Resilience is not enough

Resilience is more than a buzzword: it is a normative good to which civil society groups and regional governments aspire. In this brief piece, I argue that ‘resilience’ as an end in and for itself is an uninspiring political vision that fetishizes the status quo and is not suited to the emancipatory social change desired by groups that have employed the term. Following Braun (2014, “A New Urban Dispositif? Governing Life in an Age of Climate Change.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32: 49–64) in suggesting that resilience has become a ‘dispositif of government,’ I propose ‘resourcefulness’ as the political posture that hold more promise than resilience or anti-resilience.