Approaches to Climate Resilience

Climate resilience is an ill-defined and contested concept, leaving it prone to co-optation into discourses that serve widely divergent interests, actors, and contexts. This chapter develops a framework for analyzing and categorizing existing climate resilience discourses, based upon their underlying conceptualizations of resilience, primary referent object/s, and main institutional proponents. This is used to map the various articulations of climate resilience across four key areas of scholarship and practice: climate security, sustainable development, climate change-induced migration, and urban climate resilience. It is demonstrated that five basic discourses of climate resilience cut across most of these areas. These are neoliberal resilience, which inculcates vulnerable subjects to be resilient in the face of climatic risks; reactive resilience, which construes resilience as a means to return to the status quo ante following climatic disruption; security-based resilience, which depicts resilience as a strategy to secure valued referents ranging from vulnerable communities to the global economic and states system; ecological resilience, which is fundamentally concerned with preserving underlying ecosystem functions in the face of climatic disruption; and transformational resilience, which seeks to change underlying socioecological systems in order to alleviate vulnerability. Although in reality discourses are more fluid and hybrid than these categories suggest, they help to clarify the key ways in which climate risks and vulnerability are understood and how resilience discourse shapes contemporary debates about, and responses to, global environmental change.