Genealogies of Resilience: From Conservation to Disaster Adaptation

The concept of ‘resilience’ was first adopted within systems ecology in the 1970s, where it marked a move away from the homeostasis of Cold War resource management towards the far-from-equilibrium models of second-order cybernetics (or complex systems theory). Resilience as an operational strategy of risk management has more recently been taken up in financial, urban, and environmental security discourses, where it reflects a general consensus about the necessity of adaptation through endogenous crisis. The generalisation of complex systems theory as a methodology of power has ambivalent sources. While, on the one hand, the redefinition of the concept can be directly traced to the work of the ecologist Crawford S. Holling, on the other hand, the deployment of complex systems theory is perfectly in accord with the later philosophy of the Austrian neoliberal Friedrich Hayek. This ambivalence is reflected in the trajectory of resilience theory itself, from the ecological critique of orthodox fossil-fuelled growth economics to a methodology of power deployed in its service, in a time of planetary heating and ecosystem collapse in which all long-term expectations of equilibrium have been abandoned.