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Article
From resilience to
resourcefulness: A critique of
resilience policy and activism
Danny MacKinnon
University of Glasgow, UK
Kate Driscoll Derickson
Georgia State University, USA
Abstract
This paper provides a theoretical and political critique of how the concept of resilience has been applied to
places. It is based upon three main points. First, the ecological concept of resilience is conservative when
applied to social relations. Second, resilience is externally defined by state agencies and expert knowledge.
Third, a concern with the resilience of places is misplaced in terms of spatial scale, since the processes which
shape resilience operate primary at the scale of capitalist social relations. In place of resilience, we offer the
concept of resourcefulness as an alternative approach for community groups to foster.
Keywords
communities, ecology, resilience, resourcefulness, social relations
Concepts of resilience are used to describe
the relationship between the system under
observation and externally induced disruption,
stress, disturbance or crisis. In a more general
sense, resilience is about the stability of a sys-
tem against interference. It is, however, more
than a response to or coping with particular
challenges. Resilience can be seen as a kind
of systemic property. (Lang, 2010: 16)
In its tendency to metabolize all countervailing
forces and insulate itself against critique, ‘resi-
lience thinking’ cannot be challenged from
within the terms of complex systems theory
but must be contested, if at all, on completely
different terms, by a movement of thought that
is truly counter-systemic. (Walker and Cooper,
2011: 157)
I Introduction
The concept of ‘resilience’ has migrated from
the natural and physical sciences into the social
sciences and public policy as the identification
of global threats such as economic crisis, cli-
mate change and international terrorism has
focused attention on the responsive capacities
of places and social systems (Hill et al., 2008;
Swanstrom et al., 2009). The question of how
to build up the resilience of places and organiza-
tions is attracting great interest, especially in the
Corresponding author:
Danny MacKinnon, School of Geographical and Earth
Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK.
Email: Daniel.MacKinnon@glasgow.ac.uk
Progress in Human Geography
37(2) 253–270
ª The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0309132512454775
phg.sagepub.com
‘grey literature’ produced by government agen-
cies, think tanks, consultancies and environ-
mental interest groups. As Walker and Cooper
(2011: 144) observe, the concept of resilience
has become ‘a pervasive idiom of global gov-
ernance’, being ‘abstract and malleable enough
to encompass the worlds of high finance,
defence and urban infrastructure’. In particular,
the frequency by which resilience is invoked by
progressive activists and movements underlines
the need for critical appraisal of both the term
itself and the politics it animates. Through our
own ongoing engagement with a grassroots
project in Govan, a post-industrial neighbour-
hood in Glasgow, as well as through attending
a variety of events in Britain over the past year
that have attracted representatives of environ-
mental groups and campaigns such as Transi-
tion Towns, Grow Heathrow, and Coexist,
1
it
is clear that ‘resilience’ is helping to frame par-
ticular forms of activism, some of which are
anti-capitalist in nature.
This paper aims to provide a theoretical and
political critique of how the concept of resili-
ence has been applied to places. In particular,
we are concerned with the spatial politics and
associated implications of resilience discourse,
something which we consider to have been
neglected in the burgeoning social science liter-
ature (Agder, 2000; Norris et al., 2008;
O’Malley, 2010; Simmie and Martin, 2010).
2
A key issue here concerns the importation of
naturalistic concepts and metaphors to the social
sciences and the need to problematize social
relations and structures, rather than taking them
for granted (Barnes, 1997). This requires recog-
nition of the ecological dominance of capitalism
in terms of its capacity to imprint its develop-
mental logic on associated social relations,
institutions and spaces (Jessop, 2000).
3
From a
geographical perspective, urban and regional
‘resilience’ as an objective must be understood
in relation to the uneven spatial development
of capitalism across a range of spatial sites and
scales (Smith, 1990). In this context, we suggest
that resilient spaces are precisely what capital-
ism needs – spaces that are periodically rein-
vented to meet the changing demands of
capital accumulation in an increasingly globa-
lized economy. From this perspective, both the
sources of resilience and the forces generating
disruption and crisis are internal to the capitalist
‘system’. Crucially, the resilience of capitalism
is achieved at the expense of certain social
groups and regions that bear the costs of peri-
odic waves of adaptation and restructuring.
Our critique of resilience is based upon three
points. First, we argue that the concept of resili-
ence, derived from ecology and systems theory,
is conservative when applied to the social
sphere, referring to the stability of a system
against interference as emphasized in the first
of our opening quotations (Lang, 2010). This
apolitical ecology not only privileges estab-
lished social structures, which are often shaped
by unequal power relations and injustice
(Harvey, 1996; Swyngedouw and Heynen,
2003), but also closes off wider questions of
progressive social change which require inter-
ference with, and transformation of, established
‘systems’. Thus, while Larner and Moreton
(2012) suggest that resilience can generate a
politics that prefigures alternative social
relations, we do not regard it as the best way
to animate such a politics. Second, resilience
is externally defined by state agencies and
expert knowledge in spheres such as security,
emergency planning, economic development
and urban design (Coaffee and Rogers, 2008;
Walker and Cooper, 2011). Such ‘top-down’
strategies invariably place the onus on individu-
als, communities and places to become more
resilient and adaptable to a range of external
threats (O’Malley, 2010), serving to reproduce
the wider social and spatial relations that gener-
ate turbulence and inequality. Third, we contend
that the concern with the resilience of places is
misconceived in terms of spatial scale. Here,
resilience policy seems to rely on an underlying
local-global divide whereby different scales
254 Progress in Human Geography 37(2)
such as the national, regional, urban and local
are defined as arenas for ensuring adaptability
in the face of immutable global threats.
4
This
fosters an internalist conception which locates
the sources of resilience as lying within the par-
ticular scale in question. As a result, resilience
policy is devolving what Peck and Tickell
(2002: 386) call ‘responsibility without power’
by effectively setting up communities and
places to take what our collaborator Gehan
MacLeod has called ‘knock after knock’ and
keep getting up again. By contrast, we contend
that the processes which shape resilience
operate primarily at the scale of capitalist social
relations (Hudson, 2010).
Beyond this critique, our approach is atten-
tive to what we understand to be the normative
political yearnings that underpin resilience talk
among oppositional groups and campaigns. In
these contexts, we recognize that resilience is
meant to prefigure alternative social relations
in which social and environmental well-being
is the system which is to be privileged (i.e. the
resilient system), with capitalism seen as one
of a number of disruptive and destructive forces.
Without intending to belittle such activism, we
view the cultivation of what Spivak (2012) has
termed a will to social justice as a first step
towards realizing the vision that we understand
resilience activism as attempting to ‘prefigure’.
Put another way, if alternative social relations
are to be realized democratically and sustain-
ably, and in ways that are wide-reaching and
inclusive (as opposed to uneven or vanguard-
driven), then uneven access to material
resources and the levers of social change must
be redressed. To that end, we offer resourceful-
ness as an alternative concept to animate poli-
tics and activism that seek to transform social
relations in more progressive, anti-capitalist and
socially just ways. In contrast to resilience,
resourcefulness as an animating concept specifi-
cally seeks to both problematize and redress
issues of recognition and redistribution (Fraser,
1996; Young, 1990) and work toward cultivating
conditions in which communities can develop
alternative visions of social relations. It is
intended to foster a ‘counter-systemic’ mode
of thought (and practice) that transcends sys-
tems theory and resilience thinking in the spirit
of our second opening quotation (Walker and
Cooper, 2011: 157).
The remainder of the paper is divided into six
sections. The next section discusses the concept
and discourse of resilience, tracing its migration
from the natural sciences to the realm of urban
and regional policy and activism. We then
address the three points of our critique in turn.
This is followed by a consideration of the possi-
bilities of resourcefulness as an alternative
approach for communities and oppositional
groups. Finally, we summarize our arguments
and consider their implications.
II Resilience and its uses
The concept of resilience has roots in both phy-
sics and mathematics, where it refers to the
capacity of a system or material to recover its
shape following a displacement or disturbance
(Norris et al., 2008), and ecology where it
emphasizes the capacity of an ecosystem to
absorb shocks and maintain functioning (Folke,
2006; Holling, 1973). Subsequent applications
to a number of objects from the built environ-
ment to individuals, social systems and commu-
nities have spawned a range of definitions
(Table 1). The work of the American ecologist
C.S. Holling (1973, 2001) has proved particu-
larly influential, not least through his role in
groups such as the Resilience Alliance of scien-
tists and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, a
high-profile think-tank (Walker and Cooper,
2011). Researchers often distinguish between
resistance and ‘bounce back’, where the former
refers to the ability of a system to block disrup-
tive changes and remain relatively undisturbed,
while the latter is defined in terms of the capac-
ity to recover from shock and return to normal
functioning.
MacKinnon and Derickson 255
In the ecological literature, two types of resi-
lience are commonly identified (Folke, 2006;
Holling, 1973). The first is ‘engineering resili-
ence’, which is concerned with the stability of
a system near to an equilibrium or steady state,
where resilience is defined in terms of elasticity
which emphasizes resistance to disruption and
speed of return to the pre-existing equilibrium.
Second, ‘ecological resilience’ refers to exter-
nal disturbances and shocks that result in a
system becoming transformed through the
emergence of new structures and behaviours.
This understanding of resilience appears to be
complex and open-ended, making it more suit-
able for the study of social phenomena charac-
terized by ongoing adaptation and learning
(Pickett et al., 2004; Pike et al., 2010). Yet
Simmie and Martin (2010) suggest that even the
ecological model of resilience should be treated
with caution as it relies on a conception of exter-
nal shocks triggering a shift from one relatively
stable regime to another, simply recognizing
that equilibria are multiple rather than single.
In recent years, the ecologically rooted con-
cept of resilience has rapidly infiltrated public
policy fields such as national security, financial
management, public health, economic develop-
ment and urban planning as policy-makers and
expert advisors have adopted the concept
(Walker and Cooper, 2011). For instance,
increased concerns about terrorism in the wake
of the 11 September 2001 attacks have led to
widespread securitization though increased
electronic surveillance, the establishment of
bounded and secure zones in cities and key
transport hubs, and the adoption of increasingly
complex forms of contingency and scenario
planning (Coaffee and Murakami Wood,
Table 1. Selected definitions of resilience.
Author, date Discipline Level of analysis Definition
Gordon, 1978 Physics Physical system The ability to store energy and deflect
elasticity under a load without breaking
or being deformed
Holling, 1973 Ecology Ecological system The persistence of relationships within a
system; the ability of systems to absorb
change and still persist
Resilience Alliance,
undated
Ecology Ecological system The capacity to tolerate disturbance
without collapsing into a qualitatively
different state (http://
www.resalliance.org/index.php/
resilience)
Egeland et al., 1993 Psychology Individual The capacity for successful adaptation and
functioning despite high risk, stress or
trauma
Agder, 2000 Geography Community The ability of communities to withstand
external shocks to their social
infrastructure
Katz, 2004 Geography Community Ways in which people adapt to changing
circumstances to get by and ‘make do’
through the exercising of autonomous
initiative
Hill et al., 2008 Urban and regional
development
Region The ability of a region to recover
successfully from shocks to its economy
Source: Adapted and extended from Norris et al. (2008: 129).
256 Progress in Human Geography 37(2)
2006). Lentzos and Rose (2009) distinguish
between three national models of biosecurity:
a contingency planning approach in France; an
emphasis on protection in Germany; and the
UK strategy of resilience. UK resilience
amounts to more than simply preparedness,
implying a systematic programme of measures
and structures to enable organizations and
communities to better anticipate and tolerate
disruption and turbulence (Anderson, 2010).
This requires what has been termed a ‘multi-
scale governance fix’ (Coaffee and Murakami
Wood, 2006: 509), involving the establishment
of Local Resilience Forums and Regional Resi-
lience Teams within each of the Government
Offices for the Regions in England, overseen
by the Civil Contingencies Secretariat in the
Cabinet Office (Cabinet Office, 2010).
5
Walker and Cooper (2011: 144) argue that
the success of resilience in ‘colonizing multiple
arenas of governance’ reflects its ideological fit
with neoliberalism. Contemporary forms of
securitization overlap substantially with neolib-
eral discourses of competitiveness, which
emphasize the need to promote economic
growth (Bristow, 2010). Such discourses sup-
port a framework of interregional competition
in which cities and regions have effectively
become ‘hostile brothers’ which compete for
investment, markets and resources (Peck and
Tickell, 1994). Enhanced regional competi-
tiveness is seen as the key to success in glo-
bal markets by policy-makers and business
leaders, ba sed upon the ha rnessi ng of local
resources and assets th rough initiatives which
seek to upgrade workfor ce skills, stimulate
the formation of new firms, and foster inno-
vation and learning (Bristow, 2010; MacKin-
non et al., 2002). Increasingly, resilience and
security strategies have been linked to com-
petition for footloose global capital with
urban marketing strategies, for instance,
stressing the ‘ safet y’ and ‘ securit y’ of cities
as places to conduct business (Coaffee and
Murakami Wood, 2006).
Policy-makers in the UK have also placed an
increasing emphasis on the social and commu-
nity aspects of resilience in recent years, seek-
ing to raise public awareness of potential
threats and to encourage increased ‘responsibili-
zation’ by involving citizens and communities in
their own risk management (O’Malley, 2010).
This resulted in the publication of a Strategic
National Framework on Community Resilience
(Cabinet Office, 2011), defined in terms of ‘com-
munities and individuals harnessing local
resources and expertise to help themselves in
an emergency’ (p. 4). Here, community resili-
ence is viewed in terms of the Conservative-
Liberal Democrat Coalition Government’s ‘Big
Society’ agenda, which is intended to promote
greater community self-reliance and empower-
ment by reducing the powers of the state and
encouraging volunteering and community activ-
ity (HM Government, 2010).
The recent upsurge of interest in community
resilience is not only a product of the ‘top-
down’ strategies of government, but also of the
‘bottom-up’ activities of a wide variety of com-
munity groups and environmental campaigns.
In the context of the rapidly growing Transition
Towns movement (Bailey et al., 2010; Mason
and Whitehead, 2012), for instance, resilience
seems to be supplanting ‘sustainability’, provid-
ing a renewed focus for initiatives seeking to
localize the supply of food and energy in partic-
ular (Mason and Whitehead, 2012). In the case
of Govan Together, a project with which we
have worked closely over the past year as colla-
borators and researchers, the language of resili-
ence was meant to promote thinking about
nature and society in a systemic way, influenced
in large part by the intellectual framework of
‘human ecology’. Informed by such initiatives,
the Carnegie UK Trust (2011) has produced a
handbook on community resilience which
emphasizes the need for people to come
together to ‘future-proof their communities on
the basis of agreed values’ (p. 4). The second
part of the handbook outlines a ‘compass’ of
MacKinnon and Derickson 257
community resilience based upon: healthy,
engaged people; an inclusive and creative
culture that generates a positive and welcoming
sense of place; a localized economy that oper-
ates within ecological limits; and the fostering
of supportive intercommunity links. Research-
ers have noted, however, that this burgeoning
sphere of action tends to operate through a kind
of inclusive localism that is largely apolitical
and pragmatic in character (Mason and White-
head, 2012; Trapese Collective, 2008).
III Resilience and the privileging of
existing social relations
Resilience can be seen as the latest in a long line
of naturalistic metaphors to be applied to cities
and regions (Barnes, 1997; Evans, 2011; Gandy,
2002). Organic conceptions of cities as systems
displaying natural traits such as growth, compe-
tition and self-organization have proven partic-
ularly influential, informing the urban ecologies
of Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard and the
Chicago School (Evans, 2011). The notion of
the ‘sanitary’ or ‘bacteriological’ city took
shape from the mid- to late 19th century, based
upon the application of the nascent sciences of
epidemiology and microbiology, alongside the
emerging professions of planning and civil
engineering (Gandy, 2002; Pincetl, 2010). The
use of natural metaphors had implications for
the governance and management of cities, as
Gandy (2002) observes:
In the twentieth century, a range of technologi-
cal advances facilitated a new mediation
between organic metaphors and the production
of urban space. In 1965, for example, the engi-
neer Abel Wolman outlined ‘the complete
metabolism of the modern city’ as the culmina-
tion of advances in the technical organization
of urban space. Yet these metabolic metaphors
treat the city as a discrete physical entity. The
‘body of the city’ is considered in isolation
from wider determinants of urban form, and
the social production of space is downplayed
in relation to the technical mastery of cities.
(Gandy, 2002: 8)
In the context of scientific efforts to create more
resilient urban infrastructures, Evans (2011:
224) suggests that ecologists may come to play
an analogous role in the shaping of 21st-century
cities to that of the sanitarians in the 19th cen-
tury. Informed by the work of ecological author-
ities such as Holling, Arthur Tansley and the
Resilience Alliance on ecosystems as complex
adaptive systems, this new urban ecology con-
ceives of the city as a social-ecological system,
in which biophysical and social factors are
linked by multiple feedback loops and exhibit
the common properties of resilience and com-
plexity (Evans, 2011; Folke, 2006). The effect
is to naturalize cities and regions as self-
contained systems by divorcing them ‘from
wider determinants of urban form’ such as flows
of capital and modes of state regulation (Gandy,
2002: 8). The abstract language of systems the-
ory and complexity science offers a mode of
intellectual colonization which serves to objec-
tify and depoliticize the spheres of urban and
regional governance, normalizing the emphasis
on adaptation to prevailing environmental and
economic conditions and foreclosing wider
sociopolitical questions of power and represen-
tation (Evans, 2011).
The implication of the extension of ecologi-
cal thinking to the social sphere is that human
society should mimic the decentralized and resi-
lient processes of nature (Swanstrom, 2008: 15).
Resilience is fundamentally about how best to
maintain the functioning of an existing system
in the face of externally derived disturbance.
Both the ontological nature of ‘the system’ and
its normative desirability escape critical scru-
tiny. As a result, the existence of social divisions
and inequalities tends to be glossed over when
resilience thinking is extended to society
(p. 15). Ecological models of resilience are fun-
damentally anti-political, viewing adaptation to
change in terms of decentralized actors, systems
258 Progress in Human Geography 37(2)
and relationships and failing to accommodate
the critical role of the state and politics (Evans,
2011; Swanstrom, 2008). Deference to ‘the
emergent order of nature’ (Swanstrom, 2008:
16) is implicitly extended to society as existing
social networks and institutions are taken for
granted as ‘natural’ and harmonious. This
reflects the origins of resilience thinking in the
writings of Holling and others as a critique of
the methods of scientific resource management
employed by state agencies in the 1960s and
1970s (Ostrom, 2005), fostering a suspicion of
central authority that has affinities with the
work of Hayek (Walker and Cooper, 2011).
6
In response, Swanstrom (2008: 16) argues that
the neglect of the role of the state and politics
and the privileging of harmonious social net-
works renders the ecological model of resilience
‘profoundly conservative’ when it is exported
into a social context. This conservatism is rein-
forced by the normative aspect of resilience
(O’Malley, 2010), which is assumed to be
always a positive quality, imbued with notions
of individual self-reliance and triumph over
adversity.
Both government agencies and local environ-
mental groups emphasize the need for commu-
nities to become more resilient and self-reliant
(Cabinet Office, 2011; Carnegie UK Trust,
2011). In common with transition thinking, this
agenda favours community self-organization in
terms of the agency of local people to make their
communities more resilient, while overlooking
the affinities with neoliberal thinking. Yet, as
a number of critical scholars have argued, the
nebulous but tremendously evocative concept
of community is commonly deployed to bestow
particular initiatives with unequivocally posi-
tive connotations as being undertaken in the
common interest of a social collectivity (DeFi-
lippis et al., 2006; Joseph, 2002). Rather than
referring to a pre-existing collective interest,
invocations of community attempt to construct
and mobilize such a collectivity. By generating
a discourse of equivalence between groups and
individuals, they often have the effect of sup-
pressing social difference (according to class,
gender, race, etc.) and masking inequality and
hierarchy (DeFilippis et al., 2006; Joseph,
2002; Young, 1990). As such, the bracketing
of resilience with community works to reinforce
the underlying imperative of resilience-building
through the abstract identification of its
sociospatial object (the community in question),
fostering a sense of common purpose and unity.
The effect is to further naturalize not only
resilience itself as a common project, but also
the social and political relations which are to
be mobilized in the pursuit of this project.
IV Resilience as an externally
defined imperative
The second point of our critique is concerned
with the external definition of resilience by state
agencies and expert analysts across a range of
policy spheres (Coaffee and Rogers, 2008;
Walker and Cooper, 2011). In this context, the
‘pseudo-scientific discourse’ of resilience pre-
sents something of a paradox of change: empha-
sizing the prevalence of turbulence and crisis,
yet accepting them passively and placing the
onus on communities to get on with the business
of adapting (Evans, 2011: 234). The effect is to
naturalize crisis, resonating with neoliberal dis-
courses which stress the inevitability of globali-
zation (Held and McGrew, 2002). In the sphere
of security, for instance, the identification of
‘new’ global risks, coupled with political lead-
ers’ claims of ‘unique’ and ‘classified’ knowl-
edge of potential threats, justified ‘the
implementation of a raft of resilience policies
without critical civic consultation’ following
the events of 11 September 2001 (Coaffee and
Rogers, 2008: 115). In the context of urban and
regional development, resilience has become
the latest policy imperative by which cities and
regions are entreated to mobilize their endogen-
ous assets and resources to compete in global
markets (Wolfe, 2010).
MacKinnon and Derickson 259
The emerging literature on regional resili-
ence policy emphasizes that resilience should
be seen as a dynamic process such that particu-
lar shocks or crises must be situated in the
context of longer run processes of change such
as deindustrialization (Dawley et al., 2010). The
role of regional institutions is to foster the adap-
tive capacity to enable the renewal and ‘branch-
ing out’ of economic activity from existing
assets, echoing the processes that seem to have
underpinned the development of successful
regions such as Cambridge (Dawley et al.,
2010; Simmie and Martin, 2010). A key theme
concerns the importance of civic capacity and
strategic leadership in framing and responding
to particular crises and challenges. According
to Wolfe (2010: 145), ‘Successful regions must
be able to engage in strategic planning exercises
that identify and cultivate their assets, undertake
collaborative processes to plan and implement
change and encourage a regional mindset that
fosters growth’. A key task is the undertaking
of detailed foresight and horizon-scanning work
to identify and assess emergent market trends
and technologies. Such anticipatory exercises
reflect how resilience thinking is associated
with the adoption of a range of non-predictive and
futurological methods of risk analysis and man-
agement such as scenario planning (Anderson,
2010; Lentzos and Rose, 2009; Walker and
Cooper, 2011).
As indicated above, resilience is serving to
reinforce and extend existing trends in urban
regional development policy towards increased
responsiveness to market conditions, strategic
management and the harnessing of endogenous
regional assets. In this sense, resilience policy
fits closely with pre-established discourses of
spatial competition and urban entrepreneurial-
ism (Bristow, 2010; Peck, 2010). Its proximity
to the prior understandings and outlooks of
urban and regional policy-makers helps to
account for the widespread adoption of resili-
ence in economic development circles, provid-
ing a somewhat more muted successor to the
‘creative cities’ craze of the mid-2000s (Florida,
2002; Peck, 2010). Like the creative cities
script, resilience is a mobilizing discourse, con-
fronting organizations, individuals and commu-
nities with the imperative of ongoing adaptation
to the challenges of an increasingly turbulent
environment. Beyond the recurring appeal to
innovation and strategic leadership, resilience
can be seen as a more socially inclusive narra-
tive, requiring all sections of the community,
and not just policy-makers serving the needs
of privileged ‘creatives’, to foster permanent
adaptability in the face of external threats
(O’Malley, 2010). In the context of national
security, this calls for a ‘culture of resilience’
which integrates ‘emergency preparedness into
the infrastructures of everyday life and the
psychology of citizens’ (Walker and Cooper,
2011: 159).
Research on urban resilience tends to opera-
tionalize the term ‘resilience’ as it pertains to
the ability of cities to either continue to replicate
their day-to-day functions in the face of major
shocks such as a terrorist attack or an extreme
weather event, or to adapt to longer-term disrup-
tive forces such as climate change (Otto-
Zimmerman, 2011). While it is common for
work in this vein to describe cities as ‘complex’
or ‘dynamic’ systems, in this work the term
‘system’ appears to refer merely to the everyday
functioning of cities, rather than some fully con-
ceptualized and empirically validated abstract
model. Typically, ‘urban resilience’ mobilizes
a coupled human and natural systems frame-
work for conceptualizing urban systems.
Whereas Pickett et al. (2004) describe ‘resili-
ence’ as a metaphor for integrating analyses of
urban design, ecology and social science, a
more recent articulation of a framework for
urban resilience research identifies ‘metabolic
flows’, ‘governance networks’, ‘social
dynamics’ and the ‘built environment’ as the
key features of the urban ‘system’ (CSIRO,
2007). The Long Term Ecological Research
programme in the United States (USA)
260 Progress in Human Geography 37(2)
incorporates sites in Baltimore and Phoenix
where scientists have been undertaking adaptive
experiments in urban governance, defining the
city as a social-ecological system. As Evans
(2011) argues, the ‘scientific assumptions of
resilience ecology run the risk of political
foreclosure because they frame the governance
choices that are available, often in feedback
mechanisms that are seemingly neutral’ (p. 232).
Some scientists associated with the Resili-
ence Alliance have emphasized the need to
insert politics into research on resilience, partic-
ularly in terms of how governance can enhance
the capacity to manage resilience (Folke, 2006;
Lebel et al., 2006). Accordingly, Lebel et al.
(2006) identify three key dimensions of this
capacity: public participation and deliberation;
polycentric and multi-layered institutions; and
accountable and just institutions. While this rep-
resents a welcome advance in many respects,
the proffered solutions of greater public partici-
pation and accountability seem inadequate,
since they continue to be underpinned by a
notion of adaptive management that subordi-
nates communities and local groups to the
imperative of greater resilience as defined by
external experts and policy-makers. At the same
time, the characteristic ecological emphasis on
self-organization and polycentric institutions
(Folke, 2006; Ostrom, 2005) remains divorced
from the sociopolitical realities of state author-
ity and unequal power relations.
V Scale and the localization of
resilience thinking
The importation of the ecological approach into
the social sciences has served to privilege spa-
tial sites and scales such as cities, regions and
local communities, which are implicitly equated
with ecosystems, and viewed as autonomous
and subject to the same principles of self-
organization. In this sense, resilience thinking
is characterized by a certain imprecision in sca-
lar terms, treating different scales similarly as
arenas for fostering local adaptation in the face
of global threats. Yet the question of whether
the spatial unit in question can be usefully or
accurately understood as a self-organizing
entity modelled after ecosystems remains unad-
dressed. Informed by the extensive literature on
scale (Brenner, 2004; MacKinnon, 2011), we
argue that viewing cities and regions as self-
organizing units is fundamentally misplaced,
serving to divorce them from wider processes
of capital accumulation and state regulation.
Discussions of resilience in the social
sciences have tended to move from responses
to natural disasters to consider the effects of
economic shocks without recognizing the spe-
cific properties and characteristics of capitalism
as the ecologically dominant system (Jessop,
2000). The result has been to take capitalism for
granted as an immutable external force akin to
the forces of nature, while focusing attention
on the self-organizing capacities of places to
become more resilient. As Hudson (2010)
observes, capitalism is itself highly resilient at
a systemic level, confounding successive pre-
dictions of its imminent demise through its
capacity for periodic reinvention and restructur-
ing, as captured by Schumpeter’s notion of crea-
tive destruction (Schumpeter, 1943). This
means that the sources of instability and crisis
that affect urban and regional economies can
be seen as internal to capitalism as a system,
rather than as immutable external forces to
which local groups and communities must con-
tinually adapt. Paradoxically, the long-term suc-
cess of capitalism is predicated upon the
periodic undermining of the resilience of certain
local and regional economies, which are vulner-
able to capital flight and crisis in the face of
competition from other places offering more
profitable investment opportunities (Smith,
1990). The extent of such vulnerability is condi-
tioned by the operation of different forms and
varieties of capitalism (Peck and Theodore,
2007), with ‘liberal market economies’, for
instance, proving more permissive of uneven
MacKinnon and Derickson 261
spatial development and regional crises than
‘coordinated market economies’ which tend to
have maintained ameliorative policy frameworks
(Hall and Soskice, 2001; Peck and Theodore,
2007). As the contemporary politics of austerity
in Europe and the USA demonstrate, the costs
of adaptation and restructuring are often externa-
lized by capital and the state onto particular com-
munities and segments of labour at times of crisis
and restructuring in the interests of ‘general’ eco-
nomic recovery and renewal.
The equation of cities and regions with eco-
systems reinforces the neoliberalization of
urban and regional development policy, foster-
ing an internalist conception which locates the
sources of resilience as lying within the scale
in question. By contrast, the need to position cit-
ies and regions within wider circuits of capital
and modes of state intervention is apparent from
some preliminary empirical analyses of the
dynamics of regional resilience (Martin, 2011;
Simmie and Martin, 2010). Defining resilience
in terms of regions’ resistance to, and recovery
from, major economic shocks, Martin (2011)
examines the responses of UK regions to the
major recessions of 1979–1983, 1990–1993 and
2008–2010. While prosperous regions such as
South East England invariably tend to emerge
as more resilient than less favoured ones such
as North East England, this is not simply the
result of divergent endogenous capacities for
innovation and leadership, but is bound up with
the operation of a range of wider political and
economic relations which have positioned the
former as a global ‘hot-spot’ and the latter as
economically marginal (Massey, 2007). As
neoliberal modes of regulation have supported
the interests of advanced finance in the City of
London, regions such as the North East have
borne the economic and social costs of capitalist
adaptation in terms of deindustrialization and
attendant levels of social disadvantage (Hudson,
1989).
The crucial role of national states in shaping
levels of resilience is illustrated by Swanstrom
(2008) with reference to the foreclosure crisis
in the USA, whereby forms of federal deregula-
tion in the 1980s encouraged a wave of innova-
tion through the introduction of new financial
instruments which actually undermined house-
hold resilience in the long run. In another study,
Swanstrom et al. (2009) examine how metropol-
itan areas in the USA have responded to the
foreclosure crisis, defining resilience in terms
of three main processes: the redeployment of
assets or alteration of organizational routines;
collaboration within and across the public, pri-
vate and non-profit sectors; and the mobiliza-
tion and capturing of resources from external
sources. Crucially, while ‘horizontal’ collabora-
tion between public, private and non-profit
actors within metropolitan areas is important,
Swanstrom et al. (2009) argue that the effects
of this will remain limited without support from
‘vertical’ policies emanating from the state and
federal scales of government. Only these insti-
tutions can provide the necessary level of
resources to support local foreclosure preven-
tion and neighbourhood recovery activities.
The vacuous yet ubiquitous notion that com-
munities ought to be ‘resilient’ can be seen as
particularly troubling in the context of austerity
and reinforced neoliberalism (Peck et al., 2010).
In the UK, this is being accompanied by a
renewed invocation of localism and community
through the government’s ‘Big Society’
programme (Featherstone et al., 2012). This
provides a crucial supplement to neoliberal dis-
courses (see Joseph, 2002), serving to fill an
underlying void created by the privileging of
market rationalities over social needs (Derrida,
1976; Sheppard and Leitner, 2010). The effect
is to maintain and legitimize existing forms of
social hierarchy and control (Joseph, 2002),
drawing upon long-standing Conservative tradi-
tions of middle-class voluntarism and social
responsibility (Featherstone et al., 2012). We
cite the ‘Big Society’ agenda here to emphasize
the potential relationship between reductions in
public expenditure and attacks on the state as an
262 Progress in Human Geography 37(2)
active agent of redistribution and service provi-
sion, on the one hand, and arguments for greater
local and community resilience, on the other
(Cabinet Office, 2011). This discursive and
material policy milieu promises to have
profoundly uneven effects, with disadvantaged
communities having fewer material resources,
professional skill sets, and stocks of social
capital to ‘step up’ to fill the gaps created by
state retrenchment (Cox and Schmuecker,
2010; Fyfe, 2005). It is in this context that the
promotion of resilience among low-income
communities strikes us as particularly danger-
ous, insofar as it normalizes the uneven effects
of neoliberal governance and invigorates the
trope of individual responsibility with a
renewed ‘community’ twist. At the same time,
resilience-oriented policy discursively and
ideologically absolves capital and the state from
accountability to remediate the impacts of their
practices and policies. Implicit, then, in resili-
ence discourse is the notion that urban and
regional policy should enable communities to
constantly remake themselves in a manner that
suits the fickle whims of capital with limited
support from the state. Not only does this
approach hold little promise of fostering greater
social justice, it also elevates the operation of
the market over the well-being of the commu-
nities that are meant to be resilient.
VI Towards a politics of
resourcefulness
In this section, we outline our favoured concept
of resourcefulness as an alternative to resili-
ence, which we have argued is ill suited to the
animation of more progressive and just social
relations. Acknowledging that the concept itself
requires more empirical research in conversa-
tion with a wide range of communities and
groups, we argue that resourcefulness has the
potential to overcome the three main limitations
of resilience that we have emphasized. As
we have argued, resilience is inherently
conservative insofar as it privileges the restora-
tion of existing systemic relations rather than
their transformation. Yet calls for alternative
utopian visions and transformations of social
relations are themselves not inherently socially
just and progressive. Nor does the history of the
20th century suggest that decommodification
and state socialism necessarily lead to ethical
and desirable social relations. Rather, as we
noted earlier, Spivak (2012) suggests that the
immediate and most pressing task is to ‘culti-
vate the will to social justice’ among everyday
people.
As a first step in that direction, we offer a
politics of resourcefulness. Developed in close
conversation with our collaborators in the
Govan Together project, resourcefulness is
meant to problematize both the uneven distribu-
tion of material resources and the associated
inability of disadvantaged groups and commu-
nities to access the levers of social change. In
this sense, a politics of resourcefulness attempts
to engage with injustice in terms of both redis-
tribution and recognition towards a vision of
resourceful communities, cities and regions.
The normative vision that underpins resource-
fulness is one in which communities have the
capacity to engage in genuinely deliberative
democratic dialogue to develop contestable
alternative agendas and work in ways that
meaningfully challenge existing power rela-
tions. In particular, our approach is conscious
of the need for progressively orientated groups,
organizations and communities to avoid forms
of politics and praxis that are prone to vanguard-
ism, whereby a small group leads in a top-down,
ideologically driven way, and the often uninten-
tional recreation of unequal social relations
(Cumbers et al., 2008; Mason and Whitehead,
2012).
Second, rather than being externally defined
by government agencies and experts, resource-
fulness emphasizes forms of learning and mobi-
lization based upon local priorities and needs as
identified and developed by community activists
MacKinnon and Derickson 263
and residents. In this sense, our conception of
resourcefulness takes the normative desirability
of democratic self-determination as its funda-
mental starting point. The issue of community
influence and control has been explored in the
geographical literature, specifically with respect
to autonomy (Clark, 1984; Lake, 1994). While
some have defined autonomy as an objective
condition in which localities are somehow inde-
pendent of wider social relations, DeFilippis
(2004) usefully argues that autonomy is a rela-
tional concept, which should be understood as a
process, not as a property that an entity might
possess. Following Lake (1994), DeFilippis
(2004: 30) argues that local autonomy is ‘the
ever-contested and never complete ability of
those within the locality to control the institutions
and relationships that define and produce the
locality’.
Third, as we have emphasized, resilience
policy tends to reify different spatial scales such
as the urban and regional as discrete, self-
organizing units, requiring local actors to adapt
to a turbulent external environment which is
taken for granted and naturalized. By contrast,
the concept of resourcefulness is both more
scale-specific in focusing attention on the need
to build capacities at community level, and
outward-looking in emphasizing the need to
foster and maintain relational links across space
(Cumbers et al., 2008). In this sense, we
advocate resourcefulness as part of a progres-
sive and expansive scalar politics that both
addresses local issues and appreciates systemic
challenges. The conception of the local that
underpins resourcefulness is not only spatially
grounded in identifiable local spaces, but also
open and relational in terms of both recognizing
the wider politics of justice that often underpin
local activism and emphasizing the need for
alliances between community groups and
broader social movements (Cumbers et al.,
2008).
Resourcefulness, as we conceive of it, is
better understood as a process, rather than as a
clearly identifiable condition amenable to
empirical measurement or quantification. As a
relational concept, resourcefulness cannot be
understood as something communities possess
to varying degrees. It is the act of fostering
resourcefulness, not measuring it or achieving
it, that should motivate policy and activism.
We identify the following four key elements as
an initial framework, recognizing that additional
research is needed to further elaborate the con-
cept and practice of community resourcefulness.
(1) Resources. While foregrounding the
importance of resources in a conception
of resourcefulness might seem somewhat
tautological, we want to emphasize the
extent to which our conception of resour-
cefulness emphasizes material inequality
and issues of maldistribution. This point
is crucial in distinguishing resourcefulness
from mainstream conceptions of resilience
which take existing social relations for
granted (Swanstrom, 2008). Rather than
functioning as an internal characteristic
of a community, resourcefulness is a mate-
rial property and a relational term that
seeks to problematize the often profound
inequalities in the distribution of resources
by the state that further disadvantage low-
income communities. The resources to
which we refer here include not only orga-
nizing capacity, spare time and social cap-
ital, but also public- and third-sector
resources and investments on a par with
the wealthiest communities.
(2) Skill sets and technical knowledge. Com-
munities with expertise in governmental
procedures, financial and economic
knowledge, basic computing and technol-
ogy are much better positioned to take
nuanced positions on public policy issues,
as well as to propose policies and imagine
feasible alternatives and the concrete steps
necessary to enact those alternatives.
While, like Fischer (2000), we regret the
264 Progress in Human Geography 37(2)
turn towards technocratic public policy-
making and away from a model based
upon the democratic debate of normative
ideals, we argue that resourceful commu-
nities must have at least some technical
knowledge and skill for communicating
that knowledge.
(3) Indigenous and ‘folk’ knowledge. Alter-
native and shared ways of knowing gener-
ated by experiences, practices and
perceptions are important spaces of
knowledge production about the world:
what Escobar (2008) terms ‘alternative
modernities’. Moreover, they can also pro-
duce critical ‘myths’ from which resource-
ful communities may draw. Here,
following Innes (1990), ‘myth’ refers not
to made-up stories, but rather to origin
stories (Haraway, 1991) and explanatory
frameworks that weave together norma-
tive and observational knowledge, and
serve as the guiding framework for shared
visions. For example, a group of commu-
nity activists in the disadvantaged district
of Govan, Glasgow (UK), with whom we
collaborated, mobilized the myth of past
Gaelic Highlander life, and the folk ways
and knowledges that emerged from that
mythology, as a grounding for their alter-
native vision of social relations. There are
a whole number of ways in which this kind
of knowledge could become inward-
looking and nostalgic, but the kinds of folk
knowledge that ultimately cultivate
resourcefulness will necessarily be as
attentive to difference as they are to
commonality.
(4) Recognition. Philosophers of justice and
oppression have emphasized the impor-
tance and value of cultural recognition as
a requisite condition of justice (Taylor,
1994; Young, 1990). Recognition pro-
motes a sense of confidence, self-worth
and self- and community-affirmation that
can be drawn upon to fuel the mobilization
of existing resources and argue for and
pursue new resources. Additionally, rec-
ognition confers group status upon the
community in question on the basis of
common attributes and a shared under-
standing that the community is itself a sub-
ject of rights and a receiving body for state
resources.
A politics of resourcefulness highlights the
material and enduring challenges that margina-
lized communities face in conceiving of and
engaging in the kinds of activism and politics
that are likely to facilitate transformative
change. Unlike resilience policy and activism,
the concept of resourcefulness emphasizes the
challenges that many grassroots endeavours
face in terms of organizational capacity. While
many Marxist-influenced geographers are quick
to point out the need for anti-capitalist endea-
vours to link up (Brenner et al., 2010; Harvey,
1996), they often overlook the very immediate
challenges that organizations and individual
activists face. These include time, access to
knowledge and essential skill sets, and the capa-
cities for organizing and maintaining associated
organizational structures to facilitate the kind of
holistic, ongoing critique that might support
sustained activism, the lack of whi ch many
critical political economists have lamented
(Brenner et al., 2010; Harvey, 1996). In this
sense, a politics of resourcefulness challenges the
conservatism of resilience policy and activism by
attempting to foster the tools and capacities for
communities to carve out the discursive space
and material time that sustained efforts at civic
engagement and activism, as well as more radical
campaigns, require.
None of the four dimensions outlined above
should be seen as sole preserves of resourceful-
ness, operating, instead, as sites of contestation
and struggle between different social forces.
Each is vulnerable to capture and co-option by
powerful political and economic actors such as
the state (Bohm et al., 2010). This is apparent,
MacKinnon and Derickson 265
for instance, in the growing emphasis on public
participation, local institutions and the harnes-
sing of community knowledge within main-
stream conceptions of resilience derived from
ecology (Folke, 2006; Lebel et al., 2006). In
essence, it is the interrelations between the four
dimensions and their yoking to a democratic
politics of self-determination (independent of
the imperative of adaptation to external forces
such as climate change or globalization) that
distinguishes our concept of resourcefulness.
At the same time, the adoption of a relational
approach helps to ensure that a politics of
resourcefulness can transcend the long-
standing tension between autonomous action
and dependence upon the state (Bohm et al.,
2010). As part of an expansive spatial politics,
there is scope for community groups to feed into
broader campaigns and social movements that
seek to challenge neoliberal policy frameworks
at the national and supranational scales (Bren-
ner et al., 2010; Cumbers et al., 2008). By fos-
tering such wider connections, resourceful and
progressive forms of localism (see Featherstone
et al., 2012) can overcome the ‘local trap’ iden-
tified by radical scholars (Purcell, 2006), repre-
senting more than particularisms or ‘mere
irritants’ to the neoliberal capitalist machine
(Brenner et al., 2010; Harvey, 1996).
VII Conclusions
While we have spent the bulk of this article cri-
ticizing the conception of resilience as it has
been deployed by policy-makers, social scien-
tists and progressive campaign groups, we
recognize the motives of these actors in being
drawn towards resilience as a desirable quality
to foster. Having weathered a rapid and unfor-
giving shift in the global political economy and
the associated fracturing of the welfare state and
social democracy over the past 30 years, to be
faced with a new economic and fiscal crisis
since 2008, it is understandable that activists
and policy-makers would be inclined to turn
away from the glare and intensity of globaliza-
tion to consider how they might make them-
selves less vulnerable to future economic and
environmental catastrophe. Nor are we intrinsi-
cally opposed to the integration of social and
ecological perspectives; rather, we emphasize
the need to pay close attention to the terms upon
which such integration takes place (Agder,
2000). Yet, as we have argued, promoting resi-
lience in the face of the urgent crises of climate
change and global recession actually serves to
naturalize the ecologically dominant system of
global capitalism. It is the ‘internal’ workings
of this ‘system’, we contend, that generate dis-
turbance and instability and shape the uneven
ability of communities, cities and regions to
cope with crisis. Our fundamental problem with
the mobilizing discourse of resilience is that it
places the onus squarely on local actors and
communities to further adapt to the logics and
implications of global capitalism and climate
change. This apolitical ecology entails the
subordination and corralling of the social within
the framework of socio-ecological systems.
Convergence of thinking around the notion of
resilience is resulting in the evacuation of the
political as the underlying question of what kind
of communities and social relations we want to
create is masked beneath the imperative of tran-
sition (Swyngedouw, 2007).
This intervention has been prompted by our
particular concern about the adoption of resili-
ence thinking by community activists, opposi-
tional groups and critical social scientists and
geographers, in addition to government agen-
cies, policy-makers and business organizations.
As we have argued, by uncovering its origins,
affiliations and consequences, resilience think-
ing has become implicated within the hegemo-
nic modes of thought that support global
capitalism, providing a further source of natura-
lization through complex systems theory. While
the unsuitability of resilience in the social
sphere is rooted in the underlying ecological
concept, its regressive effects have been greatly
266 Progress in Human Geography 37(2)
accentuated by its entanglement in neoliberal
modes of governance. This makes its adoption
by oppositional groups and critical analysts
deeply problematic. In response, we offer the
alterative concept of resourcefulness as a more
productive means of challenging the hegemony
of neoliberal capitalism. This is designed to
open up debate beyond the closures of resilience
thinking, foregrounding the fundamental ques-
tion of transition ‘to where, and from what’
(Trapese Collective, 2008: 3). Resourcefulness
focuses attention upon the uneven distribution
of resources within and between communities
and maintains an openness to the possibilities
of community self-determination through local
skills and ‘folk’ knowledge. For resourcefulness
to become part of a ‘movement of thought that is
truly counter-systematic’ is, however, depen-
dent upon more than the intellectual abandon-
ment of complex systems theory (Walker and
Cooper, 2011: 157). It also requires the cultiva-
tion of links with community groups and social
movements as part of an expansive spatial poli-
tics that aims to both foster translocal relations
between particular sites and exemplars and
challenge the national and supranational institu-
tions that support the operation of global
capitalism.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Paul Routledge, Gehan MacLeod, Wendy
Larner, Andrew Cumbers, Andy Pike, Robert
McMaster, Dave Featherstone, Kendra Strauss,
Denis Fischbacher-Smith, Katherine Hankins and
Verene Nicolas for conversations around resilience
and resourcefulness and for comments on previous
versions of this paper. As always, we remain
solely responsible for any remaining errors or
misrepresentations.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-
for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. Thanks to Wendy Larner for bringing the work of this
organization to our attention.
2. As such, our purpose is not to examine the geographical
circulation and mutation of resilience policy through a
range of elite networks as per the ‘policy mobilities’ lit-
erature (Peck, 2011), but to assess the ramifications of
this discourse in terms of the framing of local and
regional development.
3. This is not meant to suggest that capitalism is always
the most pressing process or dominant social relation,
and nor is it to suggest that all manner of politics must
be overtly anti-capitalist in order to have potential to
undermine oppressive social relations. In relation to
urban and regional development, however, we maintain
that capitalism is the most powerful set of processes at
work.
4. Our critique follows resilience thinking in moving
between these different scales, reflecting their common
social and ideological construction.
5. The Government Offices for the Regions were abol-
ished by the incoming Coalition Government in 2010
and the roles of the Regional Resilience Teams have
been largely absorbed by Civil Contingencies Secretar-
iat in the Cabinet Office.
6. As Walker and Cooper (2011) argue, Holling’s later
work on adaptive cycles and social-ecological systems
(Holling, 2001) resonates with the writings of Hayek
(1945), whose notion of ‘spontaneous order’ through
market exchange informed a growing engagement with
complexity science and systems theory in his late career.
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