Thinking the African Food Crisis - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 787

oftheWorldBankandUNHABITATinsuchdiversearenasassustainableurbanism,
ecosystemservices,andclimateadaptationandmitigation(LentzosandRose2009).
Resiliency, in short, is the form of governmentality appropriate to any form of pertur-
bation and uncertainty: dealing with extreme weather events in not merely analogous
to coping with recurrent financial shocks. By integrating prior work on vulnerability
and poverty, with current concerns with participation and empowerment at the com-
munity level, resiliency provides a powerful systematic, interdisciplinary, and pragmatic
approach.AsBénéet al.(2012,11) putit: “heconceptofresilienceisthusbecominga
form of integrating discourse that rallies an increasing number of people, institutions,
and organisations under its banner, as it creates communication bridges and platforms
between disciplines and communities of practices, and offers common grounds on
which dialogue can then be initiated between organisations, departments or ministries
which had so far very little, or no history of collaboration.”
The notion of adaptive capacity and resilient institutions through community orga-
nizationdoes,ofcourse,restonasubstantialbodyofresearchdemonstratinghowrural
communitiesinAfrica(andelsewhere)adapttoclimatechangethroughmobility,stor-
age, diversification, communal pooling, and exchange by drawing on social networks
andtheiraccesstoresources.Yetwhatisonoferinsteadisablandandbloodlessshop-
ping list of “conditions” for adaptive governance, including “policy will,” “coordination
of stakeholders,” “science,” “common goals,” and “creativity,” all held together by social
riskmanagement.How,forexample,resiliencywillbebuilt—totaketheconclusions
oftherecentSahelreport(Gubbels2011)—fromandwithinstatefragilityandconlict,
corruption, class power, land and asset inequality, and asymmetric state capabilities
is entirely unclear. Perhaps most drastic is the failure of resiliency theory to propose
an account of power and human agency. What is on offer is a particular view of indi-
viduals—peasant, pastoralist, woman—as autonomous agents who have the power
to negotiate their own lives with the unproblematic arena of “the community.” Power,
self-determination, and democracy fit very uneasily with the dynamics of living systems
drawnfrom“non-equilibriumecosystems”(Duitet al2010).
At the time that Holling was laying out his first ideas (and in the midst of the
SahelianfamineinAfricaasithappened),FriedrichHayekdeliveredhisNobelPrize
speech,which,asM.CooperandJ. Walker(2011)brilliantlyshow,hasanelective
ainitywithHolling'sideas.Hayekwasmovingtowardhismaturetheorizationof
capitalism as an exemplar of the biological sciences: the extended market order is
“perfectly natural . . . like biological phenomena, evolved in the course of natural
selection”(Hayek1988,citedinCooperandWalker2011).Intheresiliencyparadigm,
ecosystem-based enterprises, rooted in community resource management, will
entail local-state and private-civic partnerships and enterprise networking. Markets
in ecosystem services, and delegation of responsibility to communities and house-
holdsasself-organizingproductiveunits,willconstitutethebasisforsurvivalinbio-
physical, political, economic, and financial worlds defined by turbulence, risk, and
unpredictability. Some will be resilient, but others will be too resilient or not resilient
enough.