Positive failures: rethinking the legacy of resilience interventions

Context

A burgeoning literature has focussed attention on maladaptation in which strategies deployed lead to unintended consequences that worsen existing conditions. Elsewhere, literature has focused on the conditions under which communities resist interventions, blocking planned adaptation or resilience building actions. In each case, interventions are perceived by their proponents as a failure. However, our experience suggests that apparent failure masks a more complex story in which material, knowledge and/or relational assets remain in communities, subsequently deployed to better meet the aspirations of some or all people locally.

Aims and Objectives

We will plan to investigate communities with histories of marginalisation and deligitimisation, asking how, when and why they deploy their own agency in redirecting resilience agendas to better align with their interests and priorities. Our goal is to explore the legacy of projects through a novel analytical framework that centres on local knowledge politics, identifying which aspects of projects persist, under what circumstances, and for the benefit of whom.

To do this, we will bring together our understanding of the contexts in which adaptation and resilience play out and build on our shared analytical interests in bricolage processes and political capability. While this approach identifies a new direction for adaptation research, it is also consequential for resilience planning as it rethinks how the benefits and value of projects can be understood (what resources are communities able to draw on to effect future change?), and recentres the agency of local actors and community-level political capability as the starting point for resilience planning (how can project interventions support local actors and institutions to effect equitable and informed changes?).

We aim to produce a perspective article, to be submitted to Nature Climate Change, arguing that despite progress in acknowledging the politics of adaptation and resilience and the reality of maladaptation, the real life and legacy of such projects remains hidden, to the detriment of our understanding of the types of value that projects can and should bring to communities at the frontline of climate change. This will form the basis of a funding proposal, to be submitted to a suitable targeted call or the ESRC's responsive mode. Detailed outline drafting of these outputs will be completed during the Fellow's visit to York.