Resilience and Responsibilities

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that climate change requires both mitigation actions to reduce climate change and adaptation measures to cope with the effects of climate change, such as increased droughts, heat waves, heavy rainfall, and flooding among others. In recent years, resilience has emerged as one of the leading paradigms for climate adaptation policy. After a first wave of enthusiasm in the literature, resilience is increasingly becoming a contested concept. Not only does the concept lack clarity due to theoretical inconsistencies and ambiguity in its use but definitions of resilience also uniformly portray urban resilience as a desirable goal, which is problematized by research that questions the distribution of benefits and burdens under different resilience regimes. A growing number of scholars now recognize that, for climate adaptation to draw on and benefit in practical ways from a resilience approach, the appropriation and use of resilience to justify policy measures should be critically scrutinized, as it contains particular normative choices that are often not made explicit. Although it is often said that resilience involves new responsibility arrangements between state and local actors, with an increasing emphasis on the responsibilities of citizens, the literature on urban resilience has hitherto devoted limited attention to the responsibilities that citizens are expected to assume under different resilience regimes. A more prominent role for citizens cannot be a simple substitute for responsive and accountable governance. The aim of this chapter is to develop a normative notion of resilience that can account for the responsibilities of different actors in realizing resilience.