Negotiated resilience

Resilience thinking has been roundly critiqued for not accounting for the political – and inherently power-laden – structures that shape decision-making. In the light of the range of critiques as well as the increasing global momentum around resilience thinking, this paper develops the concept of ‘Negotiated Resilience’. The concept highlights processes of negotiation to situate, ground and operationalise ‘resilience’. The concept puts particular accent on the procedural orientation of resilience – it is not something that ‘exists’ and that we can uniformly define, rather it is a process that requires engagement with diverse actors and interests, both in specific places and across scales. Negotiation also inevitably entails contestation and an ongoing consideration of diverse options and trade-offs. We suggest that when considering the inherent complexities of resilience, we would do better to explicitly theorise, analyse and speak to these negotiations.