The Social Life of Resilience: From Techno-Politics to Socio-Environmental Justice
The Social Life of Resilience: From Techno-Politics to Socio-Environmental Justice

Summary/Abstract: The discourse of resilience is typically imposed in a top-down manner by powerful actors such as states and development agencies. Critics of this use of the discourse have pointed out that the implementation of policies aimed at increasing resilience can be overly technocratic and expert-driven, infused with neoliberal values, and shifts the risk of dealing with climate change to vulnerable populations. While acknowledging these critiques, in this paper I ask how various actors, especially those who lack the power to impose it on others, deploy the concept of resilience to fight for their aims. I focus on the question of resilience in the domain of flood risk in Belgrade, Serbia, in which concerns around overdevelopment and environmental destruction find their expression. I examine how resilience becomes a part of a constellation of terms (including climate change, green infrastructure, investors’ urbanism, etc.) whose importance can be amplified as they move back and forth between the worlds of engaged scholarship and of the lay audience. Instead of being a part of an “anti-politics machine” apparatus, resilience can be a tool that non-state actors can use to (re-)politicize urban planning and make it more sensitive to questions of social and environmental justice.

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