Resilience

Coping capacity built up and passed on by a society that expects catastrophe. In the disaster literature it is a description of adaptation, not a compliment: repeated exposure to typhoons, earthquakes, floods and eruptions produces practices, arrangements and expectations that a low-hazard society never develops.

The reason the word needs care is that it moved from scholarship into public relations. In its scholarly form it describes what people do. In its public form it often describes what a state did not do. Both usages exist in Philippine speech, frequently in the same sentence, which is why this course keeps the critique attached to the term rather than in a separate box.

Source: Greg Bankoff (2003), Cultures of Disaster: Society and Natural Hazard in the Philippines, RoutledgeCurzon, which argues that repeated hazard exposure produced genuine transmissible coping capacity and that Western disaster management discourse undervalues local coping mechanisms. Bankoff also ties vulnerability to political, social and economic marginalisation rather than to nature, which is the root of the critique. Paid; chapters circulate on Academia.edu.

First used in: 2.6 · What is actually strong here