An unsquareable circle? Resilience and sustainable development with reference to English coastal policy

FCERM (Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management) policy for England has moved from a focus of defence in favour of ‘resilience’ as the conceptual frame through which prescription and activity might be understood. Whilst the use of resilience in this context is not new, the nature and extent of its use in extant policy marks a significant shift and a problematic one given that under current arrangements the most vulnerable coastal dwellers can expect to lose their homes to the sea, uncompensated, in areas that government chooses not to defend.

This paper will interrogate resilience as a concept and consider difficulties with its application in this context. Both proponents and critics have identified its potential for co-option by – or at least alignment with – a neo-liberal discourse likely to attract criticism. This places a particular onus on policy makers to use it with the clarity they argue is so important, although this paper will argue that their efforts have resulted in the opposite. For example, it is not hard to identify in speeches and policy statements concerning resilience an ideological orientation that bends toward neoliberalism in expressing a preference for a shrinking state, self reliance and the individualisation of risk. However, it is similarly straightforward to identify a strand of communitarianism in stated enthusiasms for continued state provision and shared risk. Analysis predicated upon resilience leads us into a conceptual hall of mirrors: risk is owned by the individual, except when it isn’t; the public purse can’t be relied on to protect people, except when it can; protection is distinct from resilience but is also an example of it. At various times we might identify the policy deployment of resilience as fitting contradictory conceptual renderings, then, with coastal dwellers facing wildly different outcomes.

Resilience as employed in this way is an inadequate reference point for purposes of deliberation and action, further undermined by the subtle deflection of critical attention away from the principles of sustainable development as enshrined in the UN SDGs which challenge signatories to tackle inequalities within as well as between countries and specify coastal areas as deserving of particular attention.

Only a reworked and more coherent conceptualisation of resilience, stripped of its association with uncompensated loss for a vulnerable minority, can make possible an FCERM strategy that is in step with the UN SDGs.