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Performances and Performativities of Resilience

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Evolutionary Governance Theory

Abstract

Resilience has become an institutionalized buzzword in spatial planning. Regarding resilience as a Foucauldian dispositif manifest through discursivities and materialities, I demonstrate how resilience is both a process and product of governance. Signifying a particular regime of truth or configuration of power-knowledge, resilience performs both as a social-political construct and, in turn, constructs certain behaviors, expectations and so on of human and non-human actors. I discuss how spatial planning practitioners have generally conceptualized and performed resilience and demonstrate the contingent nature of resilience as both product and process, both descriptive and normative. Such boundary-crossings are often major sources of performativity.

Conceiving resilience as performative practice recognizes that actors’ identities, interests, knowledges, needs and so on are constructed in the practice itself. I also demonstrate that in spatial planning, resilience tends to be performed as a descriptor or end-state rather than as a process. A managerial ‘command-and-control’ approach trades off the evolutionary dynamics of social-ecological systems in favor of conserving the status quo.

Traditionally regarded as a scientific discipline and an administrative technique which seeks to achieve specified end-states, spatial planning systems tend to be fairly rigid. A major paradox of planning practice is that a system whose main purpose is to plan for change is underpinned by structures which impinge on capacity for change. Eliding issues of power, politics and normativity and locked into planning for certainty, spatial planning practice is in tension with conceptualizations of resilience as adaptiveness and transformation. I suggest that a resilient form of spatial planning would no longer seek to master or control, but to affirm the contingent, to adapt and transform, working with, rather than against the temporalities of social, political, economic and ecological dynamics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See the work of poststructuralist theorists, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987: 257) for discussion of what a ‘body’ or thing can do.

  2. 2.

    The UNFCCC (1994) distinguishes between climate ‘change’ as attributable to human activities altering the atmospheric composition long-term and climate ‘variability’ to natural causes over a shorter term.

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  1. School of Global Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

    Jean Hillier

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Correspondence to Jean Hillier .

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  1. Faculty of Management, Science and Technology, Open University, Heerlen, The Netherlands

    Raoul Beunen

  2. Faculty of Extension, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

    Kristof Van Assche

  3. Cultural Geography Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Martijn Duineveld

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Hillier, J. (2015). Performances and Performativities of Resilience. In: Beunen, R., Van Assche, K., Duineveld, M. (eds) Evolutionary Governance Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12274-8_12

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