social and natural science. Whether these philosophies go under the descriptions of
new materialism, complexity theory, network analysis or reexive approaches, they
share a set of ontological commitments. The idea of resilience ts neatly with these new
ontological commitments. It assumes a world that is increasingly complex but also
contingent. Stable and enduring social relations are believed to have given way to complex
networks of actors, each with their own individual pursuits. Our social engagements have
no necessity to them; they are what we make of them and blend with our own particular
narratives. And in order to survive the uncertainties of complex systems, people have to
show their own initiative as active and reexive agents capable of adaptive behaviour.
Although these philosophies are not reducible to political practices, it is easy to see
how they might lend themselves to particular ways of governing. Rather than challenging
a series of mistaken philosophical commitments, the rest of this paper will concentrate on
the political consequences of such ideas. In particular, on how these approaches
3

Ibid., 12.
Lance Gunderson, Adaptive Dancing: Interactions Between Social Resilience and Ecological
Crises, in Navigating Social-ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change, ed.
Fikret Berkes, John Colding, and Carl Folke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3352.
5
Fikret Berkes, John Colding, and Carl Folke, Introduction, in Navigating Social-ecological
Systems, ed. Berkes et al., 1 29.
6
Ibid., 20.
7
Charlie Edwards, Resilient Nation (London: Demos, 2009), 10.
8
World Resources Institute in collaboration with United Nations Development Programme, United
Nations Environment Programme, and World Bank, World Resources 2008: Roots of Resilience
Growing the Wealth of the Poor (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 2008), 27.
9
Ibid., ix.
10
Jonathan Joseph, The Social in the Global: Social Theory, Governmentality and Global Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
4

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conceptualise the social order in such a way that is consistent with neoliberal practices of
governance. A belief in the contingency and complexity of adaptive systems supports the
sociological view that society is moving away from enduring social relations based on
such things as class, nation-state and social identity in favour of a view of the world as
comprising individualised consumer-citizens with their own life-pursuits. Resilience ts
with a social ontology that urges us to turn from a concern with the outside world to a
concern with our own subjectivity, our adaptability, our reexive understanding, our own
risk assessments, our knowledge acquisition and, above all else, our responsible decisionmaking. Although we started with ontological assumptions about the bigger social world,
we arrive at a view by which the best way to govern society is through a greater awareness
of our own behaviour. Indeed, a major claim here is that the way resilience works,
certainly in Anglo-Saxon approaches, is to move fairly swiftly from thinking about the
dynamics of systems to emphasising individual responsibility, adaptability and
preparedness.
For the reasons above, I study the concept of resilience through the lens of governance in
order to see how and why it has entered the political vocabulary. More than this, it is through a
Foucauldian understanding of governing that we learn most about what the concept of
resilience is actually doing. For example, Zebrowski11 notes that resilience is better
understood, not through its own claims about the changing nature of security threats, but
instead as an indication of the changing organisational structure of the advanced liberal
societies. OMalley, meanwhile, notes that resilience is not just a reactive model that teaches
people how to bounce back, but also acts as a means to create adaptable subjects capable of
adapting to and exploiting situations of radical uncertainty.12 In the Resilience as
governmentality section, I argue that this ts with a neoliberal mode of governmentality
present, to varying degrees, in the advanced liberal societies. Resilience supports the
organisational structure of the advanced liberal societies through its assumptions about social
relations, and it supports the idea of the neoliberal subject as autonomous and responsible. It
helps embed that subject, particularly in relation to processes of governance.
Hence, my approach to the concept of resilience is not a philosophical one. Indeed, I will
argue that the term lacks any proper philosophical meaning and that to write a philosophical
paper on resilience is dangerous given the way the concept works. To put it differently, the
meaning of the term is derived from its position within a particular discourse which is itself
related to practices of governance. To develop a philosophical account of resilience would be
to give this discourse a credibility it does not deserve and to ultimately legitimate a set of
practices of governance. My approach to the concept of resilience is to see it in relation to these
practices. It has been plucked from the ecology literature and used in a fairly instrumental way
to justify particular forms of governance which emphasise responsible conduct. As the
Resilience as governmentality section argues, it works alongside a set of similar ideas in
order to create this effect. Its rise to prominence is the result of being in the right place at the
right time. Contemporary conditions have given rise to certain practices of governance by
which the idea of resilience nds a home. Whether this continues to be the case remains to be
seen, but it could well be that as these practices are modied, rened or even challenged, the
term itself my lose its inuence. Although I wish this journal every success in performing an

11
Christopher Zebrowski, Governing the Network Society: A Biopolitical Critique of Resilience,
Political Perspectives 3, no. 1 (2008): 1 41.
12
Pat OMalley, Resilient Subjects: Uncertainty, Warfare and Liberalism, Economy and Society
39, no. 4 (2010): 488 509.

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important service to intellectual debate, the political side of me wishes for something
different!

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Resilience as governmentality
To make sense of the rise of resilience, we have to see it in the context of new discourses
of governance. This is not the place to go into detail about approaches to governance and
whether or not we are really seeing a shift from government to governance or from
traditional governance to multi-level, complex governance. Critics argue13 that the issue
is not so much the newness of forms of governance, as the new emphasis placed on them
by and the fact that one of the key effects of the discourse of governance is to conceal
the continuing reproduction of hierarchical power relations. My argument here is that
this discourse can be critically examined by looking at it through the lens of
governmentality. Although Foucaults approach has its limits in terms of its ability to
speak to the big picture, it provides a lot of the ne detail necessary for understanding
how concepts play a role in constructing governable spaces. Resilience, it is argued, is
one such concept.
Foucaults work on governmentality emerges in a series of lectures that engage with a
number of linked themes such as biopolitics and the governance of the self. We could
spend an endless amount of time trying to work out the most authentic interpretation of
Foucaults ideas. Or we could admit that Foucaults work is an evolving and unnished
product and that his approach is deliberately evasive, elusive and provocative. Opting for
the latter, I therefore propose to interpret Foucault in a way that best ts with an
understanding of dominant forms of governance in the world today. Of course this does
not do justice to the richness and diversity of Foucaults ideas, but I will leave it to others
to justify the superiority of a different interpretation. The main issue I am concerned with
here is the emergence and embedding of specically neoliberal forms of governance. And
in doing this we can help explain why resilience places so much emphasis on things such
as individual preparedness, making informed decisions, understanding our roles and
responsibilities, and showing adaptability to our situation and being able to bounce back
should things go wrong. These t with neoliberal approaches that put emphasis on the
responsibility of the individual to govern themselves in appropriate ways.
Foucaults lectures point to a number of shifts in discourses and practices of power and
rule. These are caused by the development of capitalism and demographic change and,
therefore, take population as their main concern. Although disciplinary power works
directly on the body to place it under constant supervision and surveillance, a new form of
power, governmentality, works from a distance through a liberal rationality of governance.
Some analysts of Foucaults work would emphasise that although Foucaults concept of
governmentality does tend to highlight liberal practice, it is far more wide ranging than
this.14 My view is that although this may be true, there are good reasons for Foucault to
concentrate on liberal forms of governmentality, and even better reasons for those of us
who want to look at the dominant forms of governance in the world today. Foucault is
interested in liberal forms of governance because he is trying to understand the newfound
concern with population and its relation to the development of capitalism in certain
13

Jonathan Davies, Challenging Networks Theory: From Governance to Hegemony (Bristol: Policy
Press, 2011).
14
William Waters, Governmentality: Critical Encounters (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).

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Western countries. Hence he highlights the way these forms of governance operate
through promoting the natural processes of the economic sphere.15 The rationality of
liberal government stresses the need to respect the freedom of economic processes through
deliberate self-limiting of government.16 For Foucault Laissez-faire governance, based on
the liberal principles of political economy, nds its expression in civil society and is
legitimated through the liberal concern that one must not govern too much.17 Liberal rule
looks to the private sphere and civil society as a way to disguise the imposition of market
discipline as somehow an exercise in freedom.
Neoliberalism extends this process through the articial (often forced) introduction
of competitive practices in more and more spheres of social life.18 Part of this process
is the neoliberal assault on the institutions of the post-war settlement and the promotion
of the norms and values of the market as a means of destatication. Hence we might
expect the intensication of governmentalitys emphasis on limiting government and
governing from a distance by encouraging free conduct. But the second part of this
process involves the embedding of these norms and values in a new set of social
institutions and practices. Tickell and Peck19 describe this as the roll-out phase of
institution building which reects a shift from the earlier, more aggressive roll-out
phase, to a new emphasis on normalising the logic of the market through softer ideas
such as public private partnerships, networked governance and an individualised
conception of civil society based on mobilising active citizens. Neoliberalisms
promotion of free market norms is therefore much more than the simple ideology of
free-market economics. It is a specic form of social rule that institutionalises a
rationality of competition, enterprise individualised responsibility. Although the state
steps back and encourages the free conduct of individuals, this is achieved through
active intervention into civil society and the opening up of new areas to the logic of
private enterprise and individual initiative. This is the logic behind the rise of
resilience.
In the process of constructing and interpellating neoliberal subjects, neoliberal
discourse and practices appeal to them as citizens or consumers who are free to take
responsibility for their own life choices, but who are expected to follow competitive rules
of conduct. Governmentality works by telling us to be enterprising, active and responsible
citizens. Neoliberalism works through the social production of freedom and the
management and organization of the conditions in which one can be free.20 Resilience
contributes to this through its stress on heightened self-awareness, reexivity and
responsibility. It encourages the idea of active citizenship, whereby people, rather than
relying on the state, take responsibility for their own social and economic well-being.
In particular, it focuses on the risk and security aspects of this by encouraging
preparedness and awareness.
An important way in which resilience encourages heightened self-awareness is
through constructing a picture of a world that is beyond our control. This sounds like a
15

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2007), 353.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2008), 10.
17
Ibid., 319.
18
Ibid., 147.
19
Adam Tickell and Jamie Peck, Making Global Rules: Globalisation or Neoliberalisation, in
Remaking the Global Economy, ed. Jamie Peck and Henry Wai-chung Yeung (London: Sage, 2003),
163 82.
20
Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 63 4.
16

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contradiction because it might create a sense of resignation. But the resilience argument
is that even if we cannot change the world, we can survive better through knowing how
to adapt. Hence although resilience appears at rst sight as a systems theory, its main
effect is to emphasise the need for adaptability at the unit level. The conservative
ontology behind this (the political acronym is TINA or there is no alternative) is shared
with a range of other contemporary social ideas such as reexive modernity, risk society,
network society and information age, all of which posit the idea that we must change our
behaviour and adapt to things beyond our control. The ecology literature is clearly more
sophisticated in how it theoretically argues for adaptability. Most of the policy
documents, security strategies and think-tank papers make brief reference to the origins
of the concept in this literature, but then ignore it. From the policy perspective, all that
matters is the idea that we live in a changed world. A study of the security literature, for
example, reveals that the argument barely gets beyond the idea that 9/11 shows the
changing nature of threats faced. The last thing these documents want to do is engage in
a complex philosophical discussion about adaptive systems. They are concerned,
primarily, with justifying new forms of governance and are driven less by systems
thinking than by an individualist bias.
The 9/11 scenario is also used to justify other key arguments, which is the networked
nature of both threats and resilience. In addition to terrorist threats, the network concept
applies to economic systems, business and management networks, and community
organisation. Global cities are seen as connected through networks. For example, London
is regarded as being strategically placed but uniquely vulnerable due to its global
networked nature.21 The development literature highlights the role of networks in
enhancing capacity and making communities more resilient to external shocks.
Individuals, communities, organisations and governance need to show awareness of
how to enhance their capacities through networks. Getting this right means taking
responsibility for our choices. The resilience approach emphasises how responsibility
works through making the right connections. This is a privatised view of the world where
the state steps back and allows partnerships to develop between stakeholders and various
informed people.
The idea of resilience as heightened awareness reinforces the idea of governmentality
from a distance. The literature that emphasises self-organisation argues that governments
should not play a direct role in the process. For example, the Strategic National
Framework on Community Resilience argues that the Government contribution to
community resilience is not to dictate or measure what is being or should be done locally.
Instead, the role is to support and enable local activity by making existing good practice
available to others.22 The reality is nothing of the sort because it is the UK government
that forces local bodies to engage in resilience exercises. The 2004 Civil Contingencies
Act requires local authorities, businesses and other front-line responders to carry out risk
assessments, keep risk registers, produce contingency plans and take measures to ensure
business continuity.
21

Cabinet Ofce, A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The National Security Strategy
(London: Cabinet Ofce, 2010), http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/
dg_digitalassets/@dg/@en/documents/digitalasset/dg_191639.pdf?CID PDF&PLA furl&
CRE nationalsecuritystrategy (accessed July 29, 2012), 21.
22
Cabinet Ofce, Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience (London: Cabinet
Ofce, 2011), http://www.cabinetofce.gov.uk/sites/default/les/resources/Strategic-NationalFramework-on-Community-Resilience_0.pdf (accessed July 29, 2012), 8.

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The reality, therefore, is that governments are pushing a particular agenda. Far from
giving power back to civil society, the government is constructing a sphere of governance
which it oversees from a distance through the use of powers. Policy emphasises that
individuals, communities and the private sector take responsibility for their welfare and
economic and social well-being. These stakeholders are required to familiarise
themselves with possible risks and learn how to make informed decisions.
Although not wanting to reduce the idea of resilience to neoliberal governance, in
policy terms it ts extremely well into this environment. The effects of the use of the
concept are more important than theorising its precise meaning. Its place within neoliberal
discourse is more meaningful than any philosophical or scientic interpretation.
Is resilience post-liberal?
Having outlined why I think resilience ts with neoliberal discourse and practice, I want to
address the argument made by David Chandler that resilience is in fact part of a new phase
of post-liberalism. Although I think Chandler is right to point out the shift from a classical
liberal rights approach to intervention and state-building, he is wrong to characterise this
as post-liberal. Chandlers argument is a powerful one and contains important insights
regarding a paradigm shift away from classical liberal framings of politics and the subject.
However, I wish to dispute his argument that this constitutes a post-liberal phase. My
claim is that this shift is adequately described as neoliberalism is and that to call it
something else is to unintentionally reinforce neoliberal ideology by not calling things as
they are.
In discussing international interventions associated with projects of state-building,
Chandler suggests that resilience is playing a pivotal role in the shift away from classical
liberal interventionist discourses and towards greater emphasis on preventive
intervention. This means a focus on the empowerment and responsibility of agency at
the local societal level, rather than upon the assertion of the right of external sovereign
agency.23
This shift in responsibility can be seen as typical of governmentality insofar as it
operates from a distance, lowering expectations of what Western governments are
prepared to do, while at the same time promoting the need for capacity building to enhance
practices of good governance. What counts as good governance is decided by Western
interests and transmitted through a normative and normalising discourse that transfers
responsibility to local agents. To summarise Chandlers views:
it is the discursive framing of the broader human security discourse, with its emphasis upon
prevention, resilience and empowerment, that facilitates dominant discourses of international
regulation and intervention today, up to and including coercive military actions, rather than
liberal internationalist claims of interventionist rights to undermine sovereignty in the cause
of global human rights victims.24

Such approaches are described as being agent centred and move away from direct
intervention or provision of resources in favour of empowering local subjects. The
problem is deemed to be their lack of proper institutional and social resources, to be
addressed through practices of good governance and capacity building. I believe that all
this can be explained through the idea of neoliberal governmentality. However, Chandler,
23

David Chandler, Resilience and Human Security: The Post-interventionist Paradigm, Security
Dialogue 43, no. 3 (2012): 213 229.
24
Ibid., 223.

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while appreciative of the contribution that concepts such as governmentality can make,
has a bigger point to argue.
In Chandlers view this is not just a transformation of liberalism, but a rejection of it.
He makes this point by claiming that the new discourse and practices are an inversion of
classical liberalism. It rejects liberal modernitys frame of the social contract and the
securing role of the sovereign agent. Modern rights-based assumptions of government and
law are transformed. For classical liberal framings, government and the market are
constructed upon the autonomy of the subject, conceived of as a rational self-determining
actor.25 In a reversal of the relationship between institutions and autonomous agents,
autonomy now appears as the problem which requires management rather than the
unproblematic starting assumption.26 Or, to give a similar point, the autonomy of the
individual is a problem for development, rather than the lack of development being the
problem for political autonomy.27
There are two issues to unpick here. One is the perceived decline of the classical liberal
discourse of rights. The other is the issue of the autonomy of the individual. These two
elements are addressed in a comment from Foucault. He argues that liberalisms account
of freedom contains two contradictory elements. On the one hand, there is a juridical
conception of freedom which is possessed by every individual. On the other, freedom is
conceived not as the exercise of some basic rights, but as the autonomy or independence of
the governed. These are two heterogeneous conceptions of freedom, one based on human
rights, the other on the independence of the governed, and they have different histories and
origins.28 Chandlers post-liberal argument can be said to point to this essential
contradiction within liberal conceptions of freedom. But there are problems both with his
account of the decline of rights-based liberalism and with his account of the problem of
individual autonomy.
First, although Chandler is right to point to the shift away from a classical rightsbased liberalism, this is a shift rather than a full reversal and does not necessarily mean
the end of classical liberalism. Ironically, he falls into the poststructuralists trap of
hunting for binary oppositions rather than looking at reality. Moreover, Chandlers
readiness to write off classical rights-based liberalism is based on his examination of the
discourse of state-building. Would he say the same thing about changes in political
discourse in France? It happens to be the case that the new discourse is heavily AngloSaxon in tone and so not surprisingly predominates in Anglo-Saxon countries and in
those international organisations that fall under the inuence of Anglo-Saxon ways of
thinking. This does not mean that the discourse is fully hegemonic. For example, if we
look at recent UK and French security papers, we nd a great deal of scepticism in
France as to whether an Anglo-Saxon concept such as resilience can make it across the
Channel.29 And even in the Anglo-Saxon world the new discourse of responsibility
does not make much sense without the old discourse of rights. To invert Tony Blairs
saying, there are no responsibilities without rights. These rights may now be heavily
compromised. But it is difcult to see how Chandler could make the point that something
25

David Chandler, International State-building: The Rise of Post-liberal Governance (Abingdon:

Routledge, 2010).
26
Ibid., 3.
27
Ibid., 20.
28
Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 42.
29
Jonathan Joseph, Resilience in UK and French Security Strategy: An Anglo-Saxon Bias,
Politics (2013).

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like sovereignty is conditional without there still being something to which this
conditionality applies.
Chandler argues that new forms of intervention assume that people are incapable of
bearing policy responsibility, hence abandoning both liberal conceptions of sovereignty and
liberal conceptions of the individual as politically autonomous. This moves us to the second
issue which is that which Foucault calls the independence of the governed. Chandler sees
this as being undermined because the new discourse problematises the autonomy of both
states and individuals. Individual autonomy, rather than being the starting point for a
rationalist liberal politics, is now merely an ideal that has to be striven towards by removing
institutional blocks.30 Again, my argument is that rather than being post-liberal, this is very
much the denition of neoliberalism. Or rather, as Dean31 and Walker and Cooper32 have
argued, neoliberalism contains within it a view of individual freedom as something that is
socially constructed within complex adaptive systems. Hence neoliberalism is founded on
the very distinction that Chandler claims as the basis for post-liberal government, the
disjunction between ideal behavioural outcomes and actual institutional frameworks.33
Individual freedom, according to Hayeks conception, is a cultural construction that evolves
over time depending on institutional framework.34 As Foucault says, liberalism works not
through the imperative of freedom, but through the social production of freedom.35
Neoliberalism is about constructing the conditions for autonomy, the neo aspect
recognises the need to take account of institutional realities.
That is precisely the point of the new state-building. It works through
problematising autonomy and the institutions that are required to make it work. If
freedom, as Chandler suggests, is dened as the capacity to make the right decisions
and respond correctly to external problems,36 then projects such as state-building,
development programmes and resilience work on the assumption that intervention is
necessary because people lack an adequate understanding to cope with freedom and
autonomy. Rather than undermining it, this reinforces the idea of the independence of
the governed as the key factor of governance. Except that interventions centre on the
lack of this independence. Hence the paternalistic discourse of failed states, trusteeship
and capacity building. The whole issue concerning intervention is that deciencies
provide the justication for action. The idea of responsibility and independence plays a
key role, albeit in a negative sense.
This helps us understand resilience as the capacity [or lack] to positively or
successfully adapt to external problems or threats.37 And as Chandler goes on to say:
The resilient subject (at both individual and collective levels) is never conceived as passive or
as lacking agency (as in the case of 1990s understandings of victims requiring saving
interventions), but is conceived only as an active agent, capable of achieving selftransformation.38

30

Chandler, International State-building, 188 9.

Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), 157.
32
Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper, Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the
Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation, Security Dialogue 42, no. 2 (2011): 144.
33
Chandler, International State-building, 189.
34
Dean, Governmentality, 157.
35
Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 63.
36
Chandler, International State-building, 125.
37
Chandler, Resilience and Human Security, 217.
38
Ibid., 17.
31

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There are two things to add to this. First, this is the neoliberal conception of active
agency as discussed above. This idea of active agency depends on the granting of the
illusion of autonomy and individual initiative and enterprise, a social construction of the
subject that works through policies that establish a particular institutional framework.
Second, this is a form of governmentality that has developed in the advanced liberal
setting of various Anglo-Saxon countries and has come to inuence other countries as
well as international organisations. As I have argued elsewhere,39 this conception of
active agency does not always translate to things such as state-building and poverty
reduction strategies. This means we need to carefully examine what resilience is actually
doing in practice and is the reason I warned that Chandler needs to better distinguish
between interventions that target individuals and those that target states. As I shall argue
in the Theoretical consequences of resilience in practice section, there is a difference
between building resilience among communities in the UK and exercises claiming to
build resilience capabilities among communities in poorer countries as part of
development or state-building programmes. The latter might work though the appearance
of helping vulnerable subjects to develop their technical and administrative capacities,
but the real aim, we will see, is to use lack of capacity as the means by which to
discipline states and their governments.
Theoretical consequences of resilience in practice
Here I propose to look at a few examples of resilience in various policy papers and then
draw some theoretical conclusions. The conclusions are actually quite straightforward
that resilience does not really mean very much and whatever meaning it does have changes
depending on the context. However, this cannot be discovered unless we rst look at some
of the policy material.
As we have already mentioned, virtually all documents begin by arguing that the world
has fundamentally changed. The US National Strategy for Homeland Security talks of
increased unpredictability, challenging and complex environments and the need for
high-level organization and efciency among multiple actors.40 The UK approach is a bit
more specic:
There has, since 2001, been a fundamental shift in the purpose and organisation of civil
protection in the UK. The Cold War model of civil defence focused on a single, monolithic
threat, managed top-down by central government in secret and restricted to a small
community has gone. In its place has come a model better suited to a modern network
society with its increased connections and interdependencies bringing with them greater
vulnerability to external shock.41

The UK documents come closest to the type of resilience Chandler and I are most
concerned with. The focus on resilience is multi-level and reaches right down to individual
behaviour in a way that other approaches usually do not. It is here, rather than in the statebuilding literature, that we nd the clearest focus on the governance of individuals and the
39

Jonathan Joseph, Governmentality of What? Populations, States and International

Organisations, Global Society, 23, no. 4: 413 427.
40
Homeland Security Council, National Strategy for Homeland Security (Washington, DC:
Homeland Security Council, 2007), 32.
41
Bruce Mann, Protecting the UKs Critical Infrastructure (London: Cabinet Ofce/Contingency
Today, 2007), http://www.contingencytoday.com/online_article/Protecting-the-UK_s-CriticalNational-Infrastructure/416 (accessed July 29, 2012).

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promotion of active citizenship. To give an example from the Strategic National

Framework on Community Resilience:

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The Programme outlined in this framework encourages people to think about their
vulnerabilities using the information about risks placed in the public domain and to consider
the infrastructure they rely on. Using this information, the next steps are for people to consider
what risks they face and whether they need to take steps to prepare themselves to deal with the
potential consequences of an emergency.42

This individualist focus on risk is very much an Anglo-Saxon discourse. Indeed, it is very
much a British discourse. We can also nd it in US documents, but interestingly there is a
more limited role for governance and active citizenship. Instead there is a more general
discussion of the need for a culture of preparedness for example, the National Strategy
for Homeland Security writes that individual citizens, communities, the private sector,
and non-prot organizations each perform a central role in homeland security. Citizen and
community preparedness are among the most effective means of securing the
Homeland.43 But this is only a prelude to the main emphasis which is on operational
resilience, which means not only structural resilience of assets, systems and networks but
also the maintenance of effective continuity programmes. The private sector is strongly
encouraged to conduct business continuity planning. This leads to a heavy focus on the
role of the private sector which, as might be expected in the USA, is responsible for the
majority of critical infrastructure provision.
The US and UK documents reect the governmentality approach of operating from a
distance through the responsibilising of various actors. In the words of the Homeland
security strategy:
protecting the health of citizens is a shared responsibility one that starts at the individual and
family level, involves government and the private sector, and relies heavily on local action.
While the Federal Government possesses unique tools and resources to guide and assist efforts
to protect the health of citizens from all disasters, collaborative community and regional
planning is essential for the protection of the American people.44

The UK documents, we have already seen, argue that the Government role is to support,
empower and facilitate; ownership should always be retained by communities who have
chosen to get involved in this work.45 As already mentioned, communities often do not
chose to get involved in this work, but are forced to do so by government legislation even
as governments talk of local autonomy in decision-making. This is certainly the case when
we turn to the work of international organisations and especially development
programmes. For example, an important document by the World Resources Institute
argues the importance of local ownership by arguing that ownership acts as an inducement
by offering a stake in the benets (in this case of ecosystem management), offering
resources, rights and a sense of control over the decision-making process. Giving a local
stake in ownership of eco-management schemes is seen as the best way to promote
sustainable and effective poverty reduction.46 In all these cases, the discourse talks of
putting local people in the driving seat when in reality the direction of the journey has
already been decided.

42
43
44
45
46

Cabinet Ofce, Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience, 8.

Homeland Security Council, National Strategy for Homeland Security, 42.
Ibid., 29 30.
Cabinet Ofce, Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience, 14.
World Resources Institute, Roots of Resilience, 49.

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European Union (EU) documents are interesting because they are more reective of a
political struggle that is going on inside the EU. Although the documents come across in
the way Chandler says is typical of resilience literature as mundane and technocratic
they in fact promote an Anglo-Saxon view of a new European social model that is highly
politicised. Take the following passage from the mundanely titled Non-Paper on the
Establishment of a European Public-Private Partnership for Resilience (EP3R) which
argues the need to:
(1) Provide a platform for information sharing and stock taking of good policy and
industrial practices in order to foster a common understanding on the economic
and market dimensions of security and resilience in the context of CIIP as well as
on the roles and responsibilities of public and private stakeholders.
(2) Discuss public policy priorities, objectives and measures with a view to dene
framework conditions and socio-economic incentives to improve the coherence
and coordination of policies for security and resilience in Europe.
(3) Identify and promote the adoption of good baseline practices for security and
resilience, with a view to pursue minimum security and resilience standards and
coordinated risk assessment approaches.47
This is very much a neoliberal market-driven approach. Like the US approach, it
emphasises the role of the private sector, the difference being that in the USA this model is
already dominant, whereas in the EU there is an ongoing agenda to bring
competitiveness and market rules to European institutions and economic relations
through such things as the Lisbon Agenda and Europe 2020. As the following passage
shows, the dominant tone repeats the full spectrum of neoliberal buzzwords in order to
promote such an approach:
there is a need for more coordination and cooperation between the public and the private
sector to achieve an appropriate level of governance. To address this governance challenge,
Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) have emerged . . . a joint responsibility which is shared
among a multiplicity of public and private stakeholders. The success of EP3R would depend
on the active participation and strong commitment of all relevant stakeholders. A bottom-up
approach is proposed, seeking the active contribution of relevant public and private
stakeholders to ensure that EP3R would address their actual needs and priorities.

Hence resilience here must be understood in the context of the wider issue of the
restructuring of social relations in European Member States. The discourse ts perfectly
with neoliberal governmentality, promoting things such as limited government, public
private partnerships, stakeholding, active agency and bottom-up approaches. This is what
makes the discourse controversial and contested. The Lisbon Strategy was a failure even in
its own judgement, and the agenda is widely perceived as an Anglo-Saxon attack on the
European Social Model.
The UK is unfortunately much further down this neoliberal path. This partly explains
why policy statements place much greater emphasis on individual responsibility.
In particular, individual resilience works through the promotion of risk assessment. There
are a number of ways that risk itself works as a form of security, insurance, audit and so
on. In the case of resilience, risk is connected to issues such as information, understanding
and awareness. As the Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience says:
47
European Commission, Non-paper on the Establishment of a European Public Private
Partnership for Resilience (EP3R) (Brussels: European Commission, 2010), 6.

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Individual resilience is about having an informed understanding of the risks faced and the
likely impacts of those risks. The work to date has explored the idea that even if individuals
have an understanding of risk, they need to be able to assess their proximity or vulnerability to
these risks and use this as motivation to act and be prepared.48

If the concept of resilience as individual responsibility is stronger in the UK discourse,

then there are other limits to the idea in terms of the areas where it can (relatively) be
meaningfully deployed. Reading recent UK defence reviews reveals how closely the
concept relates to strategies of governance and how it has little to offer to more
conventional security concerns. The 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review is
mainly written in a traditional security discourse with just a token discussion of resilience
and risk. This starts to change with the section on wider security issues such as terrorism,
cyber crime and energy security. Then in the section on civil emergencies, we nd the
emergence of the governance discourse. Here we have the argument that individuals and
community groups are better placed than the local government to respond to local needs as
well as the promotion of public private cooperation, and the belief that a better informed
public is key to effective community resilience.49 All this is very familiar by now. But it
bears no relation to the documents recommendations regarding the deployment of armed
forces, nuclear deterrence or other military as opposed to civil matters.
The last limit to resilience relates to its usage by international organisations for such
things as state-building and poverty reduction. There is certainly no limit to the use of the
term. Indeed, the term is now overused to the point of banality so that what was once
referred to as putting down sand bags to stop ooding or ensuring that there are separate
toilets for men and women are now described as resilience measures.50 The difculty,
therefore, is picking out usages of the term that have some genuine meaning. Again, the
key connection is governance. And again, this governance is working from a distance. To
pick just one document, the United Nations Development Programmes (UNDP) Towards
Human Resilience argues:
When individual institutions or entire systems adopt a combination of these governance
principles and institutional capacities, governments boost their ability to formulate and
implement effective anti-crisis measures that are also legitimate in the eyes of their
citizens. These qualities and principles are mutually supportive: the governance principles
set the overall enabling environment and drive the capacity of institutions to perform better
and respond to crises, while the key institutions involved in realizing these principles need
to be effective, adapt to changing circumstances and priorities, and sustain results and
efforts.51

The shift in focus, as Chandler has suggested, is away from the initial external element of
exposure to shocks, and on to internal matters of resilience. It is clear from the UNDPs
intervention that resilience is being used to assess institutional capacity and performance.
These are monitored by international organisations, governments and donors using
resilience indicators such as scal capacity, institutional strength and level of social
48

Cabinet Ofce, Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience, 11.

Cabinet Ofce, Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The Strategic Defence and Security
Review (London: Cabinet Ofce 2010), http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/
dg_digitalassets/@dg/@en/documents/digitalasset/dg_191634.pdf?CID PDF&PLA furl&
CRE sdsr (accessed July 29, 2012), 49.
50
Bangladesh Climate Change Resilience Fund, Climate Action (September 2011), http://www.
cleancookstoves.org/resources_les/bangladesh-climate-change.pdf (accessed July 29, 2012), 2.
51
United Nations Development Programme, Towards Human Resilience: Sustaining MDG
Progress in an Age of Economic Uncertainty (New York: UNDP, 2011), 270.
49

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development.52 In short, governments are lectured on the need to engage in long-term

institution building and public nancial management.53 But this has become a somewhat
different issue to those we started this section with. In contrast to Chandlers concerns and
the earlier focus of this article, the creation of autonomous or independent individuals
plays very little role in practice. Indeed, to make it do so would be to engage in the most
articial exercise in governance. The purported concern with individual people is no more
than a device in an articial construction where the real targets are states and governments.
Hence the resilience discourse of the UNDP, World Bank and others is a tool in a bigger
game that applies governmentality to states in order to get them to reform their institutions
in the interests of global capital. Of course I do not have the space to defend such an
argument here,54 but a quick glance at the literature should be enough to at least see that
the main concern with such interventions is institutional reform and monitoring. We can
argue about the real interests behind this, but we can at least see that that Chandlers two
issues of autonomous individuals and autonomous states need separating out if we are to
make sense of the different ways in which resilience operates.
Conclusion
Although we can broadly agree on what resilience is, the conclusion must be that it does
not mean very much. A quick search of the literature shows that resilience lacks any
deeper meaning in relation to either the functioning of systems or the psychology of the
human condition. The conceptual basis of resilience that comes from the ecology and
psychology literature soon gives way to rather more banal arguments about the changing
nature of the world and the need to protect the everyday. This was perceptively noticed
early on in a piece by Handmer and Dovers who suggest a distinction between the concept
of resilience as found in the ecology literature and concerned with the long-term survival
of populations, species and eco-system and resilience as it appears in risk management,
which is more concerned with the preservation of day-to-day activities of individuals and
communities.55 The latter usage is predominant in the policy because it better ts with
neoliberal governmentality. But in tting into this discourse, the term becomes little more
than a buzzword that might easily be exchanged for some other term.
Not only is resilience a shallow concept, it is also a shifting concept. The policy
literature reveals that resilience can mean different things in different contexts. Again, the
reason to make these distinctions lies with the nature of neoliberal governmentality. In
advanced liberal countries such as the UK, the neoliberal discourse may well target
individual citizens, but when applied in the form of things such as state-building or poverty
reduction, the targeting of citizens works more as a pretext. The real aim is the disciplining
of states, governments and elites. This gives the whole exercise an even greater degree of
articiality, with the fabrication of civil society organisations and the pretence that good
governance is about local empowerment when it is really about removing barriers to open
markets.
Resilience is best understood in the context of rolling-out neoliberal governmentality.
Its meaning varies depending on the place and the level where this occurs and the aims and
52

Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 13.
54
But see Joseph, Governmentality of What? The Social in the Global.
55
John W. Handmer and Stephen R. Dovers, A Typology of Resilience: Rethinking Institutions for
Sustainable Development, Organization and Environment 9, no. 4 (1996), 486 87.
53

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objects of governance. However, this does not make the idea hegemonic precisely because
the strategies to which resilience is attached and which sustain it are themselves
incomplete and thus reversible. This leads to my last point about the post-liberal argument.
For not only is the argument debatable as a theory, but it is also questionable in practice. In
particular, there is little out there to suggest that post-liberalism has become hegemonic.
The argument that we have seen a fundamental paradigm shift, although partly correct, too
easily gives up on opposition and resistance to this shift. It accepts as given the idea that
governance has become depoliticised and that terms such as resilience are here to stay.
The limits to resilience are real. Although it might increasingly pervade international
organisations, this does not necessarily have any meaningful effects on the ground.
In Europe, where we would expect such ideas to have resonance, there are great
divergences across Member States as seen in the failure to implement to the neoliberal
Lisbon Agenda. And there is a big difference in the security discourse in the UK and other
European countries such as France where there are strong republican traditions that are
opposed to Anglo-Saxon ideas and where the idea of resilience has met with widespread
scepticism.56
In questioning the idea of post-liberalism, I do not want to give the impression that I
am defending classical liberalism, French republicanism, the European Social Model,
post-war consensus or anything else. If anything, the undoing of the post-liberal argument
is due to more realist reasons. Ideas such as resilience come to prominence in an uneven
world where hegemonic discourses reect real-world power politics. Not surprisingly,
given the continued strength of US hegemony, the term is very Anglo-Saxon in nature.
Consequently, it plays an important role in international organisations and the statebuilding discourse Chandler is discussing, because they are part of the (post) Washington
consensus. The ideas play a role in European discourse insofar as they support its
neoliberal drive. And the strength of this discourse in the EU is less a result of the inuence
of the Eurosceptic UK than of wider US hegemony. This hegemony has to be continually
renewed, reproduced and institutionally inscribed. Resilience is part of this process today,
but not necessarily tomorrow.
Notes on contributor
Jonathan Joseph is Professor of International Relations at the University of Shefeld. His most recent
books are The Social in the Global: Social Theory, Governmentality and Global Politics
(Cambridge, 2012) and Scientic Realism and International Relations co-edited with Colin Wight
(Palgrave, 2010).

56

See Joseph, Resilience in UK and French Security Strategy.