Resilience The Governance of Complexity [Paperback]

Resilience has become a central concept in government policy understandings over the last decade. In our complex, global and interconnected world, resilience appears to be the policy buzzword of choice, alleged to be the solution to a wide and ever-growing range of policy issues. This book analyses the key aspects of resilience-thinking and highlights how resilience impacts upon traditional conceptions of governance.

This concise and accessible book investigates how resilience-thinking adds new insights into how politics (both domestically and internationally) is understood to work and how problems are perceived and addressed; from educational training in schools to global ethics and from responses to shock events and natural disasters to long-term international policies to promote peace and development. This book also raises searching questions about how resilience-thinking influences the types of knowledge and understanding we value and challenges traditional conceptions of social and political processes.

It sets forward a new and clear conceptualisation of resilience, of use to students, academics and policy-makers, emphasising the links between the rise of resilience and awareness of the complex nature of problems and policy-making.

1. Introduction: The Rise of Resilience, Part One: Thematics2. Governing Complexity 3. Resilience: Putting Life to Work Part Two: Resilience and the International 4. The Politics of Limits: The Rise of Complexity in Peacebuilding, 5. The Everyday Policy Solution: Culture, from Limit to Resource 6. A New Global Ethic: The Transformative Power of the Embedded Subject Part Three: The Politics of Resilience 7.Revealing the Public: The Reality of the Event and the Banality of Evil 8. The Democracy of Participation 9. The Poverty of Post-Humanism 10. Conclusion: Resilience, the Promise of l³4