Julien Rebotier

Resilience for the Anthropocene? Shedding light on the forgotten temporalities shaping post-crisis management in the French Sud Ouest

Abstract Building on a set of semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observations conducted in the south-west region of France in the aftermath of two windstorms (‘Martin’ in 1999 and ‘Klaus’ in 2009) and the collapse of the natural gas industry, this paper explores how different temporal dynamics and rhythms interact in the shaping of post-crisis responses in the wider context of the Anthropocene. By so doing, it argues that resilience proponents and critics have articulated a wider biopolitics of speed in which accelerated futures and explicated time have both become the focal temporal realms in which it is possible to (re)think and enact political change. Finally, it is argued that resilience is detracting our attention from important enquiries about temporal relations and processes such as rhythms, which have the capacity to transcend classical rationality and axiology for reimagining what it means to be together, in a different human–non-human nexus that is fit for the Anthropocene.

A fábrica da insegurança entre lenda urbana e gestão (Caracas)

Caracas figura entre as cidades mais perigosas do mundo. Para alem do caso venezuelano, o discurso regional (latino-americano), e mesmo global, sobre inseguranca deve ser territorializado. As contingencias sociais, culturais e politicas na Venezuela, nas ultimas decadas, a atuacao dos governos chavistas e as desigualdades socioespaciais da conflituosa sociedade caraquenha presidem a uma singular construcao da inseguranca urbana como metanarrativa. Neste artigo, destacam-se a dimensao performativa da narrativa de inseguranca, verdadeira lenda urbana em Caracas, e o surgimento de formas inovadoras de governanca local da seguranca - espacos de regulacao que poem em questao os papeis e os estatutos anteriormente assumidos pelos atores urbanos.

La dimensión territorial del riesgo urbano en Caracas: características y alcances. Una propuesta integradora para pensar el riesgo en una realidad socio-espacial compleja

Las mutaciones urbanas contemporaneas, en particular en paises del Sur, hacen del riesgo mucho mas que un mero objeto de estudio. Ademas de una contextualizacion necesaria para poder pensar su construccion en el espacio urbano, segun aspectos materiales e inmateriales, es importante subrayar la dimension causal del riesgo urbano en la construccion del espacio urbano. Los enfoques sectoriales y tecnicos de estudio de riesgo no permiten abarcar ampliamente dicha complejidad. Afianzar la construccion territorial y construccion de riesgos en una combinacion sistemica ayuda a explorar las relaciones complejas entre territorios y riesgos urbanos. El analisis de un “contexto geografico” dentro del cual se articulan situaciones de riesgo entonces historizadas, en calidad de “momentos geograficos”, favorece la comprension de las condiciones de construccion de los riesgos. Estudiar la dimension territorial del riesgo urbano en Caracas permite fundamentar y articular en un trabajo de campo diferentes influencias epistemologicas mediante la asociacion de enfoques territoriales y de una postura constructivista y eminentemente social. Los territorios de riesgo urbano son la traduccion geografica de un orden social a traves de una categoria unanime y poco cuestionable: el riesgo urbano. Uno no se limita a un estudio local circunscrito en el espacio, sino que se puede valer de una lectura geopolitica, muy reveladora del orden socio-espacial que caracteriza el contexto urbano. Elaborar una metodologia de reflexion a proposito del riesgo partiendo de los retos planteados por la realidad socio-ambiental urbana es una manera de cuestionar las ciencias sociales, su epistemologia y su practica, afirmandose la vocacion critica de dichas ciencias.

The Limits of Understanding Disasters

We come back, therefore, to the databases, the essential components of research efforts. Indeed, they make up the foundations of the knowledge that we can have about disaster risk. The expression of the database, as such, also suggests that they play a fundamental role in analyzing problems, which are here linked to the development of disasters and the associated damage. The very principle of the databases is by no means called into question as much by academic institutions as by managers involved in disaster prevention. A forum was held in Antalya in February 2015, which brought together several international institutions directly involved in disaster prevention, such as the World Meteorological Organization, the World Bank and the International Red Cross, besides several dozen researchers from more than 30 countries involved in international research programs on the same question. The Antalya Forum prepared, among other things, for the Sendai congress of March 2015, in order to review the principal framework for international action dedicated to disaster prevention. Yet, the first recommendation resulting from a week of collective reflection in Antalya, and whose concluding statement suggested six initiatives for action, displays the necessity of using a new database. Accessible by a portal, they rest on postdisaster returns on experience and on what we can learn from them.

Bridging the Gap between Disaster Prevention and Environmental Concerns

The paradox of disaster prevention policies results from numerous elements: limits linked to measurement, conceptual frameworks, analytical capacity to access knowledge, multifaceted conditioning of this knowledge and other similar factors. Furthermore, the intensification of risk concern and the proliferation of management initiatives are inseparable from an environmental issue which indeed proved to be a social issue in the second half of the 20th Century. The context of such concerns makes the social and political conditioning easier to understand in various situations. Those conditionings affect the production of knowledge around risks and also the development of policies to prevent them.

The Limits of Disaster Prevention: Returns on Management Experiences

Researchers are confronted with problems posed by the definitions and models that they use to give as much coherence and usefulness as possible to the prevention of disaster risk. However, for their part, the managers and the political decision-makers, who use the same definitions, eventually recognize the limits of actions decided in order to anticipate future damages and to reduce their intensity as much as possible. The emphasis put on limits of management equally justifies the interrogation that underlies this book. It can also receive feedback in the research and reflections on political actions. According to Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, “policy is created inasmuch as it reflects, where people make policy thinking about (and because they think) what they are doing”. The philosopher concludes that “an essential function of political activity (…) consists exactly of confronting fragility, living with it, and not by controlling it by exceeding or abolishing it”. Indeed, multiple post-disaster feedbacks, such as reflections on reconstruction, confirm on their own the impossibility of finding a fully satisfying solution (and for whom?) to the problems that disaster prevention poses. These interrogations of the limits of prevention policies are exposed at the worldwide scale. We follow this with two studies that are more specific: one about the identification of dike risk, and the other on the analysis of prevention policies carried out in Ecuador. These will show that the problems that the disaster prevention policies pose are clearly identifiable whatever the differences between the land occupations implied, as well as the scale of the analysis or the institutions and even the local actors who are involved.

The Contributions to Disaster Prevention are Difficult to Assess

Reports officially presenting disasters and their development are surprising in their overwhelmingly dominant pessimism. Indeed, there is no lack of evidence attesting that prevention policies do their job, even if they encounter numerous limits. In this second chapter, as a counterpoint to the first chapter, we will present arguments that put the pessimistic, but dominant, messages regarding prevention policies in perspective and add nuance. In the first place, not all of the statistical databases on disasters show an increase in frequency or even an increase in the average intensity of the associated damages (2.1).

The Rise in Knowledge and Policies Suggest an Increase in Disasters

It may seem entirely paradoxical that we have more and more knowledge about disasters, more prevention policies and more institutions dedicated to the latter, and yet the number of disasters and the associated damage is statistically increasing, at least in certain categories. The opposite can be true in some cases: according to the database of the association International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (ITOPF), the frequency of major disasters associated with accidental maritime pollution and international transportation of hydrocarbons is falling. Despite these counterexamples, which we will return to, it has become more common for the bibliography to envision disaster prevention along with research on solutions to the different types of damage, which are increasing and that could even get worse in the future if they are not fundamentally better understood and managed. This is very clearly the message that is being carried by researchers and the policies concerning adaptation to climate change. For Alcoforado and Andrade, “having a better understanding of the role that urban areas play in global warming is urgent for us to combat the negative consequences of global warming and take the necessary measures to reduce its consequences or to adapt to new climactic conditions”. According to Downton, “we need towns to live, and yet they are killing us”. Such a diagnosis requires that we transform towns into “engines of survival” by developing “new types of urban ecosystems and significantly transforming our way of life in a substantial and systemic manner”. The types of adaptation to climate change, and especially their wide acceptance by social actors, are a part of the disaster prevention process. These authors, among many others, presume that if the implementation of policies for adaptation continues to encounter such large obstacles, we must expect the increase in damages associated with hydro-climatic disasters in the decades to come.

The Principle of Cognitive Limits: Its Application to Disaster Prevention

Initial light may be shed by the Discourse on Method. It establishes several principles, some of which allow us to justify why defining the notion of risk, even today, involves fragmentation into several sub-notions. For risks, it is mainly a question of hazard, exposition and vulnerability. The approach is thereby systematic.

How Can We Best Manage Disasters

Extrapolating this question further, we may ask whether it is possible to make a practical contribution to the prevention of disasters all the while taking into account the multiple and often structural conditionings that weigh on policies to do so. It has already been asked by several researchers working in conjunction with managers and policy makers. That is why we begin this chapter by addressing the practical component of the answer, which tends to have its roots in knowledge management systems. These systems (knowledge management systems, or KMS) are support tools for the assessment of disaster prevention policies, as well as decisionmaking support tools. However, they remain highly contested. Despite the continued progress in this field, they are only able to partially integrate knowledge from local players, such as citizens or households, who are likely to often challenge disaster prevention policies, as they are perceived as coming from above (“top down”). As such, local players in fact denounce part of the conditionings that frame those policies.