Governing through Failure and Denial: The New Resilience Agenda
| Author | Jonathan Joseph |
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0305829816638166 |
| Subject Matter | Conference Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 44(3) 370 –390
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816638166
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Governing through Failure and
Denial: The New Resilience
Agenda
Jonathan Joseph
University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
This article sets out a new way of understanding how resilience works as a form of governmentality
with specific focus on international interventions. It argues that resilience governs though failure
and denial, suggesting that it builds on both failures to govern complex systems and past failures of
intervention, in order to promote a new governance through denial that further shifts responsibility
onto the governed. It suggests that resilience, rather than being a radical new approach, fits with
existing discourse and practices, but offers something new in terms of its approach to knowledge, the
social, and the human. Running this through the themes of failure and denial, the article suggests that
resilience offers certain possibilities for human action, but that its emancipatory potential is largely
constrained by the way it limits how we understand the bigger picture. This is explored in relation to
international interventions and the way that resilience contributes to global governmentality.
Keywords
resilience, governmentality, denial
Resilience has spread so quickly through policy-making that it has taken on the appear-
ance of a new paradigm for intervention and problem solving. Given the rapid prolifera-
tion of usage in a variety of contexts, a precise definition of the term is now impossible.
The World Bank talks of resilience in terms of ‘people’s ability to recover from negative
shocks while retaining or improving their functioning’.1 In a slightly broader sense, it can
Corresponding author:
Jonathan Joseph, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Elmfield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield,
S10 2TU, UK.
Email: j.joseph@sheffield.ac.uk
638166MIL0010.1177/0305829816638166MillenniumJoseph
research-article2016
Conference Article
1. World Bank, Building Resilience: Integrating Climate and Disaster Risk into Development.
Lessons from World Bank Group Experience (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014), 80.
Joseph 371
be understood as ‘the ability of an individual, a household, a community, a country or a
region to withstand, adapt, and quickly recover from stresses and shocks such as drought,
violence, conflict or natural disaster’.2 This definition by the European Commission
applies the idea to international development and emergency support and it is to this area
that this article mainly relates. Looking at the arguments of the EU, World Bank, the UK’s
Department for International Development (DFID), and other international actors, it sug-
gests that the notions of failure and denial capture two important ways in which the domi-
nant narrative on resilience applies itself to the international domain. It looks at the
opportunities and possibilities resilience offers human agents, and suggests that these
come at the price of being able to influence the bigger picture.
A review of the academic literature can reveal two broad attitudes to resilience. One
understanding sees resilience as a radical new approach that opens up new ways of think-
ing and understanding. If not wholly positive about what these developments might rep-
resent, this view does tend to emphasise a view of resilience as opportunity and possibility.
A more negative view of resilience, by contrast, emphasises the way it restricts our
opportunities to act and creates compliant subjects who fit the conditions created by
neoliberal capitalism. This latter view is the dominant one among the critical scholars
who, applying Foucault, tend to coalesce around the view that resilience is a form of
neoliberal governmentality producing neoliberal subjects.3
The first approach is not so straightforward, however. There is a dominant approach
to resilience that starts from the ecology literature and emphasises systemic adaptation.
This view takes a positive view of resilience as offering opportunities for reflexive and
adaptive behaviour. However, this is founded upon a rather negative picture of the world
as uncertain and unpredictable. Critics would also argue that the mainstream resilience
literature represents a rather technical and apolitical approach that obscures the power
relations behind complex system dynamics and depoliticises the social context within
which adaptive behaviour occurs.4 However, there is also a more critical understanding
of resilience that recognises how tying resilience to a more political logic does not mean
2. European Commission, EU Approach to Resilience: Learning from Food Security Crises
(Brussels: European Commission, 2012), 1.
3. Melinda Cooper and Jeremy Walker, ‘Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to
the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation’, Security Dialogue 14, no. 2 (2011): 143–60; Mark
Duffield, ‘How Did We Become Unprepared? Emergency and Resilience in an Uncertain
World’, British Academy Review 21 (2013): 55–8; Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life:
The Art of Living Dangerously (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014); Jonathan Joseph, ‘Resilience
as Embedded Neoliberalism: A Governmentality Approach’, Resilience: International Policies,
Practices and Discourses 1, no. 1 (2013): 38–52; Mareile Kaufmann, ‘Emergent Self-organisation
in Emergencies: Resilience Rationales in Interconnected Societies’, Resilience: International
Policies, Practices and Discourses 1, no. 1 (2013): 53–68; Chris Zebrowski, ‘The Nature of
Resilience’, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1, no. 3 (2013): 159–73.
4. Maureen Biermann, Kevin Hillmer-Pegram, Corrine Noel Knapp, et al., ‘Approaching a
Critical Turn? A Content Analysis of the Politics of Resilience in Key Bodies of Resilience
Literature’, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 4, no. 2 (2016): 2–3.
doi:10.1080/21693293.2015.1094170.
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