"Organizing Community Resilience: An examination of the forms of sociality promoted in community resilience programmes"

Communities are quickly becoming a principle strategic target for contemporary resilience programmes.  Community resilience programmes are premised on the recognition that the capacity to withstand, adapt to, and recover from adversity is enhanced by strong community relations.  Going beyond community preparedness campaigns, which aimed to responsibilize individual citizens to their dangers, community resilience programmes aim to intervene in, and enhance, the social relations binding a community together in order to promote resilience.  The benefits of resilience for communities, it is claimed, go beyond emergency preparedness and recovery, promising to enhance development, sustainability and equality.  This chapter examines the forms of sociality valued and promoted within the discourses and practices of community resilience programmes.  It begins by tracing a history of ‘community’ as a specific object of governance which came to replace the ‘social’ within a wide range of governmental programmes in the 1980s.  Next, we will turn to examine a number of resilience programmes being introduced across the United States, questioning in particular the understanding of community they operate with, the kinds of relations they promote, and the forms of resilience they enact.  A final section will then consider how community resilience initiatives may both reinforce and challenge neoliberal enframings of resilience and their focus on individual preparedness.

Dr. Chris Zebrowski is a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Loughborough University, UK and assistant editor of the journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses. His research has investigated  the emergence of resilience discourses and their implications for the rationalities and practices of emergency governance.  His book, The Value of Resilience: Securing Life in the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2016 in Routledge’s ‘Interventions’ series.