On the possibility of ‘Just Resilience’: A pragmatist approach to justice-based climate change governance

Abstract

Scholars have afforded much attention to environmental justice issues amid the recent global surge in climate resilience efforts. And yet our analysis of these issues frequently falls back on reductionist modes of critique that presume to know resilience’s implications for justice before actual inquiry. Ontological claims abound about resilience being neoliberalism or neo-colonialism incarnate and as such always-already complicit in the production of myriad injustices. This paper takes up geography’s recent revival in interest with pragmatist and conjunctural methodologies to offer a more nuanced account of resilience and justice. In so doing, it introduces the notion of ‘just resilience’ to foreground and explore the influence of state-based conceptualizations of justice in structuring major interventions carried out to adapt to and mitigate climate change. I compartmentalize just resilience into three related heuristically informed concepts to analyze its emergence in our shared present, evaluate how it shapes government intervention and highlight some of its consequences. Topological composition addresses how particular understandings of justice have been constructed through dialogue between government actors and communities disproportionately affected by environmental harm. Through translational logistics, I elaborate on how these conceptualizations of justice orient the uneven movement of resilience projects across different communities. Finally, relational conceptualizations of scale considers the effects that prevail where multiple different resilience projects are undertaken in the same local site simultaneously. Contrasting with mainstream critiques, a pragmatist-conjunctural approach emphasizes the possibility that resilience can operate as a vessel for the pursuit of environmental justice. Nevertheless, it also raises substantial concerns about: the extent to which the meaning communities invest into justice translates into governmental practice, the asymmetries in political agency that just resilience affords different people and the tendency of resilience projects to produce effects that compromise the very forms of justice that putatively structure their enactment. The paper substantiates its argument through research into the Justice40 initiative that continues to structure some ongoing climate resilience programs in the United States.