Is there a dark side of resilience?

This book chapter, ‘Developing Resilience: A Retreat from Grand Planning’, examines the rise of resilience thinking in international development. It links the resilience concept to changing ideas of capacity and argues that the entwined concepts of resilience and capacity increasingly frame the ways Western donors address societal fragility in the Global South.

The article argues that the use of the concept of resilience in international development is characterised by pragmatism and a retreat from grand planning as a response to a crisis in how fragility is handled. Increasingly, Western donors take on the role of facilitators while actual responsibility for implementation is put on local partners and the recipient state. The question is whether there may perhaps be a darker side to the popular and desirable concepts of local ownership, bottom-up approaches and south-south cooperation: a wish in the Western donor camp to disengage and evade responsibility?

While using international development as its case, the perspective and general observations of the articles analysis should be applicable in a range of other contexts as were the concept of resilience is applied to frame a governance modality.

The Routledge Handbook of International Resilience
Resilience is increasingly discussed as a key concept across many fields of international policymaking from sustainable development and climate change, insecurity, conflict and terrorism to urban and rural planning, international aid provision and the prevention of and responses to natural and man-made disasters.

Edited by leading academic authorities from a number of disciplines, this is the first handbook to deal with resilience as a new conceptual approach to understanding and addressing a range of interdependent global challenges.