Help or hindrance? the contribution of the resilience approach to risk governance

Abstract

In recent years, resilience has rapidly become a mainstream notion in addition to disaster vulnerability. The concept of social resilience focuses on the social capacities available beyond the capacities of the formal disaster management sector, and is also redressing the victimising and disempowering effects of the vulnerability notion. While having a number of strong points, the resilience project also carries risks to society. Whether promoting resilience reduces peoples vulnerability to disaster is highly dependent on a persons socioeconomic standing and the larger socio-economic and political context. Hence, we should be critical about the fiction promoted by the retreating neo-liberal state that everyone can be equally resilient. The emphasis on resilience seems to be the product of a political discourse that seeks to shift the responsibility for mediating the impact of disasters from the state to the society and therefore may engender the same problems and feelings of disenchantment as the neo-liberal project creates in other societal domains and the economy at large. We have to study the potential negative political effects the neo-liberal project inheres in order to fully gauge its impact on vulnerable disaster-stricken individuals and communities, and how it may affect the governance of risk ultimately.