Resisting resilience? Negotiating responsibility, counter conduct and agency in participatory risk management

This paper examines how resilience is negotiated, contested and reworked within participatory flood risk management. Drawing on five years of longitudinal qualitative research conducted between 2018 and 2023 with three Flood Action Groups in northern England, the study uses participant observation, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis to investigate how communities experience and respond to resilience agendas. The research follows more than 35 meetings, 17 interviews with flood action group members, facilitators and flood risk professionals, and analysis of policy and organizational documents to explore how resilience governance is interpreted in everyday practice.

Authors find that resilience is not a coherent project of responsibilization but a contested socio-political terrain in which communities actively resist, negotiate and reinterpret adaptive expectations. Participants frequently challenged ideas of “living with water”, resilient citizenship and the transfer of responsibility from institutions to communities. The author develops a typology of resistance comprising emotional, symbolic, discursive, collective and procedural forms of contestation. The paper concludes that resilience is experienced as a negotiated political relationship and that adaptation governance is continually constituted, contested and transformed through everyday practices of resistance and engagement.