The papers in this special issue have been selected from past issues of the Journal, dating from 2000 to 2010, on the subject of resilience. The theme of resilience was chosen as one of the sub-themes of the EADI-DSA conference in September 2011 on 'Rethinking Development in an Age of Scarcity and Uncertainty: New Values, Voices and Alliances for Increased Resilience'. In particular, this sub-theme carries a close connection with the dominant conference themes of scarcity and uncertainty. Moreover, all three themes need to be conceived as relative concepts within the context of contemporary capitalism – that is, they are relative to the constant systemic creation and reproduction of scarcity and uncertainty within capitalist systems, in the face of which understandings and forms of resilience need to be similarly contextualised.

In approaching our survey of articles that directly, we identified four broad approaches to interpreting and analysing resilience.

1. The dominant approach to resilience within the Development Studies literature deals with the adaptations of individuals and groups to rapid change and especially adversity. These cover shocks and crises, such as famines, 'natural' disasters, environmental change and resource pressures and their impact on, for example, levels of poverty, ill-health and access to resources. These discussions of resilience are closely related to the literature on vulnerability, whereby resilience is considered to be inversely related to vulnerability, or understood as a crucial attribute in the ability of people to deal with vulnerability.
2. The second approach represents a subaltern variant on this perspective and is common in much of the post-development literature. These studies explore how individuals and groups adapt to and resist development interventions that are perceived to be disadvantageous through, for example, social movements and political action. However, there were few articles with this focus in issues of JiD in the past decade, which is perhaps suggestive of the need for more work that addresses resilience from a subaltern perspective.
3. The third and fourth approaches take more systemic viewpoints. The third focuses on the ability of political and institutional systems to withstand conflict. Although work taking this perspective does not tend to explicitly refer to the standard resilience literature mentioned above, we feel that there is much benefit to be drawn by making a link between these two literatures.
4. Finally, there are discussions that turn the tables on standard approaches to resilience by examining this theme with respect to the resilience of systems of wealth and power, rather than of the poor, weak and vulnerable. We feel that this last focus is particularly important to examine at a time when many have been predicting the collapse of an extremely inequitable neoliberal global economic system and, yet, in the face of crisis, this system demonstrates a remarkable resilience to renew itself and to maintain powerful interests. Within Development Studies there has always been an overwhelming focus on the poor and vulnerable with much less attention paid to the ways in which capital is accumulated and how the powerful maintain positions of authority. We include some of these articles here in order to highlight the necessity for Development Studies to engage with such critical understandings of resilience and to do justice to the idea of holism by moving beyond trying to understand poverty by simply studying the poor and instead gaining a more thorough understanding of the creation and reproduction of inequality through an exploration of the rich and the systemic.

Read the full issue

Read the introduction by Andrew Fischer and Uma Kothari