Abstract
Resilience thinking has undergone profound theoretical developments in recent decades, moving to characterize resilience as a socio-natural process that requires constant negotiation between a range of actors and institutions. Fundamental to this understanding has been a growing acknowledgment of the role of power in shaping resilience capacities and politics across cultural and geographic contexts. This review article draws on a critical content analysis, applied to a systematic review of recent resilience literature to examine how scholarship has embraced nuanced conceptualizations of how power operates in resilience efforts, to move away from framings that risk reinforcing patterns of marginalization. Advancing a framework inspired by feminist theory and feminist political ecology, we analyze how recent work has presented, documented, and conceptualized how resilience intersects with patterns of inequity. In doing so, we illuminate the importance of knowledge, scale, and subject making in understanding the complex ways in which power and resilience become interlinked. We illustrate how overlooking such complexity may have serious consequences for how socio-natural challenges and solutions are framed in resilience scholarship and, in turn, how resilience is planned and enacted in practice. Finally, we highlight how recent scholarship is advancing the understandings necessary to make sense of the shifting, contested, and power-laden nature of resilience. Paying attention to, and building on, such complexity will allow scholarly work to illuminate the ways in which resilience is negotiated within inequitable processes and to address the marginalization of those continuing to bear the brunt of the climate crisis.
RAS ID
43314
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
5-1-2022
Volume
13
Issue
3
Funding Information
Swedish Research Council. Grant Number: 2018-05866 / The University of Western Australia (UWA) Research Collaboration Award (RCA) / The Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Research Development Fund (RDF)
School
School of Arts and Humanities
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Publisher
Wiley
Comments
Garcia, A., Gonda, N., Atkins, E., Godden, N. J., Henrique, K. P., Parsons, M., ... & Ziervogel, G. (2022). Power in resilience and resilience's power in climate change scholarship. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 13(3), e762. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.762