The hollow politics of resilience: the case of flood governance in England

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with what it means to govern through resilience, with emphasis on flood governance. Resilience has become a pervasive idiom of global governance and has grown in popularity over the last decade in UK policy making. It is increasingly seen as a policy ideal, a benign attribute whose fostering appears appropriate for dealing with many contemporary predicaments. While many academic contributions agree that resilience is a policy ideal that needs fostering, others regard it as politically problematic. Resilience is said to represent a neoliberal strategy that seeks to responsibilise individuals, away from state-centred forms of protection. However, I contend that these contributions, while welcome, are general interpretations of the meaning and uses of resilience, derived mostly from official documents and rhetoric. This thesis makes a contribution to knowledge by analysing a full length policy initiative centred on resilience, from policy design to implementation. As resilience gradually moves from high-level official rhetoric to actual policy, there is a need for critical investigations to shift from theoretical pronouncements of what resilience ‘is’, to what it ‘does’, or fails to do in practice. I argue that, in practice, the implementation of resilience is characterised by failure points and breakdowns, which signify severe disconnects between the goals of the policy and its mechanisms for implementation. These failure points challenge the substantiality of the argument that resilience is a form of neoliberal strategy. In fact, the findings of the research suggest that if resilience is to be produced at all on the ground, it requires substantial orchestration ‘from above’, by ongoing authority. Overall, I argue that the content of resilience policies is vacuous, and if resilience is to be transformed in more productive directions, the work needs to begin with an acknowledgement that resilience policies present themselves as a hollow shell.

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ORCID for David Owen: orcid.org/0000-0002-8865-6332

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