Resilience in British social policy: Depoliticising risk and regulating deviance

DOI10.1177/0263395718777920
Published date01 August 2019
Date01 August 2019
AuthorFran Amery
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395718777920
Politics
2019, Vol. 39(3) 363 –378
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395718777920
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Resilience in British social
policy: Depoliticising risk and
regulating deviance
Fran Amery
University of Bath, UK
Abstract
Over the past decade, resilience has emerged as a key priority linking disparate areas of British
policy. Yet research to date has focused heavily on resilience as a dimension of international
development and security agendas. This article maps the movement of resilience into British social
policy. It finds that, as in other areas of policy, resilience in social policy functions to depoliticise,
placing the structural determinants of gender, racial, and other inequalities beyond the reach of
policymakers. Yet, in a departure from academic accounts of resilience, in social policy, resilience
appears to play another role: that of regulating social deviance.
Keywords
governance, resilience, risk, social policy
Received: 21st June 2017; Revised version received: 9th March 2018; Accepted: 21st March 2018
Introduction
Resilience, broadly, refers to the capacity of a population, system, or individual to deal
with adversity. This could be by ‘bouncing back’ to its original shape, or by transforming
in response to environmental change. The concept often suggests a transformation of
policymakers’ relationship to risk, going beyond modernist approaches which sought to
identify and contain risk and introducing a ‘post-classical’ (Chandler, 2014a, 2014b)
approach which accepts that risk is an inescapable fact of life. Building resilience has
emerged as a key objective of British policy in a number of fields, most notably security
(Chandler, 2012), development (Levine et al., 2012), and environmental (Nelson et al.,
2007) policy. As a result, resilience has drawn considerable attention from scholars of
public policy (e.g. Chandler, 2014a, 2014b; Duffield, 2013; Joseph, 2013; Rogers, 2013),
with commentators by turns condemning it as merely another evolution of ‘bad old’ neo-
liberal styles of governance, or acknowledging that resilience cannot be pinned down to
a single meaning. Yet it has also been the subject of academic enquiries outside the field
Corresponding author:
Fran Amery, Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies, University of Bath, Claverton Down,
Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
Email: f.c.amery@bath.ac.uk
777920POL0010.1177/0263395718777920PoliticsAmery
research-article2018
Article
364 Politics 39(3)
of public policy, particularly in ecology (Gunderson, 2000; Holling, 1973) and psychol-
ogy (Masten et al., 1990; Masten and Powell, 2003).
With some exceptions (Bottrell, 2013; Harrison, 2012; Welsh, 2014), few scholars
have paid attention to manifestations of resilience in social policy, and there have been no
systematic analyses of resilience in British social policy. Yet resilience has begun to make
inroads here. While certainly less developed than in other areas of policy, resilience is a
thread running through government initiatives relating to, among other things, education
(Department for Education (DfE), 2011a; 2011b), health (Department of Health (DH),
2013), crime (Home Office, 2007), and unemployment (Department for Work & Pensions
(DWP), 2016). It is frequently – although not exclusively – a strategy for working with
young people thought to be vulnerable due to social exclusion, troubled upbringing, or
low self-esteem. Building resilience often forms a central part of strategies for tackling
disadvantage and inequality. It is foregrounded, for example, in Government Equalities
Office (GEO, 2013, 2014) literature on body confidence and in DWP (2016) literature on
welfare and employment.
The emergence of resilience in social policy is potentially significant. ‘Resilience-
thinking’ (Walker and Salt, 2012) represents an evolution of risk governance (Renn and
Klinke, 2015), which has already had a significant impact on social policy, particularly in
the area of health (Petersen, 1996). The governance of risk in social policy has come
under fire from feminist scholars, who note the ways in which risk discourses may be
used to govern women’s behaviour through shame, from constructions of women as ‘at
risk’ of rape or sexual assault (Hall, 2004), and therefore required to monitor their own
behaviour, or when pregnant, responsible for managing an ever-expanding list of risks
lest they ‘fail’ to act as responsible mothers (Lupton, 2012). Risk therefore plays a role in
the regulation of individual behaviour, particularly that regarded as deviant. As an evolu-
tion of risk governance, resilience may be similarly important.
This article therefore investigates the entry of resilience into British social policy. It
presents the findings of a qualitative content analysis of policy literature published
between 2005 and 2016, which compares resilience in social policy to resilience in two
other fields (security and development). It finds that resilience is implicated in the depo-
liticisation of risk. This follows from the argument of critics that resilience can function
to render power structures invisible and re-cast suffering as inevitable, equipping citizens
as it does with the tools to manage suffering but not to resist its causes. The analysis pre-
sented here adds to this account by demonstrating that in social policy, discourses of
resilience conceptualise factors such as gender and ethnicity as ‘beyond control’ and out
of the reach of policymakers. The impact of power structures on the individual is there-
fore naturalised. However, this article also finds that resilience in social policy does not
merely mimic resilience in other fields. Rather, in social policy, resilience functions to
regulate social deviance. It is directed at the creation of risk-averse citizens who are also
virtuous: they do not smoke, take drugs, or have promiscuous sex; they do not riot, and
they are able to counter extremist narratives – and above all they take responsibility for
their lives. As with ‘older’ styles of risk governance (Castel, 1991; Giddens, 1999;
Lupton, 1999; Petersen, 1996), then, resilience may target the creation of moral citizens.
Resilience, neoliberalism, and risk
Authors note the polysemic nature of resilience (Reghezza-Zitt et al., 2012; Rogers,
2017). The concept has travelled between numerous fields, each time shifting slightly in

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