We live in a time where environmental pressures, social inequities and political derision are the backdrop of everyday life, and where resilience has become a routine prescription for coping with the conditions of modern existence. Drawing an analogy to Harvey Molotch's urban growth machine, this book explores different narratives of resilience and their policy and practice manifestations for cities, citizens and communities. It expands on the metaphor of the machine to show how resilience can be better understood as an assemblage. Bringing together authors from multiple disciplines and different parts of the world, the book unmasks the often invisible effects of resilience strategies by examining ways in which neoliberal mentalities are fed through the rhetoric of resilience practices, policies and development projects. The contributing essays provide provocative accounts of several areas of inquiry, including biopolitics and smart bodies, resilient cities and communities, urban planning and disaster management, justice and vulnerability, and resistance to resilience. Holding out hope for critical potentials in 'resilience, ' The Resilience Machine proposes to move beyond mechanisms of adaptation and into imagining what resilient life could look like in a more just, equitable and democratic world. The Resilience Machine is a current, vital addition to resilience, community and urban scholarship.

We live in a time where environmental pressures, social inequities and political derision are the backdrop of everyday life, and where resilience has become a routine prescription for coping with the conditions of modern existence. Drawing an analogy to Harvey Molotch’s urban growth machine, this book explores different narratives of resilience and their policy and practice manifestations for cities, citizens and communities. It expands on the metaphor of the machine to show how resilience can be better understood as an assemblage. Bringing together authors from multiple disciplines and different parts of the world, the book unmasks the often invisible effects of resilience strategies by examining ways in which neoliberal mentalities are fed through the rhetoric of resilience practices, policies and development projects. The contributing essays provide provocative accounts of several areas of inquiry, including biopolitics and smart bodies, resilient cities and communities, urban planning and disaster management, justice and vulnerability, and resistance to resilience. Holding out hope for critical potentials in ‘resilience,’ The Resilience Machine proposes to move beyond mechanisms of adaptation and into imagining what resilient life could look like in a more just, equitable and democratic world. The Resilience Machine is a current, vital addition to resilience, community and urban scholarship.

This Special Issue contributes to the debate on land grabbing as commons grabbing with a special focus on how the development of state institutions (formal laws and regulations for agrarian development and compensations) and voluntary corporate social responsibility (CRS) initiatives have enabled the grabbing process. It also looks at how these institutions and CSR programs are used as development strategies of states and companies to legitimate their investments. This Special Issue includes case studies from Kenya, Morocco, Tanzania, Cambodia, Bolivia and Ecuador analysing how these strategies are embedded into neo-liberal ideologies of economic development. We propose looking at James Ferguson’s notion of the Anti-Politics Machine (1990) that served to uncover the hidden political basis of state-driven development strategies. We think it is of interest to test the approach for analysing development discourses and CSR-policies in agrarian investments. We argue based on a New Institutional Political Ecology (NIPE) approach that these legitimize the institutional change from common to state and private property of land and land related common pool resources which is the basis of commons grabbing that also grabbed the capacity for resilience of local people.

We live in a time where environmental pressures, social inequities and political derision are the backdrop of everyday life, and where resilience has become a routine prescription for coping with the conditions of modern existence. Drawing an analogy to Harvey Molotch's urban growth machine, this book explores different narratives of resilience and their policy and practice manifestations for cities, citizens and communities. It expands on the metaphor of the machine to show how resilience can be better understood as an assemblage. Bringing together authors from multiple disciplines and different parts of the world, the book unmasks the often invisible effects of resilience strategies by examining ways in which neoliberal mentalities are fed through the rhetoric of resilience practices, policies and development projects. The contributing essays provide provocative accounts of several areas of inquiry, including biopolitics and smart bodies, resilient cities and communities, urban planning and disaster management, justice and vulnerability, and resistance to resilience. Holding out hope for critical potentials in 'resilience, ' The Resilience Machine proposes to move beyond mechanisms of adaptation and into imagining what resilient life could look like in a more just, equitable and democratic world. The Resilience Machine is a current, vital addition to resilience, community and urban scholarship.

This book comprehensively conceptualises disaster resilience leadership within the macro context of a risk society. Leadership for disaster resilience has gained prominence in the face of global environmental change, and the need for collaboration, integration, and synergy in addressing this crisis is starker than ever. Drawing on case studies from across India, the volume focuses on leaderships of individuals, bureaucratic and political actors, civil society actors, and institutions. It looks at the ways in which disaster resilience leadership can address key challenges through the application of such theoretical perspectives as integrative public leadership, critical new institutionalism, and comparative realisation focused approaches to social justice. It highlights current leadership practices and envisages sustainable solutions to the environmental crisis by emphasising the need for disaster resilience leadership that could bring about systemic and socio-structural change. Presenting fresh perspectives on leadership research, the book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of disaster management, social work, management studies, development studies, environmental studies, and public policy. It will also be useful for NGOs and professionals working in the public sector and with civil society bodies.

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.