Promising resilience: Systems and survival after forestry's ends

Abstract

AbstractEcologists, social scientists, and policymakers alike define “resilience” as the properties that allow complex systems to function in the wake of sudden shocks. While proponents treat these properties as empirical qualities that can be engineered into existence, critics have largely treated government‐organized attempts to do so as consistent with the dismantling of the welfare state. This article offers an ethnographic account of a conservation policy initiative in northwest British Columbia designed to generate consensus‐based quantitative indicators on salmon health. I examine how workshop organizers, emboldened by provocative metaphors of survival and systematicity, mobilize resilience discourse as a platform for social analysis, and urge other researchers to envision how their own work might allow them to transcend institutional attachments altogether. Resilience‐based initiatives have wrought profound changes in experts’ everyday lives, in part by encouraging precariously employed researchers to reimagine their relationships to shrinking government institutions. In addition to naming an emergent political logic for legitimating downsizing and other organizational responses to disasters, I argue that resilience discourse provides the experts entrusted with designing these responses with new grammars for imagining the future viability of their own expertise.