Wellbeing, Resilience And Sustainability: The New Trinity Of Governance 3030323064, 9783030323066, 3030323072, 9783030323073

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Abstract......Page 7
Be Well! Be Resilient! Act Sustainably!......Page 8
References......Page 15
Abstract......Page 17
The Resurgence of Wellbeing......Page 18
History and Academic Disciplines......Page 20
Other Cultural Perspectives......Page 27
Applying Wellbeing......Page 32
References......Page 40
Abstract......Page 45
Systems Resilience......Page 47
Psychological and Societal Resilience......Page 49
Resilience and Change......Page 53
Applying Resilience......Page 57
The Dynamics Behind the Idea of Resilience......Page 64
References......Page 71
Abstract......Page 77
Introduction......Page 78
The Evolution of Sustainability Thinking......Page 79
Applying Sustainability......Page 85
The Dynamics Behind Ideas of Sustainability......Page 95
References......Page 103
Abstract......Page 107
The Nature of the Trinity......Page 109
Implications for Politics......Page 114
Implications for Government and Intervention......Page 117
Implications for Governance......Page 123
Concluding Thoughts......Page 127
References......Page 131
References......Page 133
Index......Page 150

Citation preview

BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE POLITICAL ECONOMY: SPERI RESEARCH & POLICY

Wellbeing, Resilience and Sustainability

The New Trinity of Governance Jonathan Joseph J. Allister McGregor

Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy Series Editor Colin Hay SPERI University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

The Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) is an innovation in higher education research and outreach. It brings together leading international researchers in the social sciences, policy makers, journalists and opinion formers to reassess and develop proposals in response to the political and economic issues posed by the current combination of financial crisis, shifting economic power and environmental threat. Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy will serve as a key outlet for SPERI’s published work. Each title will summarise and disseminate to an academic and postgraduate student audience, as well as directly to policy-makers and journalists, key policy-oriented research findings designed to further the development of a more sustainable future for the national, regional and world economy following the global financial crisis. It takes a holistic and interdisciplinary view of political economy in which the local, national, regional and global interact at all times and in complex ways. The SPERI research agenda, and hence the focus of the series, seeks to explore the core economic and political questions that require us to develop a new sustainable model of political economy at all times and in complex ways.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14879

Jonathan Joseph · J. Allister McGregor

Wellbeing, Resilience and Sustainability The New Trinity of Governance

Jonathan Joseph School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies University of Bristol Bristol, UK

J. Allister McGregor Department of Politics and International Relations University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy ISBN 978-3-030-32306-6 ISBN 978-3-030-32307-3  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32307-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 Wellbeing 11 3 Resilience 39 4 Sustainability 71 5 Conclusion: A New Trinity of Governance? 101 References 127 Index 145

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  Wellbeing, resilience and sustainability are three of the most engaging terms in current political usage and have come to have real grip in all our lives in recent years. Here, we begin to outline how they are seen to offer new approaches to issues that recent natural and humanmade crises have highlighted as having been inadequately dealt or overlooked by mainstream policy approaches. Either separately or together they have been claimed by some commentators as being elements of a much-needed paradigm shift in political and policy thinking. Here, we introduce some of the commonalities between the ideas, particularly their concern with distinctive human capacities that shape who we are and that imply a particular relationship to our wider social and natural environments. With this in mind, this book sets out to do three things. First, it seeks to explain these three ideas, while also exploring areas of dispute and uncertainty. We thus seek to review the debates about their possible meanings and significance. Second, we explain how these three ideas connect with and even define one another. We outline an understanding of why it is that they have emerged simultaneously, at this particular moment. Third, and relatedly, we wish to examine how these ideas connect with strategies of governance, broadly understood, addressing questions of the current social, political and economic context and wider arguments about the changing global environment. As part of the SPERI series, we are particularly concerned to outline how these ideas contribute to governance ‘after the crisis’, and the questions © The Author(s) 2020 J. Joseph and J. A. McGregor, Wellbeing, Resilience and Sustainability, Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32307-3_1

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of social, political and economic uncertainty influence the ways in which these main arguments are developed. Keywords  Wellbeing Crisis

· Resilience · Sustainability · Governance ·

Wellbeing, Resilience and Sustainability: The New Trinity of Governance Be Well! Be Resilient! Act Sustainably! This book looks at three of the most engaging terms in current political usage—wellbeing, resilience and sustainability. These three ideas have come to have real grip in all our lives in recent years. They have entered popular consciousness and emerged in political and policy-making narratives over the last decades to great acclaim, being viewed as providing answers to some of the most serious challenges of our times. They are seen as offering new approaches to issues that recent natural and human-made crises have highlighted as having been inadequately dealt with by our current governance arrangements and by mainstream policy approaches. Either separately or together they have been claimed by various commentators as being elements of a much-needed paradigm shift in political and policy thinking. Elements of all three of the concepts are to be found in many of the efforts to rethink or reform our economic and societal arrangements in the post-financial crisis era. Many governments and international institutions are promoting the idea of ‘inclusive growth’ as a necessary reform of the orthodox economic growth paradigm that will better address the social and political tensions generated by growing inequalities, in which those with wealth have been further rewarded while many others are marginalized and left in an economically precarious position. The OECD, one of the leading institutions in this global effort, begins its main position paper on this by stating that inclusive growth is a human-centric vision of development, ‘in which wellbeing is the metric of success’ (OECD 2018, p. 3). In their argument for ‘Civic Capitalism’, Hay and Payne go straight to the political nexus and propose that an ideological shift is necessary, ‘to one that puts the market in the service

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of the public, as citizens, rather than the citizens in the service of the market’ (Hay and Payne 2015, p. 9). The narratives of the environmental movement have also expanded to embrace the three concepts. All three feature strongly in Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (the source of the Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs], UNGA 2015). While in more critical writing on sustainability, a number of authors argue that environmental sustainability will only be meaningfully achieved when it takes on board the significance of understanding of human wellbeing (Helne and Hirvilammi 2015; Jackson 2017). The three concepts sometimes stand in tension towards one another, but there is more that binds them together than drives them apart. They have a number of things in common but foremost amongst these is their concern with distinctive human capacities that shape who we are and that imply a particular relationship to our wider social and natural environments. With this in mind, this book sets out to do three things. First, it seeks to explain these three ideas, while also exploring areas of dispute and uncertainty. These ideas are still being formulated and at times are deployed in ways that are unclear and ambiguous—sometimes deliberately so. We thus seek to review the debates about their possible meanings and significance. Second, we explain how these three ideas connect with and to some extent even define one another. We outline an understanding of why it is that they have emerged simultaneously, at this particular moment. Third, and relatedly, we wish to examine how these ideas connect with strategies of governance, broadly understood. This addresses questions of the current social, political and economic context and wider arguments about the changing global environment. In terms of context, we write this book at a time when people are talking of governance ‘after the crisis’, where attempts are being made to think about how people and governments ought to behave and how societies ought to be governed. Questions of social, political and economic uncertainty influence the ways in which these main arguments are developed. Wellbeing, resilience and sustainability, while presented in a positive manner as eminently desirable qualities and objectives, are key ideas for times that are considered to be uncertain and unpredictable. Indeed, their desirability may derive precisely from this more troubling wider picture. This book starts with three chapters, one on each of the three ideas. In these chapters, we look first at the recent emergence of the ideas, then

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at discussions about their meaning and how they might be used in governance and policy-making. The chapters highlight areas of contestation and debate as well as identifying what is distinctive and innovative about these ideas. In particular, they identify the human and social element of these ideas, how they enhance or are enhanced by human or social capital through greater awareness and reflection upon available resources (human or social), information, networks and support, and how they relate to governance by encouraging reflexivity, awareness and innovative and enterprising behaviours. These chapters focus on each idea in its own right, but also indicate where and how they relate to one another. The fourth and concluding chapter takes the analysis of the relationship between the concepts further and explores the implications of different trajectories in how these ideas develop and are operationalized for policy and governance at different levels. It is here that we identify issues of contention about the way that the ideas are developed, tending towards a more individualised approach to the major issues thrown up in the way of crises like the environmental crisis and financial crisis. Although the origins of wellbeing, resilience and sustainability go back much further in time, it is their rise to prominence in the last two decades that we are most concerned to explain. It is hard to reject the idea that our economic development and societal development should be intended to improve human wellbeing. Politicians and policy-makers have for many years been promising that is what they would do if elected or empowered. However, until recently this was rather a symbolic promise. Over the last two decades, the idea of operationalizing wellbeing for meaningful use in policy thinking has come to the fore, and since a pivotal report of the Commission on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress in 2009, there has been a burgeoning number of initiatives to understand, measure and promote wellbeing, at global, national and local levels. The concept of wellbeing deals with questions of what is required for a good life, thus encompassing a broad range of economic and non-economic factors that contribute to our material wealth, mental and physical health, freedom and, crucially, how people experience the quality of their life. Wellbeing is first and foremost, a state of being. This makes it a concept that is at once comprehensible to all people in all places, but elusive for policy to get a grip on. Many of the recent discussions of wellbeing take as a point of departure that there is more to human development than measures of GDP and other economic indicators, but what these different measures are to be is matter of

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great contention. The wellbeing literature strongly connects to notions of resilience at both individual and societal levels and also increasingly features in global sustainability narratives. Having agreed that a reframing of the objective for societal development and that new measurements are required, there are then many different directions in which wellbeing initiatives have gone. The chapter explores different conceptions of wellbeing and current concerns about what wellbeing metrics should be used by policy. These different conceptions and their related measurements have profound implications for how we are to conceive ourselves and what kinds of societal arrangements should be encouraged by policy and governance. It can be argued that no idea has risen quite so rapidly and to quite such prominence as that of resilience. This chapter seeks to highlight the way the idea has acquired such influence in policy discourse and to briefly examine some of the areas where it exerts its influence. Despite this influence, the meaning of the term is still not entirely agreed. Broadly understood, resilience can be defined as the ability to prepare for, withstand and recover from shocks and stresses (European Commission 2012). The first question this raises concerns the subject of resilience. Are we talking here about resilient individuals, communities and societies or about resilient infrastructure and institutions? Of course, we can be talking about the resilience of all of these, but policy discussions differ on where to place most emphasis. Some arguments shift emphasis away from physical infrastructure and emphasise the resilience of people. Within this, the next question is whether to emphasise societal, community or individual resilience. Do we place more emphasis on institutions, or on informal networks? A third question concerns the purpose of resilience. Is it really to withstand and recover as our broad definition suggests? As we shall argue, a key defining feature of resilience is the ability to adapt. This means changing our ways of organising and operating. Crises can actually be seen as an opportunity to change, so that rather than trying to restore previous functioning, ‘bouncing back’ should mean ‘bouncing back better’. This message is useful when reconfiguring governance after the financial crisis in such a way as to maintain the neoliberal emphasis on individual enterprise and initiative, particularly in the face of adversity. Sustainability has a longer history of popularity compared to the other elements of the trinity. Environmental sustainability has been a major global concern from the Club of Rome in the 1970s through to today’s

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Sustainable Development Goals and the current narrative about the anthropocene. The idea of sustainability has strong links across to both resilience and wellbeing. Current sustainability narratives draw strongly on notions of human and ecosystem resilience and sustainability concerns have always been a strong driver of wellbeing thinking, drawing attention to the quality of the environment in which we live and the resources upon which we depend. Like the other ideas discussed, sustainability has a potentially radical character that can challenge current orthodox growth programmes. It might also be said, however, that the current approach that dominates the Sustainable Development Goals is more accommodating in character, complementing the logic of economic with ameliorative concerns for unsustainable social and environmental outcomes and processes. This has led to some critics declaring that current discourse is concerned with trying to sustain what is known to be unsustainable (Blühdorn and Welsh 2007, p. 198). After outlining the development of the sustainability discourse, this third chapter explores the various forms that the sustainability narrative takes and considers the challenges of the new narrative of the anthropocene. It is difficult in each of these chapters to talk about one element of the new trinity without straying into discussion of the others, albeit sometimes in tension and sometimes with different understandings or interpretations of the ideas. In the fourth and concluding chapter, we draw these connections together to argue that the ideas of wellbeing, resilience and sustainability indeed can be understood as an emergent challenge to existing paradigms of growth and governance. Focusing on the issues of governance and the management of populations, we argue that this trinity combines to generate new ideas on the governing of populations and their relationships to their wider environments. Here, and throughout the book, we explore the tensions that this generates. These ideas are popular because they shift emphasis onto ‘the human’ and, specifically, they appeal to a set of intangible human qualities or capacities. This is consistent with both new forms of governance and new economic thinking. They help consolidate the so-called human security approach as well as a more human-centric approach to economic growth and development. The new trinity also represents a turn to the social, but it is a matter of contention about the ways that the three concepts are differently interpreted to reframe our understanding of social embeddedness and how this relates to notions of human autonomy. These ideas also reflect broader changes and shifts in forms of intervention, at

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global, national and local levels, as well as the changing understanding of the human condition and our place in a complex world. Interestingly, ideas like resilience and sustainability satisfy a desire for a more systemic approach to complex problems while also suggesting that there is not much we can do to change the system, thus shifting responsibility onto human behaviour (Joseph 2018). We argue that following the financial crises, and in the face of an ongoing environmental crisis, the ideas of the trinity allow for a rethinking of intervention and a recalibration of governance in line with this way of thinking about complex systems. The concluding chapter is concerned to present the arguments for these new ideas while also highlighting the nature of their contestation at this time. This contestation derives largely from the wider set of discourses and practices within which these ideas operate. In particular, we wish to draw attention to different political and cultural contexts and the effects that this might have on how the terms are understood. We concentrate here, and throughout the book, on the governance dimension of this, and its relationship to dominant economic arguments and practices. We emphasise the positive aspects of these new ideas while also detailing the tensions and contradictions that arise from their place within wider economic and governance discourses and practices, particularly those of a more Anglo-Saxon character. While recognising that each of these concepts has a meaning and resonance in other cultures and these other cultural perspectives have fed into the current understanding, we consider the decidedly Anglo-Saxon character of the dominant narratives in each. Most notably, we address the relationship of these ideas to neoliberal thinking and debates about neoliberalism ‘after the crisis’. We relate this to both the role of markets and to strategies of governance. In both cases, the new trinity draws attention to a foundational ontological question of how we are to conceive of ‘the person’ whether as an individual seeking to maximise wellbeing or a social human being whose wellbeing is co-constructed with others. The latter shifts attention towards intangible human qualities or capacities, irreducible to economic calculation or measurement, while emphasising the social embeddedness of human activity (thus offering the potential for a much more critical appraisal of social and human practices). The other route, like previous discussions of social capital, more narrowly focuses us on the individual, the community and the social network, with a more instrumental understanding of social and human resources, capacities and capabilities. These ideas on the one hand

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emphasise our social and institutional embeddedness, but they can also be seen to be socially and institutionally embedding the notion of ‘the individual’. This raises doubts about whether the turn to the social is really questioning market logic and assumptions about rational behaviour, predictability and individual autonomy. Like social capital, these new ideas perhaps help fill a gap that market logic cannot account for. So we can consider whether making these ideas ‘measurable’ and ‘calculable’ can promote an alternative set of indicators that lead to different thinking about governance and policy or will reinforce the evolution of existing logics. We can ask whether the strong emphasis on measurement and indexes undermines the potential of the ideas and reinforce a more instrumental approach, or whether it is a necessary step if the ideas are to have some real influence on policy and the shape of governance? There are two important issues for economics that this book seeks to address. The first is the above issue of market logic, rationality and predictability and whether the new trinity challenges this logic or is a new reinforcement of it. The second relates to post-financial crisis governance and issues around austerity. They combine in questioning the effectiveness of forms of intervention, the promotion of facilitative governance instead of direct or large-scale intervention, the use of indexes and other forms of measurement and the encouragement of local initiative and enterprise. This is seen in both the critique of ‘big government’ and recent scepticism towards statebuilding and other forms of large-scale international intervention. Instead, there has been a shift, in discourse at least, from the macro to the micro, the global to the local, the universal to the everyday and from institution building to human capacities and capabilities approaches. There is a paradox in that the ideas of the new trinity can on the one hand raise big issues about social and ecological systems and freedom and human flourishing, but they can also represent a strong turn to pragmatism with an emphasis on individual responsibility, self-interest and micro-level decision-making. Through our analysis, we can see positives and negatives in the new trinity. The positives relate to issues of human empowerment, the focus on the social, recognition of non-instrumental qualities in people and their communities, recognition of complexity and past errors in intervention (domestic and international) and promotion of a more reflexive and considered approach to human behaviour as well as forms of intervention. The negatives of the new paradigm include the rather fatalistic view of a complex and uncertain world that is beyond human control and

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perhaps, even, comprehension. This justifies the consequent emphasis on human adaptation rather than on strong intervention, regulation and social planning. The direction of travel of the new trinity affects whether the burden of responsibility in an age of austerity shifts to responsibility for wellbeing, resilience and sustainable living individuals and communities, rather than states and governments. We end with these questions because we believe that a debate remains to be had over how these issues might be taken up and claimed by different groups in different ways. It could be, following Foucault (2008), that these ideas might be seen as creating ever more mechanisms for control over different aspects of our lives, while shifting responsibility onto individuals to deal with complex problems. This fits well with a politics of austerity, while recalibrating neoliberal forms of governance that emphasise the need for self-reliance and showing initiative in the face of adversity. On the other hand, they might offer some form of empowerment by appealing to certain social and human qualities that cannot be reduced to a market logic or the instrumental rationality of self-interest. Whether or not these ideas are subsumed within broader governance frameworks, we think that the ideas of wellbeing, resilience and sustainability are currently contestable and open to critical engagement and interpretation. The objective of the book is to sketch what we think is a hugely important set of developments in global, national and local policy-making and to show the connectedness of the different ideas ­ being articulated. The aim is not to take sides, either to advocate usage of these ideas or to denounce them as controlling tools of governance. We explore both sides of this debate, but ultimately our aim is to make the case for why these ideas are important; to look at how they have become influential, what they do, what they imply, how they link to one another and to strategies of governance, warning of the dangers of an over-liberalised or individualistic approach; and in doing so, to open the terrain to further debate.

References Blühdorn, I., & Welsh, I. (2007). Eco-politics Beyond the Paradigm of Sustainability: A Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda. Environmental Politics, 16(2), 185–205. European Commission. (2012). EU Approach to Resilience: Learning from Food Security Crises. Brussels: European Commission.

10  J. JOSEPH AND J. A. McGREGOR Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hay, C., & Payne, A. (2015). Civic Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Helne, T., & Hirvilammi, T. (2015). Wellbeing and Sustainability: A Relational Approach. Sustainable Development, 23(3), 167–175. Jackson, T. (2017). Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations of the Economy for Tomorrow (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Joseph, J. (2018). Varieties of Resilience: Studies in Governmentality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. OECD. (2018). Opportunities for All: A Framework for Policy Action on Inclusive Growth. Paris: OECD Publishing. UN General Assembly. (2015, October 21). Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, A/RES/70/1. Available at https:// www.refworld.org/docid/57b6e3e44.html. Accessed 25 June 2019.

CHAPTER 2

Wellbeing

Abstract  This chapter reviews the recent resurgence of the idea of wellbeing in policy narratives and in the social sciences. It considers the different contributions that have coalesced to generate the current enthusiasm and critically assess the implications of various forms of the notion of wellbeing—from happiness to quality of life to life satisfaction—for governance. In particular, it is concerned to highlight different approaches to conceptualising and measuring wellbeing and the problems that these raise. Differentiating between an instrumental use of wellbeing focused on the individual and more philosophical and culturally differentiated approaches, it suggests that a more restricted understanding is being employed as part of the new strategies of governance. We look at how wellbeing has been connected to the idea of social capital, explore how it relates to ideas of resilience and sustainability and consider how the three can be said to constitute a new trinity in contemporary policy and governance narratives. Keywords  Wellbeing

· Governance · Social capital · Measurement

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Joseph and J. A. McGregor, Wellbeing, Resilience and Sustainability, Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32307-3_2

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Introduction The rise in the amount of attention that is being paid to wellbeing in political and public policy circles is remarkable. While it is unsurprising that we should expect that our systems of governance and public policy to produce improvements in human wellbeing, it is nevertheless remarkable that what many perceive to be a cuddly and fuzzy notion has found a serious place in contemporary public policy debates. In this chapter, we review the recent resurgence of the idea of wellbeing in policy narratives and in the social sciences. We consider the different events and contributions that have coalesced to generate the current enthusiasm and critically assess the implications of various forms of the notion of wellbeing—from happiness to quality of life to life satisfaction—for governance. In particular, we are concerned to highlight different approaches to conceptualising and measuring wellbeing and the issues that these raise. As with the other two concepts of the trinity, the focus on wellbeing can be seen in part as one form of response to crises. The new wave of wellbeing thinking has strong links to increased awareness of the environmental crisis and the current momentum behind the idea has been given particular impetus by the search for new thinking in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. However, we argue for the need to differentiate between instrumental uses of the concept that tend to be focused on the individual and more philosophically informed and culturally differentiated approaches that have a more social orientation. We explore how these differing conceptions of wellbeing relate to ideas of resilience and sustainability and consider how the three can be said to constitute an emergent new trinity in contemporary policy and governance narratives.

The Resurgence of Wellbeing The idea of wellbeing has long been used and abused in major political and policy statements. It features as an ideal in many major global resolutions. For example, ‘the constant improvement of the well-being of the entire population’ was the stated goal of the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development (UN 1986). More recently however there has been a resurgence in its usage and it is challenging for a pivotal position in international policy initiatives. The UN Sustainable Development

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Goals Agenda, launched in 2015, is founded in the current wave of wellbeing thinking and states that: We envisage a world free of poverty, hunger, disease and want, where all life can thrive. We envisage a world free of fear and violence. A world with universal literacy. A world with equitable and universal access to quality education at all levels, to health care and social protection, where physical, mental and social well-being are assured. A world where we reaffirm our commitments regarding the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation and where there is improved hygiene; and where food is sufficient, safe, affordable and nutritious. A world where human habitats are safe, resilient and sustainable and where there is universal access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy. (UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/70/1 2015, p. 3)

As we will return to discuss throughout the book, in the SDGs the idea of wellbeing (hyphenated or not) is bound up with notions of eliminating damaging poverty, of reducing inequality, of upholding human rights, of making places safer and of conserving the natural environment in the face of a growing ecological crisis. In the SDGs, the assertion of the importance of the idea of human wellbeing lies at the heart of this heady mixture. Many of the contributions to the current revival of the concept trace a connection back to a statement by Robert Kennedy in 1968. During a presidential campaign speech at the University of Kansas, he declaimed, Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

The recognition that there is more to development and progress in our societies than that which is measured by GDP or any other narrow, economistic metric has been a strong driver of a global movement to develop new measures of development and progress. This movement reached an apotheosis with the publication, in 2009, of the Final Report

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of the Commission on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress (Stiglitz et al. 2009). The Commission was conducted under the auspices of President Sarkozy of France and was chaired by three globally noted scholars: Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. Subsequently known as the Stiglitz Commission, it gathered contributions from a range of renowned thinkers to deliberate on what measures could be developed to better assess whether economic development was actually contributing to human development and whether it was doing so in an environmentally sustainable way. It concluded that to do so there should be a ‘shift (of) emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being’ (2009, p. 12), and it invited policy-makers, politicians and academics to join in a global challenge to develop these measures. The publication of the report coincided with onset of the global financial crisis and this provided further force to its exploration of possible alternative paradigms for growth and societal development. Since the publication of that report, there has been an effusion of wellbeing measuring initiatives at local, national and global levels (Bache and Reardon 2016; McGregor 2018). Of course, it is not just about measurement. The wellbeing debate is about what constitutes a good life; how we are to conceive of that; and how we might make it happen. As this chapter will illustrate, there is currently an ideological struggle over the idea of wellbeing. In some formulations, the idea and ideology of ‘the individual’ is promoted, and in this form, the concept of wellbeing is being used as a vehicle to reshape the hegemony of neoclassical economics. This is a notion bearing similarities to the other elements of the trinity—Anglo-Saxon, individualist and neoliberal. In other forms, the notion of the social being is central and, beyond the ‘motherhood and apple pie’ aspects of the term, the concept of wellbeing can be a powerful tool for an analysis of what constitute vital shared public goods and a critical political economy analysis. It can encourage us to consider ‘a good life for whom?’ We can think about who wellbeing is to be defined by and how? And it can require us to critically re-examine what roles it entails for government, society and the social human being in the structuring of our societies.

History and Academic Disciplines The current state of academic and policy thinking on human wellbeing is the product of a remarkable amount of cross-disciplinary communication and it also draws significantly on insights from other cultures and

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cosmovisions. The philosophical lineage of wellbeing is often traced back to Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, but it has similarly ancient roots in the credos of many of the major religions. Almost all of these seek to tell us something about what a good life consists of and what one should do to achieve it. However, Greek philosophy provides the points of departure for the two main positions in the contemporary debate over how we are to understand and assess wellbeing. The Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia finds its counterpoint in the Cyrenaic position and the idea of hedonic wellbeing. The eudaimonic approach to wellbeing focuses on living a life well and achieving wellbeing through meaningful actions that are consistent with a person’s values. The hedonic notion focuses on the outcome of happiness or pleasure and sees this as the summative outcome of a person’s actions and experiences. In an early contribution to the contemporary literature Ryan and Deci (2001) reviewed the use of the two positions in the then emergent psychology of wellbeing and suggested that although the two might be thought of as complementing each other, with the eudaimonic position focusing on processes and hedonic psychology focusing on the outcome of such processes, they arise from different ontological starting points and lead scientific investigation to quite different forms of inquiry and even to different questions. As we shall explain shortly the difference between these two positions is highly significant but the point about ontological difference in contemporary psychology is overstated. The discipline of psychology has been particularly important in the re-emergence of the idea of wellbeing and is a powerful influence over the way that the concept is currently developing. While there has been a long history of study in psychology on this general subject area, the work of authors such as Ed Diener (1984) and Carol Ryff (1989) and subsequent rise of the ‘positive psychology’ movement in the 1990s (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000), signalled a new phase of work on wellbeing. From the outset a hedonic notion of wellbeing has been dominant, as Ryan and Deci noted in 2001, ‘SWB (Subjective WellBeing) has reigned as the primary index of well-being during the past decade and a half’ (p. 145), and despite much valuable work on eudaimonic frameworks, hedonic notions of wellbeing remain dominant in the academic/policy nexus. This is evident in a new series of major global reports, the now annual World Happiness Report (Helliwell et al. 2012, 2018), that have sought to spearhead a global movement for the uptake

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of wellbeing in global policy circles. The analyses contained in the World Happiness Reports hinge around national scores of Subjective Wellbeing and explore how these relate to or are affected by a range of other conditions in nation states. The work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has been especially significant in this new phase of wellbeing thinking and his work on the notion of ‘Objective Happiness’ has been influential (Kahneman 1999). This offers the possibility of objectively quantifying happiness at a particular point in time and for this to be understood as a proxy for utility. Although his ideas about the objectivity of this measure have been disputed (see Alexandrova 2005), his work has been powerful enough for Lord Richard Layard, a prominent UK economist and Labour peer, to champion these ideas into policy spheres, heralding them as ‘Lessons from a New Science’ (Layard 2006). The idea that a measure of hedonic wellbeing (whether happiness or a ‘satisfaction with life’ score) can be considered a better proxy for utility than income has been very attractive for economists, who can then run it as a number in regressions, and for policy-makers, who can have a single number and who do not have to shift far from their economistic orientation and individualistic focus. This school of thought has been labelled neo-utilitarian and can be seen in some ways as bringing economics full circle back to the contributions of Jeremy Bentham and William Stanley Jevons and to the foundations of modern neoclassical economics. Eudaimonic approaches to wellbeing lead away from a single, summative number and usually argue that wellbeing must be understood in multidimensional terms. However, what those dimensions are and how many need to be considered are matters of great contention. There have been two basic approaches to developing multidimensional wellbeing frameworks. In a top-down way, some frameworks are derived from particular philosophical positions, conceptual frameworks, or ideologies, while ‘bottom-up’ strategies have sought to build ‘lists’ of what is required for wellbeing from observation or research engagement with the people whose wellbeing the study is concerned to understand. The desire for ‘universality’ in policy spheres creates a bias in favour of having reasoned ‘lists’ and most of the currently prominent multidimensional frameworks arise from particular theoretical or philosophical positions. But different lists also arise from different disciplinary traditions and tend to reflect the scope or concern of the academic discipline concerned. Thus, for example, psychologists’ lists tend to be focused on the

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mental state of individuals and do not always have well developed social dimensions; health derived lists tend to focus on physical and sometimes mental health, while economist derived lists focus predominantly on material conditions. In his earlier work Amartya Sen, who has been another prominent figure in the rise of contemporary wellbeing thinking, acknowledged the philosophical tension and the politics that lie between the top-down and bottom-up approaches. In declining to propose a list, he has argued that any such list should arise from a process of public reasoning and deliberation within a particular society and polity. However, many of his fellow travellers have been less hesitant. Martha Nussbaum, for example, has proposed that there are ten universal capabilities or what she calls ‘spheres of existence’).1 Sabine Alkire has championed the Sen inspired notion of Human Development to develop a Multidimensional Poverty Index, which uses 11 indicators to assess the three basic dimensions of the Human Development framework—health, education and income (Alkire and Foster 2011). The strong relationship between wellbeing and the investigation of poverty should be noted at this point since it recurs throughout the discussion and Sen’s application of welfare economics to the problems of development has been pathbreaking in its effort to widen the conception of development and to pose the problem of poverty in more than just material or economic terms. Taking this a step further it is possible to conceive of poverty as ‘wellbeing failure’, where some people fail, sometimes chronically and persistently, to acquire or achieve what is considered necessary for what most others would consider to be a reasonable degree of wellbeing (McGregor 2007). The idea of ‘wellbeing failure’ acknowledges the recognised multidimensionality of poverty but provides a way of conceptualising the more human and relational dimensions of poverty that cannot be captured in the reductionism and essentialism of mainstream multidimensional poverty approaches. Many social psychologists have taken a bottom-up or inductive approach to identifying their dimensions of wellbeing, but they have done so for different reasons. In their early work, Diener and colleagues argued that not enough was known about wellbeing and as such a general theory could not (at that time) be constructed (Diener et al. 1998, p. 35). On the other hand, Ryff argued that because there are differences 1 Life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses, imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, control over one’s environment.

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between people and because of the effects of different social and cultural contexts, the approach to understanding wellbeing had to be in large part inductive. An example of the type of multidimensional framework that social psychology has generated is illustrated by the work of Robert Cummins (1998). He and his colleagues in a now global network have carried out extensive psychometric testing of the relevance and meaning of the various possible domains of subjective wellbeing. The Personal Wellbeing Index is corroborated by an International Working Group and is one of the most globally prominent subjective wellbeing frameworks available. It proposes that there are seven (7) domains that contribute to Quality of Life universally (material wellbeing, health, productivity, intimacy, safety, community and emotional well-being2). In this approach, these are all assessed subjectively. What is significant for our understanding of the new trinity is that the contribution of psychology has given the new wellbeing movement a distinctive character. Psychology deals with wellbeing as an experience and, whether hedonic or eudaimonic and whether it is a single measure or is a multidimensional framework, the focus is on subjective assessments of the experience of life. While this focus on how people experience their life has for long been recognised as important and has been central to the methodologies of other disciplines such as social anthropology, what psychology has added are its scientistic modes of inquiry, its claims to objectivity and an emphasis on measurement. But most importantly for the new trinity, no matter whether the product of social psychology or a more clinical or experimental strand of the discipline, the psychologist’s notion of wellbeing is focused on the experiences of ‘the individual’. In this sense Ryan and Deci’s claim about the ontological difference between hedonic and eudaimonic approaches to the psychology of wellbeing was overstated. A different set of disciplinary contributions to the current wellbeing debates can be found in the sociology and social policy literatures. In these literatures, the term has been variously associated with the study of welfare, human needs and notions of social quality. The twentiethcentury literature on welfare took the idea a considerable distance away from its historical roots in the notion of the commonweal or common good. The emergence of the modern welfare state has hinged around

2 Latterly

a dimension of ‘spiritual wellbeing’ has been added.

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developing societal arrangements to help workers and their families cope with the problems that modern capitalism inevitably throws at them. For the large part, this has focused on the notion of helping citizens meet their needs. The early phases of modern welfare states focused only on basic needs (ensuring people had enough food, shelter and water), but both the intellectual coherence of the idea of ‘basic’ needs and what the British Labour politician Ernest Bevin called the ‘narrow-minded meanness’ of this agenda in countries where much capitalist wealth has been or is being generated, have been questioned. In the UK, the work of sociologist Peter Townsend attacked the idea that poverty (and by inference wellbeing) could be defined only in terms of basic needs (Townsend 1979). Building on a tradition that can trace its roots back to, amongst others, Adam Smith, who highlighted the moral problem of a society where a person could not go out in public for the lack of socially acceptable clothing or footwear, the idea of relative poverty considers what is needed to participate in society. In this approach both poverty and wellbeing relate to ideas about what is needed to live adequately well in society and it acknowledges the need, beyond objective assessment, to take into account both the relational and subjective dimensions of the condition. What we need to live well in any society is in part determined by what we need to participate in that society and by the norms and values that we share and communicate with others in society. This idea of the importance of meaningful participation in society is further advanced in Doyal and Gough’s Theory of Human Need (1991). This provides one of the most sophisticated expositions of the idea of human needs and has been influential on welfare thinking. They develop their theory as a defence of the idea of a universal conception of human need on which all welfare interventions can be founded. Their schema argues that there are only two fundamental and universal human needs and these are for health and autonomy. These two needs are then met through eleven (11) intermediate needs satisfiers that may take different forms in different societies.3 The Doyal and Gough contribution has 3 The eleven needs satisfiers in the Doyal and Gough theory are: adequate nutritional food and water, adequate protective housing, non-hazardous work and physical environments, appropriate health care, security in childhood, significant primary relationships, physical and economic security, safe birth control and childbearing, and appropriate basic and cross-cultural education (Doyal and Gough 1991).

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many affinities with Sen’s capability approach and provides a good foundation for the development of a multidimensional conception of human wellbeing, but their agenda is normative and welfarist. In particular, their focus on autonomy, (in fact on ‘critical autonomy’), is, like Sen’s, liberal in character and can be seen to build again on a highly Western ontological construct of the individual (Devine et al. 2006). The Stiglitz Commission (Stiglitz et al. 2009) approach to human wellbeing built substantially on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach and concluded by proposing a ‘multidimensional’ framework that was intended to shape the measurement of wellbeing. That framework was taken up by the OECD, as an element of their Better Policies for Better Lives Initiative, and evolved into the ‘How’s Life’ Framework (2011).4 In the OECD framework, eleven ‘dimensions’ of wellbeing are divided between two ‘pillars’ that are labelled: ‘Material Conditions’ and ‘Quality of Life’, while a third element of the framework is labelled ‘sustainability’ and represents the systems through which material conditions and quality of life are reproduced. The four systems, or ‘capitals’5 as they are referred to, are seen as providing the dynamic that is necessary for any understanding of how human wellbeing is (re)produced and how it is distributed across populations in a society. A more social approach to wellbeing can be found in the idea of ‘social quality’ (Beck et al. 1998). In contrast to the individualism more characteristic of Anglo-Saxon approaches, this builds on a more Germanic and European tradition of concern for the ‘quality of life’ and for social indicators research (Glatzer and Zapf 1984; Noll 2011). It connects strongly with European Union concerns for social inclusion and social cohesion and has been acknowledged as being, in part at least, a response to what Walker and van Der Maesen perceive to be the inadequate treatment of ‘the social’ in the Doyal and Gough conception of needs. Concerned more with the conditions in society than with the individual, Beck et al. define social quality as, ‘the extent to which citizens are able to participate in the social and economic life of their communities under conditions which enhance their well-being and individual potential’ (1998, p. 3). Interestingly social quality has been picked up as

4 http://www.oecd.org/statistics/howslife.htm. 5 The

four capitals are ‘natural, economic, social and human’.

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a concept with resonance in East Asia and a good deal has been written about it in that context (Lin and Ward 2009; Lin and Herrmann 2015). Finally, although many of these social analyses are more compatible with the eudaimonic position on wellbeing, there has been some meeting of minds between the hedonic and social positions. This has particularly focused around the idea of social capital (Halpern 2005). John Helliwell, a quantitative economist, has extensively explored the relationship between measures of social capital and happiness (Helliwell and Putnam 2004; Helliwell et al. 2010). As one of the co-authors of the now global World Happiness Report, Helliwell and his collaborators have used this platform to convey a series of messages for policy-makers about the need to give attention to the role of the decline as social capital in worsening subjective wellbeing outcomes (cf. World Happiness Report 2013, Chapter 2). As discussed in the chapter here on resilience, Helliwell and colleagues have also highlighted the role that social capital plays in maintaining wellbeing in times crisis (Helliwell et al. 2014).

Other Cultural Perspectives While much of the academic work on wellbeing has been conducted in relation to people in wealthy American or European countries there has been an increasing number of studies of human wellbeing in other cultural contexts and in less wealthy country contexts. In social psychology the work of Biswas-Diener and Diener (2001) provided a striking illustration of the power of the exploration of subjective wellbeing in the context of slums in Calcutta, while in the study of international development, the work of the Wellbeing in Developing Countries Research Group (WED) sought to develop a universal framework and methodology to study how wellbeing was being achieved (or not) by rural and urban peoples in four different developing countries (Gough et al. 2007). That research programme illustrated how a human wellbeing framework could be used systematically to explore the reproduction of chronic poverty. That framework explores poverty in terms of ‘wellbeing failures’, which are understood as where a person fails to achieve a minimal level of wellbeing in material, relational or subjective terms—i.e. they may not have enough food or adequate shelter, they may be isolated in society and be excluded from the economy or polity, or they may have low self-esteem and be depressed. This provides a multidimensional approach to understanding poverty that does not fetishise or delimit

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our conception of poverty (McGregor 2014). As with poverty, ‘wellbeing failure’ can be idiosyncratic or may be systemic—it may be the result of a shock that affects only the person or their household or it may be something that is systemically generated in the structures of society. The persistence of chronic wellbeing failures (hunger, homelessness, social exclusion, indignity, depression), indicate where economic and social development has failed to provide the conditions that enable all people to escape harmful poverty (see Copestake 2008a, b; McGregor et al. 2007; McGregor and Sumner 2010). Since the publication of the Stiglitz Report, the OECD has driven a global initiative encouraging and cajoling national statistical offices around the world to take up the challenge of ‘measuring progress’ in terms of human wellbeing. In recent years there have been significant government-led initiatives to measure levels of wellbeing that have been launched in many westernised high income countries, most notably by the national statistical offices in Australia, France, Austria, Portugal, Italy and the UK. But government-led initiatives have not been confined only to high income countries and other initiatives have been launched or supported by the national statistical services in non-Western middle and high income countries as diverse as Chile, Mexico, Morocco, the Philippines, Bolivia, Ecuador, South Africa and Korea. There are also a number of other highly visible national wellbeing initiatives that look quite similar to those arising from the Stiglitz Commission, but which have quite different sources of inspiration. These arise from particular cultural or religious foundations. They are particularly interesting for the analysis of the new trinity because these other cultural constructions of wellbeing also give insights into ontological positions that are different from the individualist neoliberal ontological position that unconsciously dominates much of Western social science thinking. Bhutan has been prominent in the recent global discussion about alternatives to GNP and it has operationalised a concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) that has become increasingly sophisticated and well developed in its application (Government of Bhutan 2016). They have made great impact in global fora on wellbeing, they have made many allies and have even managed to inspire the production of a statement by the UN Secretary General to the General Assembly titled ‘Happiness: Towards a holistic approach to development’ (UN 2013). While, on the surface, the GNH appears to be consistent with the

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Stiglitz Commission approach it is important to acknowledge that the concept is infused by a particular set of spiritual values and that it thrives in Bhutan because it is embedded within a particular national culture and polity. This type of Buddhist conception of wellbeing has also been prominent in public policy debates in Thailand and other polities where Buddhism or other closely related religious creeds are significant. The notion of ‘happiness’ that is at the heart of the Bhutanese approach is a Buddhist spiritualist conception, emphasising virtues of abstinence and mindfulness, and is quite different from the modern hedonistic notion of happiness that Layard heralded as the ‘New Science’. In the global enthusiasm to advance the new agenda of wellbeing the significance of this difference has been overlooked. There are some ways that the two can come together and in the UK at least the gap between these two conceptions of ‘happiness’ is being bridged through the rise of a secular notion of ‘mindfulness’ (All Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics 2014). The input of psychiatry and a focus that comes from a concern for mental wellbeing in a stressful and anxiety prone modern world has begun to bridge religious and secular notions of wellbeing (Williams and Penman 2011). However, the bigger questions about what kind of people we are and what kind of society we want have been politely sidestepped. From a very different cultural, historical and religious tradition both Bolivia and Ecuador have been developing policy initiatives based on the notion of ‘buen vivir’ or ‘vivir bien’—good living, living well. Both of these national movements are claimed as being founded in the AndeanQechuan cosmology of Sumak Kawsay. These initiatives have been driven by the rise to power of leaders from indigenous Andean cultural backgrounds and the ‘buen vivir’ approach seeks to establish a distance between itself and more Europeanised notions of development (BressaFlorentin 2016; Villalba-Eguiluz and Etxano 2017). Bressa Florentin draws on the work of Salgado (2010) to explain that in, ‘the Andean culture’s world view, the final objective of human activity is not power or money accumulation, but the nurturing of a tender, harmonious and vigorous life – a Sumaq Kawsay - (Kessel 2006), both for humanity and Mother Earth: the Pachamama’ (Salgado 2010, p. 200). The ‘buen vivir’ tradition places particular emphasis on the issue of ‘living well with nature’ and as such connects with the environmental sustainability concerns that cut across many of these initiatives. The ‘buen vivir’ ambition to establish a path to development that reflects

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indigenous societal-cultural values has had resonance across many Latin American countries. With this impetus, Latin America has been one of the leading regions in pressing for the development and promotion of new thinking about how to measure development and progress (INEGI/OECD 2011, http://mfps.inegi.org.mx/en/Default.aspx). What is significant here is that both of these culturally anchored initiatives, either quietly or explicitly, seek to distance themselves from homo economicus. They have a different ontological starting point and do not express the person at the heart of their schemas as the maximising individual. Rather the person is a member of a collective religious community or one of many agents in an ecosystem. Before we move on to discuss the implications of these different ideas about wellbeing for governance it is worth noting that there are also some major non-governmental perspectives on wellbeing. In contrast to ‘buen vivir’ and other non-western traditions, two major non-governmental initiatives are the Skoll Foundation’s Social Progress Index and the Legatum Institute’ s Prosperity Index. Both of these are founded in more mainstream capitalist and liberal traditions and can be described as taking an ‘enlightened prosperity’ approach of the kind that the World Economic Forum has been espousing (WEF 2012, 2017). They both emphasise the continued production of prosperity in broadly conventional economic terms, but with the need to translate this into better levels of wellbeing for citizens. This involves paying greater attention to the moral, environmental and political concerns that have been highlighted in critiques of selfish monetarily focused wealth creation that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Their selection of indicators focuses attention on the extent to which conditions within societies enable the ongoing production of wealth alongside the translation of that wealth into wellbeing and sustainable societal progress. Both frameworks emphasise the positive importance of freedoms and give particular attention to the freedom to do business. These efforts to align prosperity with wellbeing are strongly related to the recent enthusiasm for the idea of ‘inclusive growth’. This term is believed to have originated in Asia where high rates of economic growth were not being accompanied by corresponding reductions in poverty (Klasen 2010). For countries, such as India, this was perceived as a serious potential threat to the stability of governance. Although the term remains somewhat muddled with multiple definitions being championed by various global institutions, what the inclusive growth literature has

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done is highlight the issue of the political and social sustainability of ever worsening levels of inequality. This brings us to one last strand of the current wellbeing narrative where the relationship between wellbeing and inequality is explored. This has been a surprisingly small part of the global wellbeing narrative despite the fact that we are in an era where the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few has never been greater but where chronic wellbeing failures are still an everyday reality for billions of men, women and children around the world. Perhaps most prominent on this issue is the work of Wilkinson and Pickett which is explained in their book The Spirit Level (2009). Their research, which arises out of epidemiology, explores the relationship between inequality and wellbeing, from the level of the individual to the level of society. Building on work by Marmot (2004), they argue that the level of the individual inequality ‘gets under the skin’ by affecting wellbeing through vectors such as self-esteem, a sense of vulnerability and the experience of anxiety. At a societal level, they statistically demonstrate how more equal societies tend to do better in enabling wellbeing for their people and make an argument for how this is related to the issue of sustainability. Concern for the damage to societal wellbeing that may be caused by increasing inequality has also been taken up by one of the authors of the Stiglitz Commission report. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Joseph Stiglitz (2012) work ‘The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future’ provides a strong exposition of how high levels of inequality are doing damage to our societies and economies. The concern for the relationship between wellbeing and inequality is also demonstrated in more grassroots work carried out by OXFAM Scotland (OXFAM 2012, 2013). The Humankind Index particularly sought to give voice to the poorest and those who were being excluded from society in poorer areas of Scotland to express what was important to them for their wellbeing. The bottom-up methodology that was employed entailed a mix of focus group work, community workshops, street stall interviews and a subsequent survey that affirmed the detrimental effects poverty and inequality on wellbeing (OXFAM 2012; Dunlop and Swales 2012). That work and the application of the index over two years contributed to a vibrant debate in Scotland that has seen wellbeing become a central concept in a narrative about what kind of development is needed and wanted.

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Applying Wellbeing There is an ever-increasing number of efforts to apply the idea of wellbeing public policy (Bache and Reardon 2016). But this is a new area of endeavour and the ways in which the idea is being applied are many and various. There is often ambiguity about which conception of wellbeing is used; there are disputes about what metrics can and should be used to assess it; and there are deeper, more ideological debates about the implications of different forms of the wellbeing agenda. As was noted earlier there is a something of an ‘alliance of expediency’ in the Post-Stiglitz wellbeing movement that brings many of the different camps together—from Buddhist monks clad in colourful red and yellow robes, to grey-suited, number-crunching economists, to white coated neuroscientists—to present themselves as one movement. This conceals a number of major faultlines which when explored can be seen to have great significance for direction in which our current systems of governance are moving. Prompted by crises and joined at least in the conviction that something must change in how we prosecute economic development and societal progress, there are a number of more specific points that most in this big tent find themselves agreeing on. The first is that a focus on wellbeing involves a more human-centric approach to public policy. While the mantra of being ‘human centric’ has been around for many years, most of the theories and measures that have dominated public policy thinking have little to do with how real people are experiencing economic development and societal change. Per capita GDP, for example, imputes a notional share of gross domestic product per citizen; while poverty rates tell us about how many people might be above or below a particular level of consumption or income. They are both highly aggregated measures that do not tell us about how economic growth is really impacting in peoples’ lives or what the experience of poverty day to day actually involves. The logic of the Stiglitz Commission Report was that making ‘wellbeing’ the focus of how we measure societal progress should also bring people back into focus at the centre of policy debates and deliberations about the type and direction of economic and societal development that we want. While it is possible to agree that ‘the person’ should be placed more centrally in our thinking about public policy choices, the critical question that we have highlighted from the introduction to this book

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is—how are we to conceive of the person? In a profound critique of twentieth-century social sciences Mary Douglas and Steven Nye argued that the person at the heart of much social science and contemporary policy thinking had become impoverished and restricted. As they see it, a narrow notion of homo economicus has become dominant across the social sciences and in mainstream social and economic policy thinking. Despite the wellbeing movement claiming an enthusiasm to develop a more holistic approach to understand the challenges that we face in the twenty-first century, in the neo-utilitarian/hedonic conceptions of wellbeing this holism is not applied to the notion of person. Layard is a good example of this and while his Happiness: Lessons from A New Science is enthusiastic in championing wellbeing, he appears to be unwilling to consider how this can challenge the underlying individualistic tenets of orthodox economics. The person at the heart of the new economics and psychology of wellbeing remains a thin and calculating asocial agent akin to homo economicus. Will Davies dubs him homo psycho-economicus (2017). The alternative, as Douglas and Nye propose, is to conceive of the person at the heart of wellbeing analysis as being a social human being—homo socialis—(Deneulin and McGregor 2010). This is a more holistic conception where feelings and social relations constitute the person. In the psychology of wellbeing it is what Mariano Rojas refers to as ‘the person of flesh and blood … in his/her circumstance’ (Rojas 2008, p. 1080). The adoption of a more social conception of the person leads to a more radical formulation of wellbeing thinking and not least it requires a rethinking of a number of the foundational tenets of contemporary economics (McGregor and Pouw 2017). The hedonic tendency within happiness studies, of course, does demonstrate considerable concern for the social issues that are highlighted by a wellbeing focus (e.g. Helliwell’s concern for the erosion of social capital), but because the social is not internalised in the ontology of the central agent, then social and human issues are dealt with as externalities or second order matters. Issues such as affection and caring cannot be adequately understood or dealt with by the core theory. This means that policy continues to have problems operationalising the idea because activities that are central to the wellbeing of the social person, but that had previously gone unvalued or undervalued remain so. Tasks such as building and maintaining social relationships in a community or caring for children, the infirm or elderly all remain undervalued and are difficult to account for or to justify attention to in policy systems that are still dominated by homo economicus and ideas of productivity and efficiency.

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An illustration of the ambiguity that this brings to applications of wellbeing in policy is illustrated by the muddle between individualistic and social conceptions of wellbeing in the Care Act 2014 (England). This act assigns responsibility for the social care of the elderly and disabled to local authorities. Part I of the section on ‘Care and Support’ is titled ‘The Promotion of Individual Wellbeing’ and it states that it is ‘The general duty of a local authority, in exercising a function under this Part in the case of an individual, is to promote that individual’s well-being’ (UK Government 2014, Chapter 23, p. 1). It then goes on to ‘define’ wellbeing in terms of nine criteria. This is not so much a definition as a mix of different things that might characterise or be said to contribute to wellbeing. It includes elements that arise from an individualistic notion of wellbeing, such as ‘control’ and ‘freedom’, but also a number that arise from a social notion of wellbeing such as ‘participation’ and ‘relationships’ with family and friends. The Statutory Guidance that has subsequently been issued to help local government implement the act steps further away from defining the term and states that, ‘“Wellbeing” is a broad concept, and it is described as relating to the following areas in particular:’ (it then lists the nine characteristics) (Department of Health and Social Care, Statutory Guidance Oct 2018). Because the Act itself and subsequent Guidance are vague then local authorities have a great deal of room for manoeuvre in how they interpret and seek to implement the act. This can cause problems of inequity of treatment between authorities, but more significantly it does not give clear direction on how care system in England will be shaped for the future. Emphasis on the individualistic elements (emphasising freedom and control) takes us down a route of Individual Care Budgets and an ever more marketised care system, whereas emphasis on a social conception of wellbeing (as the Welsh version of the Care Act appears to be trying to introduce—Nation Assembly of Wales 2014, Social Services and Well-being [Wales] Act 2014) encourages the development of what Joan Tronto calls a Caring Democracy (Tronto 2013). The second area of agreement amongst fellow travellers in the big tent is that subjective wellbeing matters. It is important to take account of how people are experiencing economic development and social change. But of course the big question is which approach to subjective wellbeing is to be dominant (Austin 2016). As we have noted, there are hedonic and eudaimonic approaches to subjective wellbeing but currently the hedonic notion of happiness is

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in the ascendancy. In part this is because it fits conveniently well with orthodox economics and it requires less profound rethinking of core assumptions, but it is also because of its numeracy, simplicity and its cloak of objectivity (Alexandrova 2005). The offer of a single number outcome measure, that very quickly begins to look as objective as all the other numbers that policy-makers have been dealing with, is much more suitable for policy audiences, who are less tolerant multidimensional dashboards of indicators, many of which deal with phenomena that are inescapably subjective, evidently changeable and are difficult to quantify. In his scathing critique of what he calls ‘The Happiness Industry’, Will Davies focuses on how the hedonic ‘happiness’ approach to wellbeing has been embraced by big business and governments and how it is then used and abused (Davies 2016). The essence of his argument is that the happiness approach to wellbeing entails processes of individualisation that are then manipulated by businesses to sell us the things that they tell us are important for our wellbeing. The individualised approach also can be used by government to ‘nudge’ our behaviour in directions they consider to be appropriate, but operating ‘from a distance’ in order to locate the burden of failure to achieve wellbeing on the individual rather than on the wider structures within which people are trying to be well. But there is a problem of ‘the baby and the bathwater’ in this critique of wellbeing: although, as we have suggested, more social conceptual framings of wellbeing can lead in quite different directions and challenge neoliberal interpretations, these are not really considered by Davies. But many would agree that his warnings are realistic in light of the rise of the idea of ‘nudge’ (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). This is where governments (and others) use behavioural sciences and techniques to encourage people to undertake behaviours that they consider to be good for health and wellbeing and it has been a particularly contentious relation of the wellbeing movement. In the UK the nudge agenda has been one area that the application of wellbeing to policy circles has been most effective. The work of the Behavioural Insights Team (sometimes known as ‘the Nudge Unit’), that was set up in 2010 by Prime Minster David Cameron and attached to the Cabinet Office during the UK Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, has had considerable influence on policy (Bache and Reardon 2016; Sanders et al. 2018). A wide range of contributors to the debate, from economists such as John Ormerod (Johns and Ormerod 2007), Frank Furedi in Politics (2006), to Guy

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Standing in social policy (2011), have condemned this aspect of the wellbeing movement as being paternalistic, patronising and politically subversive of democracy. As with Davies, in making these criticisms of the ‘happiness’ agenda these critics have tended to dismiss the whole wellbeing initiative, paying insufficient attention to more socially progressive motivations for using the idea of wellbeing. Not all conceptions of the wellbeing project are consistent with or subservient to a capitalist or neoliberal agenda. More eudaimonic approaches to subjective wellbeing explore the importance of intrinsic goals and values, and authors such as Tim Kasser demonstrate how overriding or neglecting these, through the absorption of the consumerist/ materialist message, can lead to negative wellbeing outcomes and psychological harm (Kasser 2002). Multidimensional frameworks for understanding subjective wellbeing, such as that developed by Cummins, give insight into the ways in which different dimensions of subjective wellbeing may be related and interact with each other. In these interactions simple happiness or material gain need not be dominant. Drawing together inputs from across the different social science disciplines and on insights from other cultural conceptions it is possible to push the notion of multidimensionality on a stage further to deal not only with subjective wellbeing but to address a more holistic account of wellbeing. This involves taking account of objectively verifiable material wellbeing and its relationship to subjective wellbeing. There are a number of prominent frameworks, such as the OECD How’s Life framework, that seek to do this. With this kind of framework we can see that a person or a population may be doing well in terms of one kind of wellbeing outcome (e.g. income) but be doing badly in respect of outcomes in other dimensions of wellbeing (e.g. social relations or dignity). The relations between outcomes in these different dimensions may be considered at a system level or at a personal level. At the system level, multidimensional wellbeing frameworks give us insight into how the functioning of social, cultural and economic systems may give precedence to one type of outcome over another (consider, e.g. some wealthy East Asian societies where high levels of income may be achieved through excessive work hours and with that negative subjective wellbeing outcomes, indicated through high levels of work-related stress and a perceived poor work-life balance). At the level of the person we can observe that people make their own trade-offs between the different dimensions of wellbeing in a struggle to be well in one or some combination of dimensions of

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wellbeing. It is not uncommon for people in poverty to trade-off dignity or physical safety in order just to put enough food on the table. Or, in a more positive example, a sufficiently affluent person may choose to sacrifice income in order to be able to spend more time with family and friends or to do something that they feel is intrinsically more rewarding for them. In most of these truly multidimensional frameworks, we can recognise that there are three fundamental categories of dimension, the material, the relational and the subjective (McGregor and Sumner 2010; McGregor 2018). The fact that people may trade-off outcomes in one dimension of wellbeing against outcomes in another dimension, or that governments may support arrangements that encourage one dimension of wellbeing outcome (e.g. income or profit) over others, highlights the need to understand wellbeing in terms of processes and not just as outcomes. It is the interplay of social, economic and political processes that generate the patterns of wellbeing outcomes that we see in societies and that governments ultimately must be interested in. It is on these processes that governance arrangements and policy interventions must work. While a single figure outcome measure of happiness may tell us something about one overall headline pattern, they afford us very little meaningful insight into the dynamics of the processes that generate a more complex combination of wellbeing outcomes. There are two further insights that this kind of multidimensional approach to wellbeing metrics introduces. The first is about difference and that populations consist of people with different characteristics (we could say capabilities), who are differently located in the structures of society and economy and who have different wellbeing aspirations and goals. Headline single figures lead to analysis in terms of aggregates that gloss over these differences or explore them in statistical terms. The aggregative headline metric approach gives us limited insight into the political economy of who is winning and who is losing in the wellbeing struggles in society—for example, to understand how social, economic and cultural structures can often make it harder for women to achieve their wellbeing goals. The second insight that a multidimensional approach to wellbeing entails a more complex analysis. We do not mean this just in terms of it being more complicated but that it suggests that it is better understood in terms of a complex-systems approach. This arises from the recognition that people are active agents who may adapt their wellbeing

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goals, change their wellbeing strategies or even change their perceptions of their state of wellbeing over time, and who are active in response to structured relations with others in a system, where there are feedback affects within and between levels. In this kind of complexity view of wellbeing, we can understand wellbeing outcomes as being generated or denied through the interactions of agency and structure across interconnecting levels of scale (Ramalingam et al. 2008; Dyson and Todd 2010; McGregor 2011). This is the same type of complexity analysis that has emerged to strongly feature in the contemporary resilience and sustainability literatures. This strong affinity with complexity thinking is one of the connecting characteristics that bind these three concepts in a new trinity. As we shall see in the chapters on resilience and sustainability, complexity thinking has been transitioning from ecology and other natural sciences to the social sciences but although complexity thinking deals a lot with relationships there is no clearly stated view about whether the human beings in this complex system are to be considered as maximising individuals or conceived of as social beings. This analysis of these two competing conceptions of wellbeing can then illuminate the issues at hand for governments and governance. If the individualistic conception remains dominant then we are moving in the direction of a system of governance that is founded on a view of society as a collectivity of individuals, all of whom are and should be encouraged to think of themselves as maximising their own wellbeing. In this vision of society ‘the market’ plays a central role. This is governance founded on the telos of living well. The alternative is a social notion of wellbeing that conceives of society as collectivities of social beings whose wellbeing is entirely dependent on each other. This involves a telos of living well together (Deneulin and McGregor 2010). In this vision ‘government’ plays a critical role. The role of current governments is important in respect of which vision it is working towards, because the telos that is favoured not only shapes policy provision, but will be promoted in the struggles for hearts and minds that are present in competing visions of our future societies. Perhaps ironically the role of government in the telos of living well can involve a reduction in the direct role of government and an increased burden on the individual to do the things that governments might previously have done. It is not surprising therefore that in the UK David Cameron’s enthusiasm for wellbeing was also accompanied by his call for ‘big society’.

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This kind of governance at a distance might be challenged if the role of government is seen as founded on the telos of living well together. This involves government playing an active role in addressing the key issues that are causing us to fail to live well together. As we have noted, one of the most obvious manifestations of us failing to live well together, either in nation states or on a global scale, is the persistence of chronic wellbeing failures (harmful poverty). And yet these failures exist in an era when inequalities are increasing. The adoption of social telos in the context of a complex-systems view would require governments at nation state and global levels to play a specific role in reducing inequality and its attendant harmful poverty. At its root this would involve ensuring that all people, in all societies have sufficient resources to enable them to achieve reasonable levels of wellbeing. When the telos of living well together is also thought of in complexsystems terms then the issue of environmental sustainability is brought back into view. This suggests that governments would also have a specific role in respect of the environment, the degradation of which (pace Brundtland) makes it difficult for some people to achieve wellbeing now and which will cause many more people in the future to have great difficulty in achieving a reasonable level of wellbeing. Of course not all depends on what governments decide to promote and support. It may be that the dominance of the individualistic view of wellbeing is a facet of or a product of the institutionalisation of individualism that Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman have argued is a characteristic of reflexive modernity. The pessimistic view that lies at the heart of Davies’ critique is that the happiness agenda is contributing to this institutionalisation. However, what he and other critics might be overlooking is that the opening up of a public debate over how we are to understand wellbeing may have given many people insights into other ways of being that are less individualistic, more social and more environmentally conscious. This then makes the struggle over which wellbeing more than just the matter of ontological debate, because it also about our human consciousness and it shapes human behaviour. The constant battery of adverts and nudging in which we are told what we are and how we should be maximising as individuals is a much an ideology as it is a scientific observation. But it may be that people also are absorbing different notions of wellbeing, not just those that are sold to us by governments and big business, but—and without getting too hippy about it—the holism, spirituality or secular mindfulness, and the social relatedness of the social human being.

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36  J. JOSEPH AND J. A. McGREGOR Kasser, T. (2002). The High Price of Materialism. Cambridge, MA, US: MIT Press. Kessel, J. (2006). Economía Bidimensional Andina. Revista de Ciencias Sociales (Chile), 17, 86–106. Klasen, S. (2010). Measuring and Monitoring Inclusive Growth: Multiple Definitions, Open Questions, and Some Constructive Proposals (ADB Sustainable Development Working Paper No. 12). Manila: Asian Development Bank. Layard, R. (2006). Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. London: Penguin. Lin, K., & Herrmann, P. (Eds.). (2015). Social Quality Theory: A New Perspective on Social Development. Oxford: Berghahn. Lin, K., & Ward, P. (Eds.). (2009). Special Issue: Social Quality in Asia and Europe. Development and Society, 38(2), 201–208. Marmot, M. (2004). The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity. New York: Times Books. McGregor, J. A. (2007). Researching Human Wellbeing: From Concepts to Methodology (Chapter 14). In I. Gough & J. A. McGregor (Eds.), Well-Being in Developing Countries: From Theory to Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGregor, J. A. (2011). Reimagining Development Through the Crisis Watch Initiative. IDS Bulletin, 42(5), 17–23. McGregor, J. A. (2014). Poverty, Wellbeing, and Sustainability (Chapter 14). In E. Neumayer, G. Atkinson, S. Dietz, & M. Agarwala (Eds.), The Handbook of Sustainable Development. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. McGregor, J. A. (2018). Reconciling Universal Frameworks and Local Realities in Understanding and Measuring Wellbeing (Chapter 9). In I. Bache & K. Scott (Eds.), The Politics of Wellbeing: Theory, Policy and Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McGregor, J. A., McKay, A., & Velazco, J. (2007). Needs and Resources in the Investigation of Wellbeing in Developing Countries: Illustrative Evidence from Bangladesh and Peru. Journal of Economic Methodology, 14(1), 107–131. McGregor, J. A., & Pouw, N. (2017, July). Towards an Economics of Wellbeing: What Would Economics Look Like If It Were Focused on Human Wellbeing? Cambridge Journal of Economics, 41(4), 1123–1142. https://doi. org/10.1093/cje/bew044. McGregor, J. A., & Sumner, A. (2010). Beyond Business as Usual: What Might 3-D Wellbeing Contribute to MDG Momentum? IDS Bulletin, 41(1), 104–112. Noll, H.-H. (2011). The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi-Report: Old Wine in New Skins? Views from a Social Indicators Perspective. Social Indicators Research, 102, 111–116.

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OECD. (2011). How’s Life? Measuring Well-Being. Paris: OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264121164-en. Oxfam. (2012). Oxfam Humankind Index for Scotland: Methodology, Consultation and Results. Oxfam Research Report. http://www.northernstarassociates.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/HKIcmrApril2012.pdf. Oxfam. (2013). The Human Kind Index: A New Measure of Scotland’s Prosperity (Second Results). Oxfam Scotland. https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository. com/bitstream/handle/10546/293743/rr-humankind-index-secondresults-100613-en.pdf;jsessionid=008841E387F878CD9C3AAFE170CA28B4?sequence=1. Ramalingam, B., & Jones, H., with Reba, T., & Young, J. (2008). Exploring the Science of Complexity: Ideas and Implications for Development and Humanitarian Efforts (ODI Working Paper 285). London: Overseas Development Institute. Rojas, M. (2008). Experienced Poverty and Income Poverty in Mexico: A Subjective Well-Being Approach. World Development, 36(6), 1078–1093. Ryan, R., & Deci, E. (2001). On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 141–166. Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness Is Everything, or Is It? Explorations on the Meaning of Psychological Well-Being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1069–1081. Salgado, F. (2010). Sumaq Kawsay: The Birth of a Notion? CADERNOS EBAPE. BR, 8(2), Paper 1, Rio de Janeiro. Sanders, M., Snijders, V., & Hallsworth, M. (2018). Behavioural Science and Policy: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going? Behavioural Public Policy, 2(2), 144–167. Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive Psychology: An Introduction. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5–14. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Stiglitz, J. (2012). The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stiglitz, J. E., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J.-P. (2009). Stiglitz Commission. Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Available at http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/118025/118123/ Fitoussi+Commission+report. Accessed 17 December 2018. Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Townsend, P. (1979). Poverty in the United Kingdom: A Survey of Household Resources and Standards of Living. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

38  J. JOSEPH AND J. A. McGREGOR Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York: New York University Press. UK Government. (2014). The Care Act 2014. London: HMSO. UK Government, Department of Health and Social Care. (2018, October). Care and Support Statutory Guidance. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/care-act-statutory-guidance/care-and-support-statutory-guidance. Accessed 16 July 2019. UN. (1986). Declaration on the Right to Development. A/RES/41/128. New York: UN General Assembly. https://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/41/ a41r128.htm. Accessed 16 July 2019. UN. (2013). Happiness: Towards a Holistic Approach to Development. Note by the Secretary-General to the General Assembly. Available at https://undocs. org/A/67/697. Accessed 25 June 2019. UN General Assembly. (2015, October 21). Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. A/RES/70/1. Available at https:// www.refworld.org/docid/57b6e3e44.html. Accessed 25 June 2019. Villalba-Eguiluz, C. U., & Etxano, I. (2017). Buen Vivir vs Development: The Limits of (Neo-) Extractivism. Ecological Economics, 138, 1–11. Wilkinson, R. G., & Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. Williams, M., & Penman, D. (2011). Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World. London: Piatkus. World Economic Forum. (2012). Well-Being and Global Success. Geneva: WEF. World Economic Forum. (2017). Future Preparedness: A Conceptual Framework for Measuring Country Performance. Geneva: WEF White Paper.

CHAPTER 3

Resilience

Abstract  Resilience has found influence in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the ongoing global environmental crisis. This ­chapter briefly looks at a range of policy areas such as disaster risk reduction, humanitarian crisis and development strategy. It examines the appeal of resilience as a way of emphasising our capacity to evolve and adapt. The human element of resilience emphasises such things as reflexivity, awareness, innovative and enterprising behaviour and flexibility. After considering the ways that resilience gets is to think about risks and shocks, the chapter asks whether this is stronger in Anglo-Saxon culture and favours a more individualist, even neoliberal, way of thinking. Resilience, understood in these terms, supports a type of governance that operates ‘from a distance’ through facilitative measures to encourage certain forms of conduct and organising. This is also related to a post-crisis rationality that is coming to terms with economic uncertainty as well as the need for austerity and for scaling-back forms of (public) intervention. Keywords  Resilience · Governance Neoliberalism · Disasters

· Governmentality · Crisis ·

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Joseph and J. A. McGregor, Wellbeing, Resilience and Sustainability, Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32307-3_3

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The idea of resilience has spread rapidly across different spheres of policy-making in recent years. Its meaning, however, is still far from agreed. Broadly speaking, it can be said to refer to the ability to recover from crises, shocks and disasters, or to cope with risks and stresses (DFID 2011; European Commission 2012). This can apply at the level of systems, countries, states, institutions, societies, communities and individuals. In particular, the origins of the notion as derived from ecological thinking stress the ability of a system to adapt and survive. By contrast, the psychology literature looks at the ability of individuals to cope with trauma, while the notion of societal resilience captures both aspects and deals with how people in communities are able to withstand, recover from and adapt to shocks and stresses (Berkes and Ross 2015). As well as the issue of whether to focus more on institutions, infrastructure or people, there is also a significant debate over whether resilience means withstanding, ‘bouncing back’, restoring functioning, adapting to new conditions or evolving in a new direction in order to better deal with crises. In the context of the ongoing global environmental crisis and in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, resilience has found influence across a wide range of policy areas and the chapter will briefly look at such things as disaster risk reduction, humanitarian crisis, development strategy, counterterrorism, critical infrastructure protection, cyber threats, civil protection and national security. It uses these to draw a distinction between approaches emphasising protection against threats and use of physical infrastructure, and those approaches that place more emphasis on human resilience and our capability to evolve and adapt. The human element of resilience emphasises such things as reflexivity, awareness, innovative and enterprising behaviour, flexibility and adaptability. However, beyond the notion of ‘restoring functioning’ or going back to a previous state of equilibrium, new thinking on resilience sees crises as providing opportunities to adapt and change ways of organising and functioning. A recent World Bank strategy paper, for example, argues, ‘That crises and subsequent reconstruction programs provide opportunities to change the status quo and behaviours that contribute to underlying vulnerabilities’ (World Bank 2014, p. 13). Once we have examined resilience as a particular way of thinking about risks and shocks, the rest of the chapter will prepare the ground for later discussion. This includes considering why the idea that resilience is particularly strong in Anglo-Saxon culture, and for this analysis, the

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issue of the commonality of the cultural roots of neoliberalism and contemporary conceptualisations of resilience will be a matter of significance. It may be that resilience is taken as a given in other societies and cultures where there is an everyday need for such a quality (floods in some countries, earthquakes in others, poverty-vulnerability in all poor countries). For example, we should note that poor people in countries such as Bangladesh had discovered resilience long before it was named and claimed by the current generation of social scientists and policy-makers. In the case of Bangladesh, living in the active delta of two of the worlds’ major rivers (the Ganges and the Brahmaputra) has meant that poor people and communities have had to bounce back from catastrophic flooding and natural disasters on a regular basis and usually have done so with minimal amount of assistance from government (Zaman 1993). The way that the new concept of resilience intersects with other neoliberal ways of understanding human conduct is particularly important for this analysis, and we explore the extent to which it can be seen as part of a new trinity that critically reflects upon liberal ways of understanding the world. All of this is understood through the framework of new forms of governance, resilience in this sense being understood as a form of governance ‘from a distance’ operating through facilitative measures to encourage certain forms of conduct and organising. This is also related to a post-crisis rationality that is coming to terms with economic uncertainty as well as the need for austerity and for scaling-back forms of (public) intervention.

Systems Resilience Resilience is not a new idea. It has been around for quite some time, with work in psychology dating from the 1950s and in ecology from Holling’s work on system resilience in the 1970s. However, a task for this book is to address why it is that resilience has become so much more significant in recent years. First, we will sketch the development of resilience in relation to theories of adaptive systems before supplementing this systems approach with more psychological and societal understandings of resilience. We build up the picture in order to see how resilience has developed as a means of governing people and fostering a sense of self-governance and responsibility.

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A systems approach to resilience can be found in a body of literature concerned with how systems return to equilibrium following a disturbance. One approach to this issue—the environmental view—draws on the physical sciences and engineering, focusing on efficiency, constancy and predictability. The other—the ecological view—looks at how much systems can absorb disturbance before the system changes its structure (Holling 1996, p. 33). Unlike the engineering view, this is about evolution and adaptation rather a return to the way things were previously. Nevertheless, this view of resilience is still somewhat conservative. For as Holling argues, the concern is with ‘the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables’ (Holling 1973, p. 14). This interpretation places more emphasis on the ability of a system to withstand and absorb shocks in order to maintain the same relationships and functioning. It might be compared with the idea of robustness understood as the maintenance of system performance in the face of exogenous shocks and disturbances. However, it challenges the engineering view of resilience as a return to a stable state by emphasising constantly changing equilibria adapt to disturbances. The emphasis is on how systems might reorganise themselves and whether instabilities act as catalysts for this process. The Hollings approach encouraged the development of a new literature on social-ecological systems. Here, a further set of characteristics of systems are emphasised, and in particular, processes of learning and adaptation are highlighted. As one influential study argues, resilience is now understood as a response to disturbances, the capacity for self-organisation and the ability to learn and adapt to changes (Folke 2006). We can say that engineering resilience emphasises recovery and return to a stable equilibrium following a disturbance, while ecological resilience looks at multiple equilibria and changing states, but continues to emphasise stability and robustness. Holling’s argument (1973) is that the constancy of a system is less important than the ability of its essential relationships to withstand these shocks and persist can be understood through the idea of complex adaptive systems. These are comprised of multiple parts which interact in multiple and unpredictable ways. As we move to more societal and psychological accounts of resilience, we start to find greater emphasis on notions of learning and innovation by different agents within the system. Complex interconnections between political, security, economic, social and environmental subsystems mean that

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shocks in one subsystem cause reactions in the others producing mutual adaptation. Societal resilience fits into this picture of complexity through the role of institutions, resources and adaptive facilitators (Bujones et al. 2013, p. 7; Ramalingam 2013).

Psychological and Societal Resilience The notion of resilience has a long tradition in psychology, reaching back to the 1950s when the term was first explicitly used in the discipline, with two distinguishable strands of work relating to social psychology and mental health. These were given a relaunch with the rediscovery of the notion of human wellbeing and life satisfaction and the rise of work of subjective wellbeing and positive psychology in the 1990s. These two strands of thinking on psychological resilience broadly persist. The social strand involves studying how people draw on wider social resources in order to be resilient (Ryan et al. 2006; Ryan and Sapp 2007), while the more clinical strand focuses on the capacities of individuals to be resilient in the face of challenges and adversity (Huppert and Baylis 2004; Cummins 1995, 2010). There is also a significant body of work on childhood resilience that draws on both strands of work (Ungar 2005). In the clinical work, individual or psychological resilience can be understood as successful adaptation and avoidance of a pathological outcome following exposure to stressful or traumatic life events or circumstances, maintaining a healthy outcome and the capacity to rebound (Seery et al. 2010, p. 1025). Both Huppert and Cummins are proponents of forms of ‘set-point theory’. This posits that humans have ‘a set point’ level of personal wellbeing and that they then have mechanisms that enable them to adapt to change and recover back to this set-point from personal catastrophes such as the loss of near kin, divorce or serious illness. Cummins sees this as involving a combination of social and neurological mechanisms and calls this process homeostasis (2010). Going beyond the application of these ideas in studies of childhood development or personal bereavement, forms of set-point theory have been related to traumatic events impacting on whole communities such as Hurricane Katrina (Waters 2016) or 9/11 (Bonanno et al. 2006). Distinguishing between recovery and resilience might mean, on the one hand, a return to a pre-trauma state and ‘baseline functioning’ and, on the other, to draw upon negative events to enhance capacity for future resilience with exposure to stress having a positive, toughening effect (Seery et al. 2010, p. 1026).

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The work of Bonanno et al. on recovery from disasters introduces elements of a more social approach. The various empirical studies show how social relationships can be instrumentally an important source of support contributing to the process of bouncing back from shocks or setbacks. This type of observation is also found in the development studies and social anthropology literatures on coping with poverty or disasters (Corbett 1988; Chambers 1989; Paton and Johnston 2001). From the eudaimonic wellbeing literature, self-determination theory (SDT) as developed by Richard Ryan and colleagues provides a more theorised basis for the link between wellbeing and resilience (Ryan et al. 2006). SDT posits the need for relatedness as one of three basic and universal psychological needs. Relatedness, alongside autonomy and competence, is necessary for humans to be well and to thrive. However, the notion of relatedness here is not the idea of instrumental relationships that enable one to cope with setbacks; rather, it is a fundamental contributor to the capacity to be well in as much as it provides people with identity and a sense of belonging (Ryan and Sapp 2007). While this provides a deeper psychological foundation of ideas about how resilience and wellbeing are related, the relationship between the two concepts has been highlighted more explicitly in recent work by Helliwell. In this more quantitative work, a strong case is made for the importance of social capital in maintaining levels of wellbeing (Helliwell et al. 2013). Berkes and Ross (2015) combine psychological approaches to resilience with ecological resilience thinking to develop an integrated concept of community resilience (Berkes and Ross 2015, p. 6). The psychological capacity that individuals possess is understood in relation to social environment and such things as social networks, communications, sense of belonging, learning, and a readiness to accept change (Berkes and Ross 2015, pp. 10–11). This connects to the notion of resilience to the idea of social capital, with its emphasis on social cohesion, community bonding and supporting networks. Through networks and communities, individuals are able to access financial and non-financial resources, access information, receive emotional support and contribute to social cohesion. They also provide the basis for social trust, collective action and public goods (Aldrich and Meyer 2015, p. 259). Take the following argument for the relationship between resilience and social capital:

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Social capital rests upon the trust that exists among citizens, and between citizens and governments. Trust is the basis upon which much else happens. Trust builds solidarity and bonds individuals to one another and to their communities. The social capital that follows in its wake enables communities and their governments to plan for shocks and, crucially, better respond to shocks and disasters once they occur. Once disruption strikes, higher social capital leads to cooperation, hence collective action. Governments that engage community through dialogue and make informed decisions based upon that engagement are. (Engelke 2017, p. 6)

Here, in this piece from the Atlantic Council, resilience is seen as synonymous with an ‘engaged community’, helping to forge stronger ties in the face of shocks and uncertainty. Social capital is at the heart of this logic, representing a shift from a concern with abstract systems to the actual ways in which people relate to one another (Engelke 2017, p. 6). There is now a large body of literature that explores the link between ecological and social components of a system through the complex resource organisations that they contain—particular economic systems and resources, social institutions and organisations. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005 was a major global exercise that set out a framework for understanding the contribution that ecosystems make to human wellbeing (MEA 2005). The ecosystems services approach that this report helped to launch has stimulated a number of major research exercises (see, e.g., ESPA 2018). Taking a complex systems approach the relationship between ecosystem services and human wellbeing, the report uses the concept of resilience extensively. The relationship between the two is seen to run in both directions: the resilience of ecosystems is being reduced by inappropriate human use of ecosystem services (in pursuit of wellbeing), but also the wellbeing of people can be enhanced (via improved resilience) by the appropriate management and use of ecosystems on which they depend. Adger argues that social resilience can be understood as the ability to withstand external shocks to the social infrastructure. To manage this requires innovation, social learning and coping with change (Adger 2000, p. 361). Above all else, social-ecological resilience is defined by adaptive capacity. As one analysis puts it:

46  J. JOSEPH AND J. A. McGREGOR The key feature that distinguishes systems resilience from complex adaptive systems resilience is adaptive capacity or adaptability. It is not just adaptation—change—in response to conditions. It is the ability of systems— households, people, communities, ecosystems, nations—to generate new ways of operating, new systemic relationships. If we consider that parts or connections in systems fail or become untenable, adaptive capacity is a key determiner of resilience. Hence in complex adaptive systems, resilience is best defined as the ability to withstand, recover from, and reorganize in response to crises. Function is maintained, but system structure may not be. (Martin-Breen and Anderies 2011, p. 7)

Adaptive capacity can be understood as spanning different levels from societies and social-ecological systems through to communities and down to individuals. The resilience literature uses the term panarchy to refer to the way that the dynamics of adaptive cycles are nested across different spaces, time scales and levels of organisation (Gunderson et al. 2002). Adaptive capacity at the level of societies or social systems is said to depend on the ability of institutions to absorb external shocks and the capacity they have to renew themselves (Berkes et al. 2000; Gunderson 2003). Indeed, across the levels, from individuals through to societies, adaptive capacity can be said to involve: (i) response to disturbance, (ii) capacity to self-organise, and (iii) capacity to learn and adapt (emBRACE 2012, p. 22; Folke 2006). Other discussions of societal resilience connect it to ideas such as social learning, reflective capacity, social vulnerability and the issues of entitlements, capabilities, freedom and choices or of justice, fairness and equity (emBRACE 2012, p. 3). While the ecology literature is mostly focused on ­ environmental change, the societal resilience literature includes security threats to societies such as pandemics, economic shocks and terrorism. Applying the concept of resilience to the study of societies means placing emphasis on such things as complexity, self-organisation, diversity and nonlinear ways of behaving (Gunderson et al. 2002, p. 530). The adaptive capacity of social systems depends on the nature of their institutions and their governance to absorb external shocks (Berkes et al. 2000; Folke 2006), which can actually play a constructive role because they force us to consider issues of learning, adapting and renewal. Societal resilience is part of a historically woven fabric in which the system as a whole and the system’s elements learn and evolve.

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Table 3.1  Four concepts of resilience Resilience concept

Characteristics

Focus

Context

Engineering resilience Ecological/ecosystem resilience

Return time, efficiency Ability to buffer capacity, withstand shock, maintain function Interplay disturbance and reorganisation, sustaining and developing Recovery from physical or emotional shocks or trauma

Recovery, constancy Persistence, robustness

Vicinity of a stable equilibrium Multiple equilibria, stability landscapes

Adaptive capacity, transformability, learning, innovation

Integrated system feedback, cross-scale dynamic interactions

Psychological capabilities and human functioning

Concerns with human functioning and mental health

Social-ecological resilience

Psychological resilience

Source Adapted from de Bruijne et al. (2010, p. 19)

Societal resilience shifts attention from the persistence of system functions to adaptation and even social transformation in the face of global challenges (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013). The differences between four approaches—engineering resilience, ecological resilience, social-ecological resilience and psychological resilience—can be summarised in Table 3.1. As the table shows, the social-ecological approach, where we locate the idea of societal resilience and its governance, places particular focus on the way crises stimulate adaptive capacities and, of particular relevance to governance, encourages learning and innovation. Thus, crises and exogenous shocks can be seen as having the potential to bring out the best out of societies, communities, institutions and individuals, and this positive perspective helps us partly understand why it is that resilience has emerged as such an attractive idea for policy-makers.

Resilience and Change It is illuminating to look at how different understandings of resilience relate to change. Following Chandler (2014, pp. 6–7), we might call the first understanding classical and the second understanding post-classical, although it is more straightforward here to call the first approach conservative and the second approach transformational.

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For Chandler, classical understandings of human resilience are ‘subject-based understandings of inner capacities for survival’. In psychology and engineering, this means the capacity to withstand or, if necessary, the ability to ‘bounce-back’. Chandler associates this view with the classical liberal subject of modernity, the natural basis for framing the rational spheres of law, politics and the market (Chandler 2014, p. 6). The post-classical approach, that can also be seen as ‘post-liberal’ and that we are calling transformational, replaces the autonomous individual with a relational subject who is ‘embedded’ in a much more complex and uncertain environment with which the subject must dynamically interact. This is a more emergent and adaptive process where the subject cannot be seen in isolation from the system of which they form a part. The emphasis on adaptation means that the resilient subject is not a subject who is fully secure or certain, but rather a self-aware subject (Chandler 2014, p. 11). This argument, while containing a persuasive element, is also somewhat problematic since it entails certain understandings of what liberalism is, what an autonomous liberal subject looks like and whether a ‘post-liberal’ understanding represents a break from, rather than a continuation of such a perspective. If, as some argue (Evans and Reid 2014; Walker and Cooper 2011; Zebrowski 2016), resilience has close affinities with neoliberal understandings, then it is associated with a view that is already critical of the ‘classical liberal’ viewpoint—hence, resilience is not a break but a continuation of prevailing neoliberal views. It seems easier to decouple the understanding of resilience from the understanding of liberalism debate and instead to talk of more traditional or conservative understandings of resilience as preservation or restoring a previous state, and more dynamic or transformative arguments about adaptability and transformation. Indeed, adaptability and transformation could themselves be separated into distinct positions. According to Bouchard, there are three approaches to resilience: (a) resilience as successful opposition and resistance to external shocks and a return to the former state; (b) resilience as successful adaptation to a new situation involving adjustment, negotiation and compromise; and (c) resilience as the opportunity to creatively respond to new challenges showing innovation and thriving in the face of in adversity (Bouchard 2013, p. 267). The first approach to resilience might be said to be more conservative, although not in the political sense. It emphasises robustness, withstanding, restoring and even resistance in the face of change, and we might

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find it more prominent in certain areas of policy-making such as critical infrastructure protection and in certain countries such as continental Europe. By contrast, approaches that emphasise adaptation, adjustment and even creative opportunity are more transformative in approach and might be considered more dynamic. However, these tend to be more Anglo-Saxon in character, and the idea of adaptation can plausibly be considered politically conservative rather than radical insofar as it often focuses on the initiative of individuals, rather than on the state playing a socially or politically progressive role. How resilience relates to sustainability is another matter of discussion (McGregor 2014). If it is understood as preserving something or some function, then this might conflict with the transformative understanding of resilience. It depends on what it is that is being preserved or sustained and what methods might be used. Promoting sustainability through risk avoidance might contrast with promoting adaptive capacities. But as Martin-Breen and Anderies go on to suggest ‘if one adopts, however, the additional thesis that disruptive events of a certain magnitude cannot be avoided, then sustainability over time requires resilience at each time’ (Martin-Breen and Anderies 2011, p. 14). Being sustainable requires constant resilience. Robustness is another term associated with resilience and indeed is often used to describe some of the systemic aims of resilience building. For the transformative approach, however, robustness is a static concept that applies only to fixed systems faced with specific external shocks. In a world of complexity, this will not work and resilience is required to emphasise greater flexibility, adaptation and learning processes. These aspects come to play a strategic role in resilience thinking. Crises can now sometimes be seen in a positive sense insofar as they encourage attitudes to change and force us to consider issues of learning, adaptation and renewal (Berkes et al. 2000, p. 20). Focus starts to shift from resilience understood as the systemic capacity to reorganise to the societal focus on the capacity to learn and adapt. It is in consideration of these issues that resilience overlaps with the ideas of wellbeing and sustainability. As we have noted, the MEA connects human wellbeing and sustainability in part through the idea of resilience by raising a concern for better or more adaptive resource management, understood as the opportunity for renewal, in systems capable of learning and adapting (Gunderson et al. 2002). Adaptive resource management is based on social and institutional learning while also emphasising feedbacks from the

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environment in shaping policy. Our understanding of socio-ecological systems places greater emphasis on continuous change and disturbance. For writers like Folke, the issue is no longer one of robustness or capacity to absorb disturbance but to navigate dynamic adaptive interplays (Folke 2006, p. 259). Ironically, the transformative view of resilience does have a certain degree of fatalism about it. Its presentation of individual opportunity is premised on the acceptance that change is inevitable. As one account of this position puts it: One slogan of resilience thinking is ‘Embracing Change’. One part of this is accepting that change in response to adversity is itself normal. Fighting against it, as well, can actually cause a decrease in resilience. Try to keep everything the same, and the chance of future catastrophe can actually increase. (Martin-Breen and Anderies 2011, p. 6)

To resist change is seen as both conservative and foolish. Yet, as this change is taken for granted, the basis for human empowerment is shifted to the individual and community level, denying the agency of larger social groups or society as a whole in relation to large-scale social projects. Agency becomes more micro-level, embodied in life choices, risk strategies and human capabilities. A good example of this can be found in the work of Aaron Wildavsky. Wildavsky is well known for his work on risk, and he addresses resilience through his framework by arguing the need for a more risk-conscious and market-oriented approach (Wildavsky 1988). A strategy of resilience is contrasted with one of anticipation with the claim that we increasingly need to rely on experience and to develop a capacity for learning. He writes that to be prepared for adversity requires ‘improvement in overall capability, i.e., a generalized capacity to investigate, to learn, and to act, without knowing in advance what one will be called to act upon’ (Wildavsky 1988, p. 70). This means accumulating generalisable resources like knowledge, wealth, energy, communication and organisational capacity. This leads to an endorsement of capitalism and the market due to its ability to accumulate the most resources and to accumulate knowledge through ‘incessant and decentralized trial and error’ (Wildavsky and Wildvasky 2005). We see here that while a conservative approach to resilience might emphasise robustness, withstanding and restoring, a transformative approach embraces a culture of risk, anticipation and learning in keeping with the present spirit of

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capitalism and enterprise. However, it is also noticeably a spirit of capitalism that recognises the inevitability of crises and which, following the recent financial crisis, is trying to reinvent itself in the face of continuing uncertainty, instability and austerity.

Applying Resilience We briefly outline here how resilience is making a difference in a number of policy areas. This reveals the multi-scalar character of resilience since it is being applied at local, national, regional and global levels. We limit our account to the promotion of resilience in relation to specific forms of governance conducted either by governments or international organisations, although an important part of resilience promotion is to try and devolve its application downwards to more local actors. Although the spread of resilience approaches is now a global phenomenon, it has made a particularly strong impact in the United Kingdom. In particular, we note the vital role of the Cabinet Office, the department of government charged with promoting government strategies and objectives and for coordinating this with other government departments. Within the Cabinet Office, we should note the role of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, a body that was established in 2001 in response to a number of threats, scares and epidemics such as the Y2K bug, flooding and food scares. Following 9/11, counterterrorism and civil protection became a major concern. The UK government’s approach was now focused on the idea of new, more complex challenges such as unpredictable events, networked threats and the challenging nature of various risks, stresses and disruptions. The idea of resilience was able to fit neatly with this approach, seeming to allow for a greater degree of flexibility and a new way of approaching these new challenges. This is reflected in the most recent national security strategies, not just in the UK but in other countries as well. Resilience enters the discourse as a means of highlighting changed conditions of global complexity and uncertainty. For example, the UK’s 2015 National Security Strategy looks at the UK’s place in a rapidly changing, globalised world with the constant pressure of external shocks and threats with events overseas increasingly affecting what happens at home. The clearer international divisions present during the Cold War have given way to a complex array of new dangers coming from multiple sources—from natural disasters to cyber-attacks (Cabinet Office 2015, p. 15). The European Union’s

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Global Strategy likewise talks of ‘a more difficult, more connected, contested and complex world’ (High Representative [HR/VP] 2016, p. 15), while also emphasising the crises and uncertainties faced by the EU itself (financial, populism, migration, Brexit, terrorism). Similar uncertainty can be seen in the United States, French, German and numerous other National Security Strategies. Resilience is seen as a necessary strategy in an age of complexity, where past ways of acting are being called into question. Britain’s resilience strategy is driven by the perception of the UK’s openness and therefore vulnerability to different global forces. Connectedness to numerous global networks provides significant opportunities but also exposure to many threats. National Security Strategy talks of the changing nature of risks in a fast-changing world, requiring a hard-headed reappraisal of foreign policy and security objectives (Cabinet Office 2010a, p. 9). Resilience is introduced into this global picture with the need to ensure: a secure and resilient UK – protecting our people, economy, infrastructure, territory and way of life from all major risks that can affect us directly – requiring both direct protection against real and present threats such as terrorism and cyber attack, resilience in the face of natural and man-made emergencies and crime, and deterrence against less likely threats such as a military attack by another state. (Cabinet Office 2010a, p. 22)

Doing so requires a rethink of partnerships and alliances although this starts to filter downwards, away from global strategy and into the territory of civil protection. In particular, recent UK National Security Strategies call for coalitions of public, private and civil society actors, between owners or operators of critical infrastructure and services, with businesses, local authorities and communities, and ultimately with individuals, ‘where changing people’s behaviour is the best way to mitigate risk’ (Cabinet Office 2008, p. 8). This is consistent with existing beliefs such as those held by the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team—‘the nudge unit’ (Sanders et al. 2018). An important document in pursuing this approach is the Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience, placing a strong emphasis on self-governance whereby individuals and local groups learn to help themselves (Cabinet Office 2011, p. 4). Government, therefore, is conceived in a supportive capacity rather than as a direct actor. It sees itself

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promoting various ‘guiding principles’, ‘inviting’ individuals, communities and practitioners to ‘engage’ in community resilience, explaining the desired outcomes, facilitating dialogue with relevant partners, sharing good practice, seeking views, ideas and support for further development of this work (Cabinet Office 2010b, p. 9). Communities themselves are to be given ‘ownership’ of resilience work while ‘the Government role is to support, empower and facilitate; ownership should always be retained by communities who have chosen to get involved in this work’ (Cabinet Office 2010b, p. 14). However, with this ownership comes the requirement of communities to take on the responsibility for ensuring their own resilience and recovery (Cabinet Office 2010b, p. 7). Preparing for Emergencies: Guide for Communities provides a good example of government attempts to make communities better equipped and more aware of their vulnerabilities and the risks they face. It seeks to get people to ‘personally take action to prepare for the consequences of emergencies’, making the most of their skills, knowledge and resources in a pragmatic but reflexive way. This type of government engagement is clearly aimed at creating a certain type of responsible subject: Community resilience is not about creating or identifying a new community or network; it is about considering what already exists around you, what you already do, who you already talk to or work with; and thinking about how you could work together before, during and after an incident or emergency. (Cabinet Office 2016, p. 9)

We find a similar approach if we look at resilience promotion in the United States. Take, for example, this statement from the Department of Homeland Security: We will emphasize individual and community preparedness and resilience through frequent engagement that provides clear and reliable risk and emergency information to the public. A key part of this effort is providing practical steps that all Americans can take to protect themselves, their families, and their neighbors. This includes transmitting information through multiple pathways and to those with special needs. In addition, we support efforts to develop a nationwide public safety broadband network. Our efforts to inform and empower Americans and their communities recognize that resilience has always been at the heart of the American spirit. (United States Government 2010, p. 19)

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The latest National Security Strategy advocates a ‘Whole of Community approach, bringing together all elements of our society—individuals, local communities, the private and non-profit sectors, faith-based organizations, and all levels of government—to make sure America is resilient in the face of adversity’ (United States Government 2015, p. 8). This is promoted by the Department of Homeland Security, established after 9/11 as the body with primary responsibility for protection against domestic and civil emergencies. The blend of national security and civil protection is evident in many policy statements with ‘the development of prepared, vigilant, and engaged communities’ being ‘at the heart of a resilient country’ (United States Government 2010, p. 16). America’s greatest resource lies in the ‘ideas, values, energy, creativity, and resilience of our citizens’ and the ingenuity of the private sector, nongovernmental organisations, foundations, and community-based organisations are seen as ‘critical to U.S. success at home and abroad’ (United States Government 2010, p. 16). The protection of critical infrastructures such as transport, energy supplies, telecommunications and cyberspace might be expected to reveal a more technical side to resilience. However, this is provided not just through physical resilience of infrastructure, but also through organisation and design. The US National Infrastructure Protection Plan defines critical infrastructure as both physical and virtual systems and assets whose destruction would have significant impact on security, the economy, public health or safety. Infrastructure protection requires an ‘integrated approach’ that collectively identifies priorities, articulates clear goals, mitigates risk and supports adaptation based on feedback and the changing environment (Department of Homeland Security 2013, p. 7). The 2013 Plan is significant in promoting resilience and risk management as the main aims of infrastructure planning. Thus, even a seemingly more technical issue of protection is transformed into an approach that targets the behaviour of individuals, communities, businesses and other local groups. The Plan’s ‘Call to Action’ uses the language of empowerment and capacity building to engage local and regional partners. It calls for partnerships and initiatives at the local or regional level in support of national efforts at protection. The state is again given the facilitative role of encouraging local communities, organisations and individuals to provide their own perspective and assessment of risk and mitigation strategies (Department of Homeland Security 2013, p. 22). The 2015 National Preparedness Goal aims for a ‘secure and resilient

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nation’ through building capacities across the whole community, arguing that individual and community preparedness is fundamental to success: ‘Each community contributes to the Goal by individually preparing for the risks that are most relevant and urgent for them individually. By empowering individuals and communities with knowledge and skills they can contribute to achieving the National Preparedness Goal’ (FEMA 2015, p. 2). A very similar argument is found in the UK. The government is promoting a Community Resilience Programme to provide information that encourages individuals and communities to consider the infrastructure they rely on and the risks and vulnerabilities they face so that they can better prepare themselves to deal with an emergency and its possible consequences (Cabinet Office 2011, p. 8). The aims of the programme include increasing individual, family and community resilience, raising awareness of local risks, increasing local response capability, removing barriers to participation in community resilience building and encouraging dialogue between the community and relevant practitioners (Cabinet Office 2011, p. 5). As far as local businesses are concerned, the important issue is to maintain continuity. Business continuity management (BCM) can be understood as ‘a process that helps manage risks to the smooth running of an organisation or delivery of a service, ensuring continuity of critical functions in the event of a disruption, and effective recovery afterwards’ (Cabinet Office 2014). Again, the government’s role is understood as that of facilitator, ensuring that businesses and organisations have a clear understanding of BCM and can identify their key products and services and the threats they face. The above examples reflect attempts by the US and UK governments to foster the capacities for resilience amongst the citizens of these countries. However, we also find resilience as a vital part of overseas strategy, indeed playing a central role in strategies that seek to bridge the gap between short-term humanitarian and emergency interventions and longer-term development strategy. In this approach, the US and UK governments play a leading role through the actions of USAID and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID). However, this is also a field led by international organisations, in particular the World Bank, UNDP, OECD (DAC) and the European Union. As a key UNDP Human Development Report suggests, the international approach to resilience ‘is about ensuring that state, community and global institutions work to empower and protect people’ (UNDP 2014, p. 5).

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Resilience strategy is thus as much about methods of cooperation and coordination as it is about actual grassroots intervention. The European Union is active in building resilience overseas with existing projects in the Sahel region and the Horn of Africa as well as a new emphasis on incorporating resilience into its neighbourhood policy. These projects all reflect the EU’s desire to present a coherent and coordinated foreign policy. Resilience therefore offers an opportunity for the EU to present a coordinated approach that joins together short-term and long-term measures and joins the activities of the different member states and policy branches of the EU itself. However, the EU’s understanding of resilience itself is not particularly radical—it defines it as ‘the ability of an individual, a household, a community, a country or a region to withstand, adapt, and quickly recover from stresses and shocks such as drought, violence, conflict or natural disaster’. Recent work by the World Bank pushes beyond such a definition to embrace a more transformative notion of resilience that encourages greater flexibility and making the most of opportunities (World Bank 2014, p. 58). This embraces the idea of a changing world that provides new possibilities alongside risks and complications. Embracing change is seen as imperative—not to do so reinforces vulnerability, stagnation and impoverishment (World Bank 2014, p. 72). Existing solutions are seen as difficult to apply in situations of deep uncertainty. To deal with uncertainty and show sensitivity to different beliefs and values, the World Bank advocates a more pragmatic and flexible interpretation of its traditional capacity building approach. Hence, policy-makers should: aim for robust policies that may not be optimal in the most likely future but that lead to acceptable outcomes in a large range of scenarios and that are adaptive and flexible: that is, policies that are easy to revise as new information becomes available. More learning, and an iterative process of monitoring and learning, is needed about how to apply risk management approaches, especially in lower-income environments. (World Bank 2014, p. 99)

However, the World Bank continues to talk of the need for the state to provide strong institutions as an ‘enabling environment’ for greater flexibility in the short term and formality in the long run (World Bank 2014, p. 202). Resilience thinking, while offering a different focus on flexible

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capacities including more emphasis on individual capabilities, continues to accept the need for an institutional approach while recognising past failures at such efforts to achieve this. Hence, the need to turn to local capacities and the dilemma of whether to embrace these or try to chance them. Certainly, the attitude of international organisations to local people has undergone something of a change. Those local populations who display resilience are to be lauded, no more so than indigenous populations living under extreme conditions. The publication of the Arctic Resilience Report in 2016 is a case in point. Here, there is a celebration of the capacity of indigenous people to cope with the challenges of their region, portraying them as an exemplary model for humanity. As Reid notes, this does, in some sense, reverse the colonial legacy of denigrating indigenous knowledge and practices (2018, p. 13). At the same time, it has a tendency to essentialise such populations, often perceived as custodians of nature, but who must nevertheless learn to live with the changing nature of their environment and should show enterprise in response to the precariousness of their nature-based livelihoods (Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen 2013). Hence, the Report, despite its celebration of indigeneity—or perhaps because of it—has been accused of continuing a neoliberal focus, classifying different indigenous groups according to their differing ability for self-organisation, experimentation, learning and adaptation (Reid 2018, p. 16). These tensions need to be explored since the nature of the ‘human turn’ is at stake here. Going back to the Human Development Report on ‘Building Resilience’ (2014), it is argued that a ‘human development approach to resilience focuses on people and their interactions, where power and social position are important factors. Resilience is to be built at the level of both individuals and society—in terms of their individual capabilities and social competences’ (UNDP 2014, p. 16). Human resilience for the UNDP refers to people’s ability to cope and adjust, ensuring that people make the best (or most robust) choices in the face of adverse events and conditions (UNDP 2014, pp. 1, 15). This forms one part of the trinity of approaches to human decision-making to be highlighted by us in this book. Human resilience means that people can exercise their choices safely and freely—including being confident that the opportunities they have today will not be lost tomorrow (UNDP 2014, p. 17). This focus on human factors and the exercising of personal choice is one of the distinctive dynamics of resilience that will be considered in the following section.

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The Dynamics Behind the Idea of Resilience Here, we look at the reasons why resilience has emerged as a significant current idea, what kind of factors might lie behind its emergence and how it relates to other ideas like wellbeing and sustainability. We provide an account of the distinctive features that make the idea attractive but also look at some of the criticisms of resilience, notably its Anglo-Saxon character and its potential closeness to neoliberal governance. First, we see from the above applications that resilience is an idea that has been used to mobilise individuals and communities. It is recognised that it is not enough just to invest in better infrastructure, physical defences or protection mechanisms, particularly when facing uncertain and unpredictable threats. Resilience therefore takes a more pragmatic approach, focusing on the local community and their particular skills, knowledge and resources. This is particularly relevant post-economic crisis as governance tries to reinvent itself while maintaining neoliberalism’s focus on private initiative. It also seeks to present a positive message to those prepared to deal with the consequences of austerity. As a strategy of governance, resilience aims to encourage individuals and communities to better deal with the problems they face through less reliance on the state and better awareness and self-organisation. This could be understood as devolving responsibilities so that the role of government is to help groups and individuals better govern themselves by facilitating their efforts to learn and organise, enhancing their capacities, offering training, sharing good practices, establishing community forums and other initiatives. In part, this is recognition that communities and individuals are already engaged in such practices and already have significant resources to draw upon. It might also be said to represent a further retreat from the role of government intervention in its Keynesian planned or command forms, and a rethinking of the role of the liberal state that seeks to further distance itself from such a heritage. A resilience strategy is thus conceived as a strategy of governance, first in trying to shift focus away from the top-down, leading role of the state and state intervention; second, in relation to encouraging self-governance and individual and community responsibility as an alternative; and third, in relation to better coordination, direction and enhancement of already existing practices, particularly when supporting the above two trends. Resilience can be seen as an attractive option because these arguments appear to recognise the specific qualities of our social and human

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engagements. It is for this reason that resilience can be paired with wellbeing and sustainability getting at certain ‘intangible elements of social capital’ (Bujones et al. 2013, p. 12). All three ideas suggest that we manage our lives through drawing on distinctive human and societal resources that strengthen our ability to face challenges. Strengthening our capacities combines both the encouragement of individual initiative and decision-making with a favourable institutional environment than enhances societal resilience (DFID 2004, p. 2). This also fits with recent thinking on capabilities that draws on Sen’s idea of development through enhancing our capability to live a good life (Sen 1999), which despite its social awareness nevertheless has weaknesses in its conception of the relational and social dimensions of human wellbeing (Gore 1997; Deneulin and McGregor 2010). Strong elements of this can be found in recent policy thinking that has been influenced by Sen. As the previously mentioned Human Development Report puts it: Enhancing resilience requires more than reducing vulnerability—it calls for empowerment and for fewer restrictions on the exercise of agency—the freedom to act. It also requires strong social and state institutions that can support people’s efforts to cope with adverse events. Well-being is influenced greatly by the context of the larger freedoms within which people live. Societal norms and practices can be prejudicial or discriminatory. So enhancing the freedom to act requires addressing such norms and transforming them. (UNDP 2014, p. 83)

International organisations including the EU therefore embrace resilience, wellbeing and sustainability as a way of encouraging ‘people-centred approaches’ addressed at ‘individual life cycle risks’ (European Commission 2013, p. 3), life choices and individual responsibility. This approach is presented in a positive way as empowering individuals and communities, giving them ownership and responsibility while enhancing their individual and collective capacities and capabilities. There is a negative side to this as well because this turn to human capacities and local communities is founded on the belief that past efforts at large-scale intervention have been unsuccessful. Resilience represents a recognition of the messiness of social life and the complexity of the life choices we face combined with a belief that the old ways of doing things—notably statebuilding abroad and state intervention at home— have not been able to deal with new challenges or keep up with the fast

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pace of social change. This moves us to a key characteristic of resilience— its ability to cope with complexity. Writers on resilience emphasise the networked, interconnected but uncertain and even transient character of our social environment. Questioning the stability of social roles and functions, complex networks are said to be the new ‘web’ that ties together the adaptive governance system (Folke 2006, p. 267). For Chandler, this means that people are considered better at governing than governments because they are more adaptive, more interactive, less formally constrained and more self-­ organised in relation to a complex world of interactive social processes (Chandler 2014, pp. 37–41). All this supports a transformative view of resilience which emphasises the need for human and social adaptability, reflexivity, behavioural and organisational change. However, a radical view of resilience might be at odds with actual practice, particularly if resilience is used to support existing practices rather than introducing new ones. In terms of underlying rationality or justification, this is also evident in efforts to measure resilience. This is less developed than the efforts we find in the wellbeing approaches and in this respect resilience remains something of a fuzzy concept. An overview of different measurement approaches shows a focus on livelihood capitals, although these have to be considered alongside a range of ‘intangible processes that include decision-making, fostering innovation, and institutions and entitlements’ (ODI 2016, p. 14). Overall, half of the frameworks have broad agreement on the use of capital or livelihood assets. Many measurement frameworks track people’s resilience in terms of their adaptive, absorbtive or transformative capacities. However, this raises significant measurement problems since there is little agreement on how to measure the relationship between transformative capacity and such things as shifting power relations, transformative change processes and various governance mechanisms. Consequently, there is limited measurement of resilience capacities beyond the local or household level (ODI 2016, p. 25). We find international approaches to resilience from DFID and the World Bank looking to measure resilience, but this is often focused on the livelihood of households. For example, a World Bank discussion paper on methods for measuring resilience in the Sahel is focused on how households maintain permanent income under conditions of risk and tests this by examining whether a household’s consumption trajectory is sensitive to transitory shocks to income (Alfani et al. 2015, pp. 6–7). This is limited to a test of resilience in relation to levels

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of rainfall and is far from what Béné et al. (2015) describe as a multi-­ scalar, multi-level approach for measuring the responses to disturbances. Some of the challenges of measurement are raised in a UNDP report which itself reflects upon an OECD paper: Experimental work by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development defined vulnerability to future loss of well-being when people lack “assets which are crucial for resilience to risks.” It proposed a set of indicators to assess a society’s vulnerability based on access to different types of capital: economic (poverty), human (education) and social capital (support networks) as well as collective assets, such as essential services… These approaches, though different, have some ideas in common. First, overall risk is defined by the interaction of the chance of something happening (exposure) and its likely impact if it does (vulnerability). Second, the analysis and measurement of vulnerability are more tractable when looking separately at exposure to risk and ability to cope or adapt. Third, vulnerability is itself a multidimensional concept that can include measures of people’s capacity both to cope (in terms of skills, assets or capabilities) and to adapt over the longer term. (UNDP 2014, p. 28)

Such arguments certainly better recognise complexity. However, the very idea of measurement itself might be said to undermine a radically new approach since it puts into the question the idea that there are intangible human or social elements present in these processes never mind the idea that complexity makes it impossible to measure the unmeasurable. Indeed, from a governance perspective, recognising complexity does not necessarily mean a radically new approach. It in fact builds on current trends towards more informal, more pragmatic and more networked forms of governance. Nor should this be taken to indicate a radically changed view of the word as writers like Chandler suggest. Instead, policy-makers employ fairly straightforward arguments for complexity rather than anything that suggests a radical change of paradigm. In national security, the idea of complexity is mainly limited to a discussion of a rapidly changing geopolitics, the globalising, interconnected world, new networked threats and the need for more flexible responses (Cabinet Office 2015). As we have noted, a stronger view of complexity can be found in the emergent ecology and ecosystems literatures where it is normal to talk of complex adaptive systems. In this view, complex systems are understood as comprised of multiple parts which interact in not always predictable

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and linear ways. Complex interconnections between political, security, economic, social and environmental subsystems mean that shocks in one subsystem cause reactions in the others producing mutual adaptation. Societal resilience fits into this picture of complexity through the role of institutions, resources and adaptive facilitators (Bujones et al. 2013, p. 7). The transformational approach is also contradictory in the sense that it emphasises change, but does so by limiting choice, making the following claim Yet, it is fair to claim that we face something new in human history. Our power over both ourselves and the planet we share with all other living things is unprecedented. So, too, is the speed at which our world turns over. More speed and more power have given us greater turbulence, not more predictability. Dynamism and risk, not stability and control, appear to rule the day. (Engelke 2017, p. 2)

Resilience comes to offer hope in a hopeless world. It becomes not a tool for making the world more certain and stable, but for navigating our way through the uncertainty that would otherwise overwhelm us: ‘The fear of chaos, combined with the hope that we can overcome it, has led us to embrace resilience as a means for navigating our world. Resilience captures the imagination precisely because it offers hope during a time of great uncertainty’ (Engelke 2017, p. 2). As with previous arguments about globalisation—where we can steer but cannot stop—we are told that we can take advantage of the opportunities we face so long as we accept the inevitability of the wider changes taking place around us. Not surprisingly, this has led some to see resilience as limiting rather than enabling. If we have very little ability to influence the wider world, then resilience strategies are founded upon a sense of resignation and powerlessness in the face of complexity and uncertainty. A number of critics have highlighted this including Evans and Reid who argue that resilience denies the possibility of securing ourselves against dangers that are seen as beyond our control, creating a sense of the need for constant adaptation (Evans and Reid 2014, pp. 41–42). Zebrowski (2016, p. 100) likewise says that resilience emphasises the need for us to enhance our adaptive capacities because we can no longer believe in the elimination of threats. Critics would point to resilience being dependent upon a fatalistic view of the world which shifts emphasis away from finding solutions to the problems we face by stressing the need for adaptation,

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pragmatism and ‘best fit’ outcomes. It is on this basis that we have to learn how to better govern ourselves and take responsibility for the lives we live. Resilience thinking presents this as human empowerment, but a case can be made that the empowerment of individuals is founded upon a disempowerment of agency as a means of collective intervention. And it might be said to responsibilise the poor and most vulnerable, but these are often precisely the groups least able to change things. Thus, resilience might be said to support a critique of the liberal framework of intervention with its universalist goals and aspirations. These are no longer regarded as sustainable. The denial that we can effectively intervene to manage our wider environment or global context is often supported with the argument that our historical record of failed interventions justifies the need for a more pragmatic and adaptive approach that seeks to change our behaviour rather than our environment and that communities and individuals are the ones who must learn how to better cope with their risks and insecurities (Joseph 2016). We might contrast the positive view of resilience as enhancing human capacities and capabilities and empowering local communities with a more critical view of resilience that sees this as a means of shifting responsibility on to people themselves, founded on a negative assessment of previous forms of state intervention and international development and statebuilding strategies. Seeking to justify such a strategy, the international approach of institutions like DFID and the EU says that resilience building if not only more effective, but cheaper (DFID 2011, p. 2; 2012, p. 3). Whether this is really true, or a political justification for downgrading intervention in an age of austerity is a matter for discussion. A related debate concerns whether resilience is supportive of neoli­ beral governance or is a post-(neo)liberal alternative. Here, most critics of resilience follow the argument found in Foucault (2008) that sees neoliberal governance (or governmentality) as a means of promoting individualised responsibility, spreading a market rationality, encouraging innovation and enterprise and governing through the devolution of powers. In this sense, resilience might seem to fit such a model given its emphasis on self-awareness, flexibility, adaptation, reflection and self-governance. Others like Mark Bevir argue that we are now witnessing a new wave of governance that is less neoliberal and market-oriented, involving new networks, partnerships and alliances (Bevir 2016, p. 2). New ideas like resilience, wellbeing and sustainability change the nature

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of governance because they appeal to intangible human and social qualities that do not appear to develop a new form of neoliberal model of rational-calculative behaviour and market efficiency. This is also notable in the contemporary enthusiasm for wellbeing where it is marked by an emphasis on ‘happiness’ and the emergence of a new form of ‘neo-utilitarianism’ (Stewart 2014; McGregor 2018). This new approach helps to constitute a new mix of practices or variegated governance that appears to be more aware of the limits of market logic as well as our social and institutional embeddedness. As Bevir suggests, some of these new techniques, technologies and practices exist alongside neoliberalism, some fill gaps or shore up weaknesses and generally the attempt to overcome problems caused by over-reliance on the market (Bevir 2016, p. 2). An alternative to this might suggest that the new trinity represents neoliberalism at its most reflexive, considering its own limitations, modifying its methods and nuancing its techniques of governance rather than breaking from its logic. Indeed, it helps fill some of the gaps in neoliberal governance by encouraging a more social or human way of thinking about our embedded social context and human condition. A recent argument by Philip Mirowski could quite easily be applied to resilience, wellbeing and sustainability. With the new trinity, neoliberalism revises what it means to be a human being with governance and awareness of the self, the main basis of social order and human capital the basis of the self (Mirowski 2013, pp. 58–59). With this turn to the human and our precarious relation to our wider, uncertain environment, neoliberalism tries to renew itself after its period of crisis. This leads to a final point of dispute—whether resilience is an AngloSaxon notion that does not translate well in other societies and cultures. The neoliberal argument would be one strong aspect of the view of resilience as Anglo-Saxon. We have seen that resilience and related ideas appeal to uniquely human characteristics that ought to have value across all societies and cultures. However, it might be claimed as we see with resilience, wellbeing and sustainability, that the direction of travel of Anglo-Saxon understanding is much more individualistic, certainly when compared to its continental European counterparts. We might contrast, for example, the UK emphasis on resilient individuals and communities, whereas there has been an emphasis in Germany on a ‘whole of society approach’ (German Federal Ministry of Defence 2016, p. 60). This is paralleled in the wellbeing literature with the German tradition of work on social quality and on social indicators (Glatzer and Zapf 1984; Noll 2011).

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Likewise, the transformative view of resilience might be said to rely on a belief in innovation, enterprise and the dynamism of the private sector that is more vociferously argued for in Anglo-Saxon literature on resilience. This contrasts with conflicting elements present in continental European approaches that still adhere to the social model and continue to emphasise the leading role of the state as responsible for providing security and protection and where resilience comes to mean ‘robustness’ and ‘resoluteness’ rather than flexibility and adaptation (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research 2016, p. 51). This suggests that either different countries have different understandings of resilience, or that resilience is a predominantly Anglo-Saxon idea that comes up against different understandings of state-society relationships, public provision and civil protection when applied elsewhere. It may be that the Anglo-Saxon approach places more emphasis on human capacities and the societal and community aspects of resilience. Perhaps it is the case that resilience is interpreted in a more technical and less human character sense in other countries because the human and societal dynamics are covered in other aspects of policy-making.

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66  J. JOSEPH AND J. A. McGREGOR Bonanno, G. A., Galea, S., Bucciarelli, A., & Vlahov, D. (2006). Psychological Resilience After Disaster New York City in the Aftermath of the September 11th Terrorist Attack. Psychological Science, 17(3), 181–186. Bouchard, G. (2013). Neoliberalism in Québec: The Response of a Small Nation Under Pressure. In P. A. Hall & M. Lamont (Eds.), Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era (pp. 267–292). New York: Cambridge University Press. Bujones, A. K., Jaskiewicz, K., Linakis, L., & McGirr, M. (2013). A Framework for Analyzing Resilience in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations. New York: Columbia University/USAID. Cabinet Office. (2008). Security in an Interdependent World: The National Security Strategy. London: Cabinet Office. Cabinet Office. (2010a). A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The National Security Strategy. London: Cabinet Office. Available from www. direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalassets/@dg/@en/documents/digitalasset/dg_191639.pdf?CID=PDF%26PLA=furl%26CRE=nationalsecuritystrategy. Accessed 21 July 2019. Cabinet Office. (2010b). Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The Strategic Defence and Security Review. London: Cabinet Office. Available from www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalassets/@ dg/@en/documents/digitalasset/dg_191634.pdf?CID=PDF%26PLA= furl%26CRE=sdsr. Accessed 21 July 2019. Cabinet Office. (2011). Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience. London: Cabinet Office. Available from www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/ default/files/resources/Strategic-National-Framework-on-CommunityResilience_0.pdf. Accessed 21 July 2019. Cabinet Office. (2014). Resilience in Society: Infrastructure, Communities and Businesses. London: Cabinet Office. Available from www.gov.uk/guidance/ resiliencein-society-infrastructure-communities-and-businesses. Accessed 18 April 2017. Cabinet Office. (2015). National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015. London: Cabinet Office. Available from www.gov. uk/government/publications/national-security-strategy-and-strategicdefence-and-security-review-2015. Accessed 18 April 2017. Cabinet Office. (2016). Preparing for Emergencies: Guide for Communities. London: Cabinet Office. Available from www.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/552867/pfe_guide_for_communities. pdf. Accessed 18 April 2017. Chambers, R. (Ed.). (1989). Special Issue—Vulnerability: How the Poor Cope. IDS Bulletin, 20(2), 1–7. Chandler, D. (2014). Resilience: The Governance of Complexity. Abingdon: Routledge.

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68  J. JOSEPH AND J. A. McGREGOR German Federal Ministry of Defence. (2016). White Paper on German Security Policy and the Future of the Bundeswehr. Berlin: Federal Ministry of Defence. German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. (2016). Research for Civil Security 2012–2017: Framework Programme of the Federal Government. Bonn: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung/Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Glatzer, W., & Zapf, W. (Eds.). (1984). Lebensqualitä t in der Bundesrepublik (pp. 13–26). Frankfurt and New York: Campus. Gore, C. (1997). Irreducibly Social Goods and the Informational Basis of Sen’s Capability Approach. Journal of International Development, 9(2), 235–250. Gunderson, L. (2003). Adaptive Dancing: Interactions Between Social Resilience and Ecological Crises. In F. Berkes, J. Colding, & C. Folke (Eds.), Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change (pp. 33–52). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gunderson, L., Holling, C. S., Pritchard, L., & Peterson, G. D. (2002). Resilience. In H. A. Mooney & J. G. Canadell (Eds.), Encyclopaedia of Global Environmental Change Volume 2, The Earth System: Biological and Ecological Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (pp. 530–531). Chichester, UK: Wiley. Helliwell, J. F., Huang, H., & Wang, S. (2013). Social Capital and Well-Being in Times of Crisis. Journal of Happiness Studies, 15(1), 145–162. High Representative (HR/VP). (2016, June). Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe: A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy. Available Online at http://eeas.europa.eu/archives/docs/ top_stories/pdf/eugs_review_web.pdf. Last accessed 14 April 2019. Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23. Holling, C. S. (1996). Engineering Resilience Versus Ecological Resilience. In P. E. Schulze (Ed.), Engineering Within Ecological Constraints (pp. 31–43). Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Huppert, F., & Baylis, N. (2004). Well-Being: Towards an Integration of Psychology, Neurobiology and Social Science. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 359(1449), 1447–1451. Joseph, J. (2016). Governing Through Failure and Denial: The New Resilience Agenda. Millennium, 44(3), 370–390. Keck, M., & Sakdapolrak, P. (2013). What Is Social Resilience? Lessons Learned and Ways Forward. Erdkunde, 67, 5–19. Lindroth, M., & Sinevaara-Niskanen, H. (2013). At the Crossroads of Autonomy and Essentialism: Indigenous Peoples in International Environmental Politics. International Political Sociology, 7, 275–293. Martin-Breen, P., & Anderies, J. M. (2011). Resilience: A Literature Review, Bellagio Initiative. Brighton: Institute for Development Studies and The Rockefeller Foundation.

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CHAPTER 4

Sustainability

Abstract  As the environment has moved centre stage, there has been an upsurge in the study of sustainability and the relationship between humans and the natural environment. Indeed, because of its focus on systems and human behaviour, sustainability is evolving into a pivotal position in the new trinity of governance that we argue for in this book. As with the other concepts, we note a more human-centred approach developing, particularly with the Sustainable Development Goals. As with the other parts of the trinity, we note that this is overly focused on the individual and generally favours adaptation and amelioration over more structural or systemic change. With such deep changes taken for granted as part of the anthropocene, the focus on lifestyles, life choices, awareness, reflection and responsible individual behaviour tends to duck the big economic and political system questions. In its current formulation, the notion of ‘the anthropocene’ is particularly culpable in this in that it fails to address what is driving the ongoing environmental crisis. Keywords  Sustainability Anthropocene

· Governance · Environmental crisis ·

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Joseph and J. A. McGregor, Wellbeing, Resilience and Sustainability, Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32307-3_4

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Introduction Over the last fifty years, the environment has moved from being a fringe issue for academia and for policy and governance to being at the centre of much of our political debate. The Limits to Growth, published in 1972 by the Club of Rome, was one of the first major reports to make a global impact and to set alarm bells ringing by warning that the growth trajectory of human society was likely to be environmentally unsustainable. Since then there has been a massive upsurge in the study of sustainability in both the natural and social sciences, confirming the steadily worsening state of relations between humans and the planet. Many of the warnings foreshadowed in the Club of Rome report are being experienced around the world now. With the launch of the 2015 Agenda for Sustainable Development (referred to throughout in terms of the Sustainable Development Goals—SDG), we have entered a new phase in the global debate about sustainability. With its title ‘Transforming the World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, the SDG agenda is a comprehensive and ambitious statement that makes yet another effort to combine concerns for environmental sustainability and human sustainability (UN SDG 2015). The current sustainability debate focuses on how we are to understand the relationship between humans and the natural environment and it is increasingly connecting to the ideas of resilience and wellbeing. Through these interlinkages, the concept of sustainability has evolved into a pivotal position in the new trinity of governance that we argue for here. This is illustrated by the SDG framework, which is founded on a multidimensional notion of human wellbeing1 and where the idea of resilience features across many of the specific SDGs. Through this evolution we can see the increased sophistication of complex-systems sustainability thinking, a shift in thinking about how to govern relations between people and the planet, and also the emergence of analyses that place an emphasis on sustainable behaviours and personal values.

1 SDG Vision: We envisage a world free of poverty, hunger disease and want, where all life can thrive. We envisage a world free of fear and violence. A world with universal literacy. A world with equitable access to quality education at all levels to health care and social protection, where physical, mental and social wellbeing are assured (UN Declaration A/RES/70/1).

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What is not in dispute in the exposition that follows is that there is an environmental crisis and that finding a path to sustainable development is vital for humans both in the present and the future. What is problematised here is how we are to conceive of this crisis and thus how we might act to avert it.

The Evolution of Sustainability Thinking Although there had been notable and influential work on environmental sustainability before The Limits to Growth (e.g. Carson 1962; Mishan 1967; Daly 1971), what the Club of Rome did was bring an impressive group of scholars from different locations around the world and with different specialisms and applied their thinking to cutting-edge computer modelling. The Club of Rome initiative provided a template for organising global voice that has been a distinctive feature of the sustainability movement ever since. The Limits to Growth study was based on formal mathematical modelling as a way of exploring the interplay between five major global trends (accelerating industrialisation, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, the depletion of non-renewable resources, and a deteriorating environment). It concluded that if the growth in these trends continued at the rates that were being experienced at that time then ‘the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years’ (1972, p. 23). It argued that these trends could be modified in order to achieve what it called ‘a global equilibrium’—a state in which the rate of economic development and the carrying capacity of the planet were in balance. Arising out of a pessimistic, bigger project called ‘The Predicaments of Mankind’ the Limits to Growth study made a stir. Its message was welcomed as a scientific affirmation by those who had increasing concern for the state of the natural environment, and at the same time, it was roundly criticised for gloom-mongering and underestimating the potential of technological change, but also for the limitations of its modelling and the data it used. 1972 also saw the first of what has come to be known as ‘The Earth Summits’. Held in Stockholm, this UN Scientific Conference on the Human Environment was one of the first major global events to highlight the damage that human development was doing to the natural environment. It signalled the launch of a range of sustainability initiatives, including the establishment of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP),

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and it issued the Stockholm Declaration. This was written in the shadow of the Cold War and consisted of a set of 26 principles that addressed key challenges of environmental degradation, human development and global security. However, although the Stockholm Declaration stated concerns for both the condition of the natural environment and the plight of human beings, it did not substantially combine these two sets of concerns. It was a starting point in what has been a largely unsuccessful struggle to integrate human and natural environment concerns in global sustainability policy. For many years subsequently, and with the notable exception of economics, social science voices have had a secondary role to play in debates about the environmental crisis, while natural science understandings of environmental degradation and risks have dominated the sustainability agenda. The decennial UN Earth Summits have had a key role in this and they have had an increasingly significant influence in shaping the global sustainability agenda. In particular, they have been at the forefront of signalling the emergent problem of climate change. The sustainability agenda of the end of the twentieth century came to be dominated in large part by the issue of climate change. Of course, there has been good reason for this and scientific reports have accumulated to highlight the trajectory of global warming and the consequent climate instability and possible sea-level rise. The present and potential future effects of climate change for humans around the planet are catastrophic. In 1998, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established as a UN intergovernmental body to officially track and develop scientific understanding of climate change and its impacts. Its First Assessment Report was produced in 1990 and set out startling projections about the rate of global warming and the likely sea-level rise. In 2007, in recognition of its increased global influence, the IPCC shared the award of the Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice-President Al Gore. The 1990 IPCC Assessment Report provided an important platform for the Rio Earth Summit, held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. This can be regarded as a watershed moment in global recognition of the need to act on climate change and it launched the Climate Change Convention that provided the basis for the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Rio 92 also saw the establishment of Agenda 21 and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Although for many years the Limits to Growth study was cast into the shadows, the basic idea that there are planetary limits to human development and progress has remained powerful and has resurfaced in many

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forms over the years. In 2009, a group of authors, who were members of the ‘Resilience Alliance’, published an article exploring what they described as the new and novel concept of ‘planetary boundaries’. Using more sophisticated modelling and better data than had been available for the Club of Rome study, the article set out a methodology for ‘estimating a safe operating space for humanity with respect to the functioning of the Earth System’ (Rockström et al. 2009). The article states that human development beyond these planetary boundaries ‘could destabilize critical biophysical systems and trigger abrupt or irreversible environmental changes that would be deleterious or even catastrophic for human well-being’ (ibid.). It set out the case for nine planetary boundaries and estimates that three of these had already been transgressed (climate change, the rate of biodiversity loss, and the rate of interference with the nitrogen cycle). The modelling is powerful and impressive, but despite the article having prominent social science co-authors it still did not meaningfully integrate any strong insights into the human and social dimensions of sustainability. Beyond blaming ‘the anthropocene’, it presents no discussion of the human conditions, ideas and actions that underpin the trends producing the pressures and as such provides no analysis that might indicate how these trajectories might be changed. In her book Doughnut Economics (2017), Kate Raworth adopts the planetary boundaries framework and partially addresses this lacuna by arguing that it is the ‘science’ of orthodox, neoliberal economics that must change if we are to achieve a more sustainable pattern of development. A more human-centric approach to sustainability had been offered in a report titled Our Common Future (1987) and more commonly known as the Brundtland Report. The Brundtland Commission, or The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) as it was formally titled, was established by the UN as an independent commission to address an ever more pressing theme that had been noted in the Stockholm Declaration but that had not been substantially explored. This was the tension between developed and developing countries in any efforts to tackle global environmental degradation. With the upswing of increasingly globalised economic growth, the relationship between growth and environmental degradation was becoming more evidently a matter of global political contention. As the populations of countries such as India and China gave up their bicycles and started driving cars and going to shopping malls, then ‘the problem’ of large sections of the

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global population transitioning towards higher levels of development has become more pressing. It highlights the question that, if economic growth and societal development are driving environmental degradation then whose growth should be moderated in efforts to halt that degradation. The issue of who is to bear the burden of a move towards more sustainable development has remained a central political tension for the global sustainability movement throughout. The definition of sustainable development that was advanced in the Brundtland Report in 1987 has proven durable and has been influential on the sustainability agenda ever since. Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. (Our Common Future 1987)

The Brundtland Report was driven more by an economic and political agenda than most other sustainability inquiries. And what was striking and different about it’s definition is that it was not all future focused. Much of the scientific work on sustainability has been about projections into the future, but what the Brundtland definition did was to place the needs of poor people now on the sustainability agenda. It posed the question as to how the urgent problems of destructive poverty are to be addressed in the present, but without prejudicing the natural environment for those in the future. The conventional answer to eliminating poverty was then, and still is for many governments, agencies and experts, economic growth. Economic growth would lift the poor up out of their poverty. But over the last 50 years of market-led and globalised economic growth, it has proven to be a disappointing panacea—while overall poverty rates have declined globally, there are still millions of men, women and children living in damaging poverty, and in the meantime the havoc being wreaked on the natural environment has accelerated. The Brundtland definition points to a key schism in thinking about sustainability. For some people, the key concern is the natural environment and how to halt human damage of it, for others it is about how to reduce human hardship and suffering (or, put more positively, to improve human wellbeing) but in ways that are not environmentally destructive. In one view, ever-increasing numbers of (poor) people are implied to be drivers of environmental damage, to be regulated in their use of the natural environment or removed from environmentally

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sensitive areas. In the other view, poor people are recognised as often being particularly dependent on natural environments and as needing to use the natural environment while at the same time being especially vulnerable to environmental degradation. In the second view, the question of sustainable development becomes one of improving people’s lives, of protecting them from environmental disasters and enabling them to adapt their relationships to a degrading natural environment. This approach then leads towards efforts to diversify livelihoods to make them less environmentally dependent but also underpins an agenda for building the resilience of people and communities that are under environmental threat. The title of the Brundtland Report ‘Our Common Future’ makes a direct appeal for recognition of the need to act together at a global scale to address the challenges of environmental sustainability, but in its definition of sustainable development it also acknowledges the issue of inequality. For many critics, this was ironic. Colonialism had facilitated the (over) exploitation of natural resources in what are now the less developed countries of the world, it had impoverished generations of people, and the current wealth and power of former imperial powers is built on that historic extraction (Moore 2017). Yet, despite the fact that those same wealthy countries are still those that inflict the greatest current global environmental damage (much bigger per capita carbon footprints and higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions), it was developing countries that were being asked to ‘join in’, to share the burden of solving the problem of the global environmental crisis. This might be seen as another aspect of what Ha-Joon Chang refers to as ‘kicking away the ladder’ (Chang 2003): although the high levels of wellbeing in developed countries had been built on first the over-exploitation of their own natural resources and then the over-exploitation of the natural resources of others, this strategy for development was to be denied to people of the less developed countries of the world. The connection that increasingly has been made between the sustainability and wellbeing agendas has been catalysed by other commentaries on the Brundtland definition of sustainable development. Rehearsing a long-standing critique of needs-based approaches to poverty, Amartya Sen criticised the Brundtland definition of sustainable development arguing that: ‘Seeing people in terms only of their needs may give us a rather meagre view of humanity’ (2004, p. 10). Bringing his capability approach to the issue, Sen argues that sustainable development depends

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on the preservation and transmission of capabilities and freedoms (Anand and Sen 2000). This more sophisticated view of sustainable development echoed another influential critique that had been advanced by Robert Solow. In an appeal to the idea of ‘a standard of living’, he states that, “… a sustainable path for the national economy is one that allows every future generation the option of being as well off as its predecessors. The duty imposed by sustainability is to bequeath to posterity not any particular thing - with the sort of rare exception I have mentioned - but rather to endow them with whatever it takes to achieve a standard of living at least as good as our own and to look after their next generation similarly.” (Solow 1993, p. 168)

Sen and Solow were both implicitly proposing the condition of human wellbeing as the ultimate yardstick for sustainable development. When this view is applied to the Brundtland definition of sustainable development, it is clear that the ‘needs’ referred to cannot be narrowly defined. When the Brundtland definition of sustainable development is reinterpreted to take account of a wider conception of human needs that might be thought of as necessary for human wellbeing, then this shifts the idea of sustainable development from a limited view of conserving just ‘things’ (such as the resources of the natural environment) or of planetary boundaries, to raise questions about how the relationships between people and the natural environment are structured and integrally about the governance of the relationships between people and their use of the natural environment. From this broader, perspective environmental sustainability is inextricably bound up with issues of social and political sustainability and with the issue of governance. As the notion of ‘Our Common Future’ suggests, it highlights that the challenge of sustainable development is the challenge of finding ways to live well together both in terms of people on the planet now and the people who will be on the planet in the future (Deneulin and McGregor 2010). The social and political arrangements for living well together, whether in terms of the distribution of the benefits of growth or the distribution of the use of the planets resources, are fundamental to any vision of sustainable development. It builds out from a basic proposition that is inherent in much recent writing on inequality: that we cannot hope to sustain the natural environment in the face of inequitable and politically unsustainable maldistributions of wealth,

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income and political power (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009; Coulthard et al. 2011). This issue of the relationship between environmental crisis and social justice is one that runs through the contemporary sustainability debate and is a central motif of this chapter. This question how we might live well together on a planet under pressure is indeed central to the main narrative of current SDG agenda and in a bold departure from previous analyses it explicitly recognises the challenge of inequality. The importance of inequality is highlighted in the preamble to the General Assembly Declaration, and it is designated as a specific goal (SDG 10) in the 17 goal agenda. But then, in the detailed formulation of other goals, and particularly those that relate to the natural environment, the issue of inequality evaporates. The grand global sustainability initiative of our time does not follow-through with an analysis of the real and detailed governance challenges of charting a route to equitable sustainable development in all of its points of focus. As we shall discuss in the conclusion of this chapter, it does this because it does not coherently advance an understanding of how the social world and the natural environment are inextricably and dynamically related to each other.

Applying Sustainability Beyond the grand narratives and grand statements, there are a range of more specific ways in which the notion of sustainability has been applied. These range from large-scale initiatives such as the Climate Change Framework to small-scale and specific projects about coping with climate change or conservation. Efforts to act on climate change are categorised as either mitigation or adaptation. Mitigation is seeking to reduce the levels of gases that are causing global warming and involves a diverse range of global protocols, policies and projects, while adaptation is about enabling populations who are, or will be, affected adversely by climate change to alter their ways of living and/or how they conduct their livelihoods to cope better with the effects of climate change. The notion of climate change adaptation has a strong relationship to the concept of resilience, while the idea of mitigation directly addresses the things that humans might do in our efforts to achieve sustainability. Climate change mitigation is primarily about stopping or reducing the levels of human instigated emissions of the most harmful greenhouse

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gases (GHGs). Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (NO2) and a group of gases called the halocarbons, all interfere with the effective functioning of the global climate system, and are drivers of global warming. All of these GHGs are produced through human activities that generate the things that we need for our current standard of living (e.g. energy, industrial goods, animal-based food products) and, at the same time, increasing deforestation, caused by human encroachment, reduces the capacity of natural systems to capture the CO2 and to recycle that back as oxygen into the environment. The Kyoto Protocol (UNFCCC 1998) set targets for emissions reductions, and these were reinforced by the Paris Agreement in 2015, but compliance with these has been mixed and some countries (most notably the United States—the World’s second-largest emitter) have either not committed to or have backed out of the agreements. There is no binding detail in these agreements as to how the reduction targets are to be met, but mitigation efforts include reducing levels of energy consumption, changing the basis of energy production and use away from carbon-based fuels (coal, oil and gas) and reducing energy losses. The Kyoto Protocol also included the establishment of international emissions-trading arrangements that would allow countries that were not able to reduce carbon emissions to pay for their pollution by trading carbon quotas with those countries that are below their emission quota levels. One way that such trades can be used is to fund schemes, that seek to halt deforestation and/or fund reforestation (e.g. the REDD Programme—Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation). Reforestation is one form of carbon capture and sequestration, but more technologically complex methods of carbon capture are also being developed. These include schemes that capture carbon dioxide, often at the point of production (e.g. large-scale mines or industrial sites), and then store it underground or undersea. Aside from these high-level agreements and then the legislation and regulation that nation states can put in place to reduce emissions, much then depends on the decisions of businesses, households and individuals about what they will consume and how. Over time, and as the post-crisis crisis global economic slowdown has impacted on public spending (Climate Policy Initiative 2018) and governments have failed to keep up to their climate change policy and financing commitments, an increasing burden of responsibility for reducing emissions is being placed on businesses, households and individuals.

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There is a disagreement about the extent to which the sustainability agenda has been taken up by business. While some see this as substantial and genuine, others argue that it has been cosmetic and that it has as not really addressed (or even obstructs the possibility of addressing) the major drivers of climate change. For example, some question whether motor vehicle manufacturers have been holding back green technologies because of their sunk investment in existing fossil fuel vehicle production. At the same time, the private financial sector provides finance for unsustainable activities on a global scale, because the profit margins that flow from natural resource exploitation and large-scale industries that are major GHG emitters can be great (Hertzig and Moon 2013). In increasingly globalised production systems, the relocation of businesses to evade stringent and costly environmental regulation is a strategic reality (Li and Zhou 2017). While it is understood that there are difficulties in ensuring compliance with environmental regulations, there nevertheless has been some voluntaristic shifting to more environmentally friendly production. Being green—having greener products and greener systems of production—can be seen as being attractive to consumers. The idea of green accounting, or the triple bottom line (people, planet, profit), has also had some traction in this respect but there remains a question as to whether, when it comes to shareholders, it is ultimately the P of profit that matters most (Hammer and Pivo 2017). Similarly, the ISO14000 series, which represents a set of voluntaristic standards for the assessment of the environmental impact of production processes, has been recognised as a badge of quality and ‘good citizenship’ in globalised production chains. However, there are some businesses (such as mining, heavy industry and energy production) where environmental impact is integral to the activity and where the extent of environmental responsibility is more a matter of the mitigation of damage than of avoiding that damage. At the level of the individual and the household, while governments may seek to steer consumer behaviour through environmental incentives and taxes, there also has been an increasing emphasis on the idea of sustainable behaviours and sustainable lifestyles (Barr et al. 2011b). This involves individual consumers choosing to make decisions that they perceive to be more environmentally sustainable and these range from decisions about which types of cars to buy, which energy supplier we choose, about the recyclability of the packaging of goods that are bought, through to diet and the rise of vegetarianism and veganism. Barr and

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colleagues note with some irony that just ‘as the scale of environmental challenges has become increasingly globalised, there has been a progressive shift towards governing environmental issues at local and regional scales and, most recently, an emphasis on individuals as agents for change (DEFRA, 2008)’ (Barr et al. 2011a, p. 712). This is a specific area where sustainability thinking can be seen to be converging with thinking on resilience and wellbeing, with governance focusing on encouraging or facilitating individuals to adopt such behaviours. As we noted in the earlier chapter on wellbeing, behavioural approaches to social and economic policy issues rose to prominence in UK government in the early 2000s and were marked by the establishment of the Behavioural Insights Team (Nudge Unit) in 2010 in the Cabinet Office. The UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) can be seen as having been something of a pioneer in its embrace of both the wellbeing and behavioural agendas. In the 2005, UK government strategy document on sustainable development, titled ‘Securing the Future’, the first chapter notes that the new sustainable development strategy would require ‘a new indicator set, which is more outcome focused, with commitments to look at new indicators such as on wellbeing’ (2005, p. 5), while the second chapter is titled ‘Helping People Make Better Choices’. There can be little doubt that in an increasingly marketised world, consumer decisions are a vital force in the dynamics of development and change, and recognition of this may be seen as bringing a realistic approach to the challenge of sustainable development, but at the same time it signals a shift to a view where the role of formal government intervention, law-making and regulation is regarded as more limited than it had been previously been held to have been. As with wellbeing and resilience, the shift of responsibility for sustainability to the individual is regarded to be a product of the emergence of the ‘third way’ in global political thinking, in which left-leaning politicians have sought to reach an accommodation with the forces of the market. This political turn has seen a recasting of notions of citizenship in terms of the ‘citizen-consumer’ and of ‘environmental citizenship’. In the case of the UK, John Clarke has argued that there are profound contradictions in the process of creating ‘citizen-consumers’ (2005). While the idea was presented using a narrative of empowerment, it involved processes not only of responsibilisation but also of abandonment.

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In this shift, ‘Citizens must manage their lifestyles so as to promote their own health and wellbeing’ (2005, p. 451), but the new citizen-consumer was to be responsible not only for their own wellbeing but also for achieving it in a sustainable way. Commenting on early stages of this ideological shift, Needham highlights the potential ontological shift that this conception of the citizen-consumer entails: it can be seen to ‘de-collectivize the public and its relationship to government’, and the new citizens are conceived of as individuals pursuing their own interests (Needham 2003). Clarke picks up the theme to argue that ‘the abandonment’ under both Conservative and Labour Governments in the UK in the early 2000s involved the ‘dismantling of the protections and defences constructed in post-war welfare capitalism against the rigours, vagaries, demands and inequities of the market and the unconstrained powers of capital’ (2005, p. 452). In these terms, it can be seen as generating greater vulnerabilities to subsequent crises. In respect of the application of these new ideas of citizenship to sustainability, John Barry also highlights the Janus-faced nature of the new citizenship ideas. He rejects a narrow instrumental notion of ‘environmental citizenship’, arguing that if sustainability is to be addressed then it must look ‘beyond environmental, ecological, nature, pollution and resource concerns’, it must look to issues of structured inequality and social justice (Barry 2016). As per Needham’s concerns for the potential ontological implications of ‘citizen-consumers’, he is concerned that there must be an ethical core for this ‘green citizenship’ that entails a more social ontology. He argues that the notion of ‘green citizenship’ has a deeper and more social ethical core. This has affinities with the social conception of human wellbeing discussed in Chapter 2, and he states that, ‘This ethical core of citizenship is both recognition of it as a legitimate way to structure and acknowledge our co-dependence on one another, and also the status and identity of citizenship as bestowing dignity upon individuals in their expression of autonomy as free moral and politically creative and imaginative agents’ (2016, p. 10). There are many that doubt the efficacy of a sustainable behaviours approach to achieving environmental sustainability. In his argument for a wider conception of green citizenship, Barry alludes to a number of the criticisms of an approach to sustainability that is built on individualistic choices and that does not take account of wider structural forces.

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An important line of argument that we will pick up later in this chapter is that individual consumer choices towards a more sustainable way of living are only one small element in a much grander, globalised and ultimately more environmentally destructive consumerist culture. This results in inconsistencies and contradictions in sustainable lifestyle choices. Empirical research in the UK confirms this to some extent, showing that while individuals may choose and be able to adopt a sustainable lifestyle in some spheres of their life they are not always able or willing to be consistently sustainable. Research by Barr et al., for example, found that while some people may adopt sustainable lifestyles ‘at home’ they then make far less environmentally sustainable choices when away from the home, and particular so when ‘on holiday’ and in respect of the issues of flying and travel (Barr et al. 2011a). Other types of inconsistency or contradiction are found in trade-offs between different elements of a person’s life choices. For example, where the carbon saved by cycling rather than using a car is outweighed by the carbon produced by industrialised beef or dairy production for the carnivorous cyclist. The distinction about being ‘willing’ and being ‘able’ to adopt a sustainable lifestyle is important and further draws our attention to relationships between inequality and sustainable lifestyles. In the UK, it has been shown that the areas with the highest levels of adoption of ‘green lifestyles’ tend to be the more wealthy areas, but that these areas are also those with the biggest carbon footprint (bigger cars, more food miles, more and longer flights, etc.) (CACI 2008). But furthermore, in austerity Britain, it is likely that many in poorer families cannot easily afford or access sustainable lifestyles (JRF 2011; Athwal et al. 2011). And despite the originally strong adoption of Agenda 212 (UN 1992), some cashstrapped local authorities may also struggle to provide some of the infrastructure that supports the pursuit of sustainable lifestyles—recycling facilities, support for energy saving, cycle facilities, etc. (Revell 2013; Eckersley 2018; Eckersley and Tobin 2019).

2 ‘Agenda 21 Chapter 28 on Local Authorities: Because so many of the problems and solutions being addressed by Agenda 21 have their roots in local activities, the participation and cooperation of local authorities will be a determining factor in fulfilling its objectives. Local authorities construct, operate and maintain economic, social and environmental policies and regulations, and assist in implementing national and subnational environmental policies. As the level of governance closest to the people, they play a vital role in educating, mobilising and responding to the public to promote sustainable development’.

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The challenges around inequality and sustainability apply to inequalities both within countries and between countries. In 1993, when discussing the Post-Rio efforts to formulate the Convention on Climate Change, Shue proposed that it was necessary to distinguish between ‘subsistence emissions’ and ‘luxury emissions’. As he puts it, ‘Any strategy of maintaining affluence for some people by keeping other people at or below subsistence is, I take it, patently unfair because (it is) so extraordinarily unequal - intolerably unequal’ (Shue 1993, p. 42). In this, Shue was following the work of Agarwal and Narain (1991) who were already highlighting political history and the challenges of tackling global warming in the context of gross global inequalities. Changes in the patterns of inequality since the 1990s have created a more complex and muddied picture: while China and India have greatly improved their aggregate economic position, driving a reduction in inequality between countries, inequality within countries has generally increased (Bourgignon 2015). The number of poor people who are still dependent on ‘subsistence emissions’ is still very large (although they are not all in the poorest countries, Sumner 2012), and it remains the case that generally it is still the wealthiest countries that have the largest per capita carbon footprints. Shue and subsequent commentators have described how the affluent countries (e.g. the United States and the oil-rich gulf states) that might have been adversely affected by any climate change convention that invoked a notion of global social justice have spent a good deal of effort ‘pulling the teeth’ from any climate change agreements. Concerns for the role of inequalities in narratives of the global environmental crisis and in debates about its possible solutions have successively been raised and then quietly dropped. Of course, climate change is not the only way that the sustainability agenda has been taken forward. Issues of pollution, conservation and biodiversity have also constituted important arenas for the sustainability debate and in which to explore the relationships between humans and the natural environment. Aside from GHGs, there are many other ways in which human lifestyles and production processes produce pollution that is damaging to the natural environment and to the humans and other species that depend on it. The use of the natural environment as a waste sink has been a long-standing feature of industrial and development processes. Emissions, leakages and spillages from industrial production often damage water and air quality, while mineral extraction tends to involve the

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production of harmful waste products and effluents. These are often manifested in local chronic pollution problems and occasionally in major, globally significant pollution events such as oil spills. Vehicle exhaust emissions are also increasingly recognised as a major and highly problematic sustainability issue, and there has been a recorded rise globally in lung diseases (Forum of International Respiratory Societies 2017). Cheap vehicles with poor emissions are seen as necessary in many poorer countries, and when combined with large and dense populations, we see the return of deadly smog events. Most major conurbations, including notably Beijing and Delhi, are facing periodic severe air quality crises and are having to confront these issues now either with outright bans or using market-based mechanisms such as vehicle pricing, fuel pricing and congestion charges. However, as we have noted, the capacity of local authorities to monitor and control environmental damage is variable throughout the world. In wealthy countries, the effects of post-crisis recession or related austerity measures have reduced local capacity to identify and deal with polluters, while in poorer countries the funding and capacity to monitor and control polluters have seldom been adequate. In both contexts, the power of local actors to deal with local polluters is also often challenged. The classic analysis of the second face of power by Bachrach and Baratz (1962), where local employment is traded off against pollution, is still relevant and this type of scenario continues to be enacted in many locations around the world today. The Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), launched at the Rio Summit in 1992, states that biological diversity is crucial ‘for evolution and for maintaining life sustaining systems of the biosphere’. It then assigns responsibility for conserving biodiversity and sustainably, using its components, to its signatory states. The convention depends considerably on the notion of ecosystems. There is some contention as to when the term ecosystem came into its current usage. Some assign this to the work of the botanist Tansey as recently as 1935, while others trace a much longer intellectual history reaching back to Linnaeus in the eighteenth century. The big issue in the application of ecosystems thinking to issues of sustainability is how human beings are to be conceived of in relation to ecosystems (Houck 1998). This tension between ‘the human’ and ‘the natural’ strongly resonates in the discussion of resilience and is a motif that runs through this book. In some applications of the idea of ecosystems, and particularly in the strict conservation literature, humans are an adjunct to the ecosystem and are usually perceived as an external threat to it, while

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others argue for humans as integral to ecosystems. There has been a long-standing tradition in social anthropology since its invention in the nineteenth century, of seeking to understand the relationship between humans and their natural environment, but the cultural ecology contribution to conservation and biodiversity thinking did not really gain much traction in conservation circles until the work of a range of social anthropologists who were working on specific ecosystems such as fisheries (e.g. Jentoft et al. 1998; Berkes 1985) and forests (Banuri and Marglin 1993; Agarwal 2001). A more substantial and sophisticated conception of the relationship between humans and ecosystems was developed in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005. This was the product of yet another gathering together of mainly prominent natural scientists but it carries the title ‘Ecosystems and Human Well-Being’. The report presents a model in which human wellbeing is understood as being produced and maintained by a set of ecosystem services, which are themselves managed and modified by humans. The ecosystem services are categorised as ‘supporting’, ‘provisioning’, ‘regulating’ and ‘cultural’, and the other side of the model offers a fairly sophisticated conception of human wellbeing, encompassing ‘basic material for a good life’, ‘security’, ‘health’, ‘good social relations’ and ‘freedom of choice and action’ (MEA Synthesis 2005, p. VI). The report then develops this as a complex-systems model with interacting levels of scale (from individual to local, to regional, to global) and with feedback loops between its different constituent parts and levels. This is something that is familiar from resilience theory. This complexity model has been further developed by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which was established by the UN in 2012 as an independent intergovernmental body to provide policy-makers with assessments of ‘the state of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services it provides to society’. The IPBES conceptual framework is described by its authors as ‘a concise summary in words or pictures of relationships between people and nature’ (Diaz et al. 2014), albeit the understanding of human wellbeing conveyed therein is not greatly advanced on what was presented in the MEA. Measuring sustainability is recognised as politically important but having so many different ways of conceiving of sustainability means that there has been a proliferation of measures of it. These measures differ in what they focus on and also on the scale to which they are applied. The scientific basis of much of the sustainability literature has ensured

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that there are ‘hard’ measures of many elements of the physical processes of environmental damage. These include specific measures of the different elements that have been included in planetary boundary frameworks to assess the extent to which the planetary limits are being reached or breached. The measurement of greenhouse gas emissions has been a core part of the global agreements on climate change and while these are mainly applied at nation-state level they can be devolved down to lower levels of scale. At the nation-state level, these calculations allow the estimation of per capita carbon footprints and, according to data produced by organisations such as the World Bank and the European Union, these still reveal huge global inequalities, with highly developed and oil-rich economies having per capita carbon footprints that are hundreds of times greater than those of many African or Asian countries. The measurement of ‘carbon footprints’ is now also being applied at the level of towns and cities as well as at the level of the person. While these calculations are complex and involve some heroic leaps of assumption, they are nevertheless increasingly significant. Cities and towns are able and are expected to monitor their green credentials, and by virtue of smartphone technologies, the individual consumer can now calculate the carbon footprint consequences of their weekly shop and other lifestyle choices. On a more formal level, as part of their responsibility for addressing issues of unsustainable development many countries are now adopting green national accounting methodologies. Both the United Nations and the EU have played a leading role in the development of standards for Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA) and encouraging their uptake by national statistical services. These systems of national accounts are an adjunct to GDP measures and seek to take account not just of emissions, but also of environmental taxation, natural resource depletion and to some extent biodiversity loss. As we have noted, a similar type of accounting approach has been taken in business with the development of triple bottom line accounting methodologies. Sustainability metrics have also shown some signs of moving closer to work that seeks to measure progress in terms of human wellbeing. The Stiglitz Commission (2009) provided some impetus for this conjunction in as much as it provided a comprehensive critique of GDP as a measure of progress that was inadequate both in terms of its failure to account of the impact of progress on human wellbeing and on the planet. There has been some effort to develop more complex indices that bring these

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two sets of concerns together, for example, the gimmicky Happy Planet Index or the Sustainable Development Index. However, we are now at a new pinnacle in complex sustainability measurement with the SDGs framework. Here, we end of up with dashboard of indicators for each of the 17 SDG, leading to a total of 230 agreed indicators of sustainable development. Although there is a cacophony of sustainability measures, these nevertheless are significant and receive considerable attention in policy circles and in global debates and negotiations.

The Dynamics Behind Ideas of Sustainability The evolution of thinking about sustainability has followed a similar path to evolution of thinking on wellbeing and resilience. In this, we see the emergence of complex-systems thinking; a struggle between contributors to the debate about how to understand and address the social dimensions of the issue, and the devolution of responsibility away from governments to communities and individuals. As we have shown, the three concepts have crossed paths with each other at various critical points in their evolution. The currently dominant idea in the sustainability literature is that of ‘the anthropocene’. The term ‘the anthropocene’ is credited to Paul Crutzen and colleagues who argued that it was ‘appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term “anthropocene” for the current geological epoch’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, p. 17). In this view, the new geological era, where humankind is the largest influence on the physical functioning of the planet, can be traced back to the European industrial revolution and particularly to the invention of steam power. The notion of the anthropocene has attracted many academic followers and has also been popularised, capturing the public imagination. As with related notions of complexity and uncertainty, in large part the idea that we are in ‘the anthropocene’ goes unquestioned—it is regarded simply as a given and obvious truth. But resistance against the idea resurfaces many of criticisms that have been lodged against nature-centric sustainability thinking for decades. The ideas that are entailed in ‘the anthropocene’ are nothing particularly new, but this is a grander, more powerful and more insidiously dangerous narrative (Moore 2018). There are two main lines of criticism of the notion of the anthropocene itself: the first is its treatment of ‘the anthropos’ as an

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undifferentiated mass and the second is its lack of a structural and historically informed analysis. These two sets of criticisms weave together, but it is the implications of the concept that require strongest scrutiny in the context of this analysis of changing ideas of governance. In a scathing critique of the anthropocene thesis Kathleen McAfee brings a political economy perspective to the term by asking ‘Whose Anthropocene?’ (McAfee 2016). In what is a critique of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (the Subaltern Studies historian) surprising surrender to the concept, she highlights the generalised treatment of ‘the anthropos’ as a species who are to be blamed for the current environmental crises. In assigning responsibility to all humans, there is a major problem of homogenisation. In the anthropocene, it is ‘people’ that are the problem and the neo-Malthusian character and implications of the term are not difficult to detect. The ‘anthropos’ is an undifferentiated mass of humanity and is not dealt with separately in terms of class, colour, ethnicity, gender, location or history, and yet, drawing on Malm and Hornburg (2014), she notes that the problem of continued damage to the environment rests with a small fraction of an historically privileged population who built industrialisation on colonial exploitation and who still dominate the fossil fuel industries of today. These are not the same people who are experiencing, and whose children will experience, the harshest impacts and hardships of climate change. McAfee pinpoints Rockstrom et al.’s planetary boundaries work as specifically giving momentum to the resurgence of the neo-Malthusian agenda of the anthropocene narrative. As in much of the previous mathematical modelling of unsustainable development, it is fairly quickly apparent that having fewer people on the planet would help a good deal to ameliorate the crisis. Exploring the implications of the concept, Malm and Hornburg draw attention to Chakrabarty’s appeal to the flawed homily that with sea-level rise ‘we are all in this together’. This masks the neo-Malthusian undertones of the anthropocene narrative, because it is clear that we are not all in this together, some people have bigger and better boats. In 2018, the Emir of Qatar was recorded as having a ‘yacht’ that is valued at US Dollars 300 m. This boat is bigger and of much greater technological sophistication than any boat in the coastguard fleets of most African countries, and its value probably surpasses that of many national coastguard fleets.

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Jason Moore presents a lengthy and very substantial challenge to coherence of the anthropocene thesis and begins by questioning what its authors claim to be the historical starting point of the era (Moore 2017, 2018). While the invention of steam power no doubt greatly accelerated the human impact on the natural environment, he argues that the processes were in motion well before that. The roots of the current relationship between humans and the environment, he suggests, are more correctly to be placed at the beginning of European imperial and colonial expansion in the fifteenth century. This proposition has implications then for how we interpret ‘the anthropocene’ and the directions it then points to for action and governance. In two lengthy articles published in 2017, Moore provides an exposition of how the current relationship between people and the natural environment has been co-constituted in the evolution of capitalism. A central feature of the global evolution of capitalism, he argues, has been the systematic ‘cheapening’ of key inputs to capital accumulation processes and in particular the cheapening of labour and nature. This insight can be detected in the ways that orthodox economics systematically devalues (or fails to value at all) certain kinds of labour (unskilled labour, the work of women and caring in general) and also has failed to place sensible values on natural resources and the natural environment (McGregor and Pouw 2017). Moore proposes that ‘the capitalocene’ would be a much more accurate label for the current epoch. This proposition problematises capitalism as a ‘world ecology’ through which we must understand the current environmental crisis and any efforts to resolve this. The notion of a world-ecology proposes a different understanding of the relationship between the planet and humanly devised arrangements for living on it. Although the concept of the anthropocene appears to represent an approach to sustainability that at last recognises the profound inter-relationship of humans and nature, numerous critics including Moore and Malm and Hornburg argue that it does so in a flawed way. They see the construct as deriving from a natural science logic that is weak in its social science sensibility and that mis-specifies the relationship between humans and nature. By advancing a lumpen concept of ‘society’ or ‘the anthropos’, the anthropocene thesis is not sensitive to the ways that the ongoing dynamic relationship between people and the planet has been conditioned, and continues to be conditioned by the development of capitalism. As Moore puts it, ‘What Green Thought

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has often done – and there have been important, indeed courageous, exceptions – is to sever the constitutive relation between the two’. He goes on to state that the way that the Human-Nature dualism is presented in the anthropocene thesis ‘limits our capacity to understand the origins of capitalism’s conjoined crises – and to understand how the “economic” and “environmental” problems of the present conjuncture are constitutively joined’ (Moore 2017, p. 602, emphasis added). Malm and Hornburg are further concerned with the implications of this misconception and the impact that this flawed notion of ‘the anthropocene’ has in sustainability discourses and on the formulation of contemporary sustainability science and political thinking. For them, ‘“the Anthropocene” is an ideology (but) more by default than by design, more the product of the dominance of natural science in the field of climate change and, perhaps, the general blunting of critical edges and narrowing of political horizons in the post-1989 world’ (2014, p. 67). This is a similar post-crises turn to that found in the development of resilience and wellbeing thinking. As Malm and Hornburg put, it ‘species-thinking on climate change is conducive to mystification and political paralysis. It cannot serve as a basis for challenging the vested interests of businessas-usual’ (2014, p. 67). It does not get to what they and others see as being the heart of the problem. The failure to substantially challenge the deeper underpinnings of the environmental crisis is evident in the work of Raworth and a number of the other prominent contributors to the Anglo-Saxon debate on sustainability. While she identifies modern neoliberal economics as ‘the problem’, and thus acknowledges the ‘cheapening’ or under-valuation of some forms of labour and the natural environment, she stops short of pressing on to present this as a challenge to capitalism itself. Like a number of other liberally minded contributors in the Anglo-Saxon debate on sustainability the preferred route is to reform capitalism, rather than reject it. In Tim Jackson’s work on sustainability (Jackson, Sustainable Development Commission 2009), the challenge is to ‘redefine prosperity’ and although in that work there are some fundamental critiques of economics and consumerist culture the idea of ‘redefining prosperity’, and yet retaining the good parts of capitalism, is central to many global initiatives on sustainable development, including the SDGs. As we noted earlier, we can see this same kind of hopeful and reformist approach in what we described as ‘enlightened prosperity’ adaptations of the concept of wellbeing. While some would argue that this is just a

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pragmatic and realistic approach that acknowledges the massive improvements to human wellbeing that capitalism has made possible, for others it is doubtful as to whether any changes achieved under such a reformist agenda could ever be sufficient to restrain the fundamental drivers of climate change in the modern world. There are more radical positions and the French ‘degrowth’ (décroissance) movement offers one such. For Serge Latouche, one of the leading voices in the degrowth school of thought, the term sustainable development is an oxymoron (Latouche 2004). The rallying call of the degrowth movement is ‘escaping from the economy’ (Fournier 2008). They identify the problem as the growth paradigm itself. Following Foucault, this critique treats the growth paradigm of neoliberal economics as an ideology that shapes our systems of governance. As Fournier explains, escaping the economy means, ‘re-imagining economic relations, identities, activities in different terms; and it is to this end that the degrowth movement puts forward the notions of democracy and citizenship’ (Fournier 2008, p. 529). The degrowth movement shifts the discussion on sustainability from an environmentalist or technocratic focus to an ontological one that focuses on the nature of the person. This calls for attention to issues of values, the institutions of governance and political relationality. In this sense, it resonates with Barry’s call, discussed earlier, that ‘environmental citizenship’ must engage with issues of social justice and inequality and must go beyond a narrow environmentalist agenda. The intention of the degrowth movement to take us towards a more fundamental discussion of the nature of our current democracy and it takes the debate into deeper territory. The work of Latouche and also of Moore echoes a more sweeping and radical argument by Fotopoulos (2007), that the ecological crisis is only one element (but a central one) of a multidimensional crisis. As he puts it, ‘There is no doubt today that a major dimension of the present multidimensional crisis, which extends to the economic, political, cultural and general social level, is the ecological crisis, namely the crisis which concerns not the relations between social individuals, as the other dimensions of the crisis, but our interaction, as social individuals, with the environment’ (2007, p. 1, emphasis added, 5 interlocked crises). In a daunting and challenging explanation of the conjoined nature of these crises, he argues that the route to addressing these crises lies not in technology, not in economic reform, nor in globally mandated statedriven action, nor in individual behaviour change, but in challenging the

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hegemony of neoliberal governance and recasting democratic systems to be inclusive and radically decentralised. While he explains why ‘Inclusive Democracy’ in the terms that he sets it out is not a utopian vision, it nevertheless presents an almost unimaginable challenge to current governance and structures of power. The nature of the challenge is considerable not least because, as this book argues, governance is evolving and in ways that seek to protect the system and its logic from the crises that we are experiencing. The new trinity recalibrates governance in such a way as to render crises a natural effect of complex systems, leaving us with adaptation and amelioration as the only options. In 2007, Blühdorn and Welsh argued that the sustainability debate had entered an era of ‘post-ecological politics’ in which rather than talk of the politics of sustainability we are witnessing a ‘politics of unsustainability’. As Blühdorn puts it, ‘The post-ecologist turn is a complex cultural transformation in which much more inclusive understandings of eco-politics are superseded by technical and managerial approaches which are symbolically empty, i.e. which deal with short term and narrowly defined problems, but are no longer inspired by any comprehensive ecological alternative to the established socio-economic system’ (Blühdorn 2007, p. 262). From the perspective of the politics of unsustainability, terms narratives such as ‘green growth’, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘inclusive growth’ are seen as euphemisms as they all seek to accommodate some form of the growth narrative. Rather than tackle the system that is perceived as driving these crises, attention is turned towards hope for win-win solutions that are based on some combination of technology, innovative markets and individualised responsibility. Blühdorn and Welsh propose that, ‘the novelty in the politics of unsustainability is a shift of emphasis from trying to avert such crises to managing their implications and consequences’ (2007, p. 191, emphasis in the original text). The notion of resilience features strongly in narratives about how the crises can be managed through community and individual responsibility and self-governance. At the same time, current debates over sustainability are seeking to invoke and mobilise the concept of wellbeing in this management process. As we have noted, a key aspect of this has been the challenge to redefine prosperity, by shifting away from a consumption-driven model of wellbeing to one that focuses on a more eudaimonic notion of wellbeing (Jackson 2009). While this appears to offer some hope on an individual basis, it tends to be couched in analysis that

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shies away from highlighting the major features of global capitalism that drive the current consumption culture. This approach to aligning sustainability and wellbeing appeals to a more Buddhist perspective or to its contemporary counterparts—‘secular mindfulness’ or formulations such as the New Economics Foundation’s ‘Five Ways to Wellbeing’ (NEF 2011). These lean towards largely individualised conceptions of wellbeing and while they make reference to a social dimension they do not substantially challenge the ‘business as usual’ of the underlying economic growth paradigm. As the SDGs demonstrate, paradigm-shifts are not easy. The 2015 Agenda for Sustainable Development represents a further missed opportunity to substantively integrate social and political thinking with natural science perspectives on the environment and the framework steps away from a thoroughgoing critique of an evolving neoliberal economic agenda and its associated systems of governance. But as the product of global negotiation between powerful nation states and other vested interests, how could it do anything but? From the perspective of the new trinity, the SDGs can be interpreted as a signpost for the evolution of thinking about governance. Although the SDGs contain insights from other ontological standpoints into other possible relationships between human wellbeing and the state of the planet, through formulations such as the Andean notion of Buen Vivir, the Bhutanese Gross National Happiness Framework and Indian Swaraj, such approaches are regarded as exotic and are viewed as something of a novelty. More recently, there have been efforts to connect to these perspectives from a more conventional Europeanised academic tradition. As we have noted, the growing literature on ‘happiness’ and its relationship to the natural environment (often referred to as green spaces) is one such, but this remains largely ontologically individualist. Helne and Hirvilammi make a further attempt to mobilise a more social conception of human wellbeing in the struggle for ways to address the ecological crisis (2015). They argue that sustainable development has come to a dead end and propose that, ‘In order to be sustainable, the pursuit of wellbeing and the struggle to meet the needs of mankind should be grounded in a balanced and responsible human–nature relationship’ (2015, p. 170). This echoes many elements of the previous critiques of how the current environmental crisis can be understood and navigated. Although a brief statement, it is a radical agenda that entails: an ontological shift in how we conceive of ourselves as persons;

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changes in how people relate to each other and to the natural environment; as well as radical transformations of the governance of all these relationships. Helne and Hirvilammi justify this proposition by exploring the relationship between weak and strong conceptions of sustainability. The former operates within the growth paradigm and is similar to the notion of relative decoupling, where advances in technology will result in the impact of human activity on the environment being lessened in its intensity. They reject this as not feasible and illustrative of human exceptionalism—where ‘the exceptional characteristics of our species exempt us from ecological principles and from environmental influences’ (from Catton and Dunlap 1980, p. 25; Helne and Hirvilammi 2015, p. 168). The strong sustainability position calls for a break from the growth paradigm altogether because humans are not exceptions to the logics of the environment and no such technological fixes are possible. The only way to deal with the impact of human society on the environment of is for the harmful activity to be stopped, and this they argue can only be achieved through a radical reconceptualisation of the relationships between humans and the planet that is founded on a holistic conception of human wellbeing. Helne and Hirvilammi call for the application of a social conception of human wellbeing to renew focus on the question of how we are to live well together on a planet under pressure (Deneulin and McGregor 2010). The evolution of sustainability thinking can be charted as having taken a similar path to the evolution of its related ideas of wellbeing and resilience. In particular, this derives from the way the new trinity has been taken up in new approaches to governance and, most recently, how these have been reused to recalibrate such practices in the wake of the financial crisis. The progressive aspects of such ideas have been compromised by the move towards individual responsibilisation where resilience and adaptation are a necessity for the vulnerable, with sustainable behaviours for those that can afford them. The consequence of focusing on lifestyles, life choices, awareness, reflection and ­responsible individual behaviour is to duck the big economic and political system questions, something perhaps deliberately fostered by contemporary forms of governing ‘at a distance’. By focusing on adaptive behaviour and lifestyle choices we then take for granted the underlying conditions as ‘complex’ and ‘uncertain’. In its current formulation, the notion of ‘the Anthropocene’ is particularly culpable in this in that it fails to

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address what is driving the ongoing environmental crisis and does worse by signalling towards simplistic neo-Malthusian solutions—after all if we do nothing to deal with the major drivers of the worsening environmental crisis and at the same time fail to attend to the significance of gross inequalities, then while some will be able to afford to survive, others will be left more vulnerable and it is poor people who will die off first.

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98  J. JOSEPH AND J. A. McGREGOR Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Lifflin. Catton, W. R., & Dunlap, R. E. (1980). A New Ecological Paradigm for PostExuberant Sociology. American Behavioral Scientist, 24(1), 15–47. Chang, H.-J. (2003). Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective. London: Anthem. Clarke, J. (2005). New Labour’s Citizens: Activated, Empowered, Responsibilized, Abandoned? Critical Social Policy, 25(4), 447–463. Climate Policy Initiative. (2018). Global Climate Finance: An Updated View 2018. London: CPI. https://climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/11/Global-Climate-Finance-_-An-Updated-View-2018.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2019. Coulthard, S., Johnson, D., & McGregor, J. A. (2011). Poverty, Sustainability and Human Wellbeing: A Social Wellbeing Approach to the Global Fisheries Crisis. Global Environmental Change, 21(2), 453–463. Crutzen, P. J., & Stoermer, E. F. (2000). The Anthropocene. IGBP Newsletter, 41, 17–18. Daly, H. (1971). Toward a Stationary-State Economy. In J. Harte & R. Socolow (Eds.), The Patient Earth. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Deneulin, S., & McGregor, J. A. (2010). The Capability Approach and the Politics of a Social Conception of Wellbeing. European Journal of Social Theory, 13(4), 501–519. Diaz, S., et al. (2014). The IPBES Conceptual Framework: Connecting Nature and People. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 14, 1–16. Eckersley, P. (2018). Who Shapes Local Climate Policy? Unpicking Governance Arrangements in English and German Cities. Environmental Politics, 27(1), 139–160. Eckersley, P., & Tobin, P. (2019, in press). The Impact of Austerity on Policy Capacity in Local Government. Policy and Politics. Forum of International Respiratory Societies. (2017). The Global Impact of Respiratory Disease (2nd ed.). Sheffield: European Respiratory Society. Fournier, V. (2008). Escaping from the Economy: The Politics of Degrowth. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 28(11/12), 528–545. Hammer, J., & Pivo, G. (2017). The Triple Bottom Line and Sustainable Economic Development Theory and Practice. Economic Development Quarterly, 31(1), 25–36. Helne, T., & Hirvilammi, T. (2015). Wellbeing and Sustainability: A Relational Approach. Sustainable Development, 23(3), 167–175. Hertzig, C., & Moon, J. (2013). Discourses on Corporate Social Responsibility in the Financial Sector. Journal of Business Research, 66(10), 1870–1880. Houck, O. A. (1998). Are Humans Part of Ecosystems? Environmental Law, 28(1), 1–14. Jackson, T. (2009). Prosperity Without Growth: The Transition to a Sustainable Economy. DEFRA: Sustainable Development Commission.

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Jentoft, S., McCay, B., & Wilson, D. (1998). Social Theory and Fisheries Co-management. Marine Policy, 22(4/5), 423–436. JRF. (2011). Sustainable Urban Neighbourhoods. Study Summary. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Latouche, S. (2004, November). Degrowth Economics: Why Less Should Be Much More. Le Monde Diplomatique. Available at http://mondediplo. com/2004/11/14latouche. Latouche, S. (2007). Degrowth: An Electoral Stake? International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, 3, 1. Li, X., & Zhou, Y. M. (2017). Offshoring Pollution While Offshoring Production? Strategic Management Journal, 38, 2310–2329. Malm, A., & Hornburg, A. (2014). The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative. The Anthropocene Review, 1(1), 62–69. McAfee, K. (2016). Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses”. Rachel Carson Centre Perspectives, 2, 65–72. McGregor, J. A., & Pouw, N. (2017, July). Towards an Economics of Wellbeing: What Would Economics Look Like If It Were Focused on Human Wellbeing? Cambridge Journal of Economics, 41(4), 1123–1142. https://doi. org/10.1093/cje/bew044. Meadows, D. H., & Club of Rome. (1972). The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. (2005). Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press. Mishan, E. J. (1967). The Costs of Economic Growth. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Moore, J. W. (2017). The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(3), 594–630. Moore, J. W. (2018). The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(2), 237–279. Needham, C. (2003). Citizen-Consumers: New Labour’s Marketplace Democracy. London: The Catalyst Forum. New Economics Foundation. (2011). Five Ways to Wellbeing: New Applications, New Ways of Thinking. London: NEF and the NHS Confederation. Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21stCentury Economist. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Revell, K. (2013). Promoting Sustainability and Pro-environmental Behaviour Through Local Government Programmes: Examples from London, UK. Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences, 10(3–4), 199–218.

100  J. JOSEPH AND J. A. McGREGOR Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F. S., III, Lambin, E. F., et al. (2009). A Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Nature, 461, 472–475. Sen, A. (2004). Why We Should Preserve the Spotted Owl. London Review of Books, 26(3), 10–11. Shue, H. (1993). Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions. Law and Policy, 15(1), 39–60. Solow, R. (1993). An Almost Practical Step Toward Sustainability. Resources Policy, 19(3), 162–172. Stiglitz, J. E., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J.-P. (2009). Stiglitz Commission. Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Available at http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/ 118025/118123/Fitoussi+Commission+report. Accessed 17 December 2018. Sumner, A. (2012). Where Do the Poor Live? World Development, 40(5), 865–877. UN. (1992). Convention on Biological Diversity. UN Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro. UN. (2015). The Paris Agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. New York: United Nations. UNFCCC. (1998). Kyoto Protocol To The United Nations Framework Convention On Climate Change. https://unfccc.int/process/the-kyoto-protocol. Wilkinson, R. G., & Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. World Commission on Environment and Development. (1987). Our Common Future (The Brundtland Report). New York: United Nations.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: A New Trinity of Governance?

Abstract   The book highlights how wellbeing, resilience and sustainability come together in both policy making and public consciousness to promote a particular form of governance. While noting some of the confusion, ambiguity and contradiction present in how policy-makers take up these concepts, our main point has been to point out their connectedness, particularly as they have emerged ‘after the crisis’ as neoliberalism tries to recalibrate. We strongly associate these ideas with forms of governance that see themselves as responding to crisis and as advocating the need for rethinking and renewal. These ideas are thus connected to the dynamic wider social, political and economic context and the changing global political environment. There is often a conscious embrace of paradox, in particular through an obsession with better governing while also raising doubt and uncertainty about our ability to intervene. The new trinity provides a means whereby these doubts are being worked into the mechanisms of governance, while not interrupting the process of getting on with actual governing. This is the central paradox of the new trinity: that the three ideas have a certain critical element inherent in them that questions the rationalism, calculation and science on which government intervention has been founded, while at the same time exploring new ways that rationalism, calculation, science can be deployed to reinforce the governance systems that they raise their concerns about. We argue that the radical implications of the trinity are being compromised by this relationship © The Author(s) 2020 J. Joseph and J. A. McGregor, Wellbeing, Resilience and Sustainability, Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32307-3_5

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to existing mechanisms of governance and call for a more systemic and genuinely transformative approach to the central issues of our time. Keywords  Wellbeing · Resilience Social transformation · Systems

· Sustainability · Governance ·

The aim of this short book has been to highlight how new ideas associated with wellbeing, resilience and sustainability have been coming together in both policy-making and public consciousness to promote a particular form of governance. While noting some of the confusion, ambiguity and contradiction present in how politicians and policy-makers take up these concepts, our intention has been to point out their connectedness, particularly as they have emerged in this particular conjuncture. We live in an era of crises and these ideas are strongly associated with forms of governance that see themselves as responding to crises and as advocating the need for rethinking and renewal. Whether that is indeed or will be their achievement is the matter for debate, but that is certainly the way that current thinking is being framed. These ideas are thus connected to the dynamic wider social, political, economic and environmental context and the changing global political environment. In this conclusion, we bring our arguments about the three concepts together to highlight the significance of seeing them as a new trinity of governance and also to relate this to the changing nature of politics, particularly in light of the ongoing environmental crisis and the global economic crisis of 2009. As we have shown the three concepts are contested and we will conclude by considering possible different directions of travel for these concepts, how the trinity might evolve and what forms of governance and societal development it might support. Through the book, we have drawn attention to the ways that wellbeing, resilience and sustainability have related to each other and then how, as a trinity, they be can be seen as representing an emergent approach to governance that displays scepticism towards governing and which seeks to intervene while also questioning intervention. These paradoxes are part of modern-day politics for both political professionals and the public more generally, reflecting an obsession with governing while also raising doubt and uncertainty about its effectiveness. They resonate with the so-called political crisis of our time, where there is widespread loss of trust in establishment politicians and traditional political systems.

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The new trinity provides a means whereby these doubts are being worked into the mechanisms of governance, while not interrupting the process of getting on with actual governance. This is the central paradox of the new trinity: that the three ideas have a certain critical element inherent in them that questions the rationalism, calculation and science on which government intervention historically has been founded, while at the same time exploring new ways that rationalism, calculation, science can be deployed to reinforce the governance systems that they raise their concerns about. They represent, so to speak, a sceptical turn in reflexive governance.

The Nature of the Trinity As we have shown in the three preceding chapters, the three concepts are all of a loose character. They lack clear definitions, they are contested and they are shifting, with changing meanings when applied in different contexts. Yet, in some ways, this is seen as a kind of merit, a characteristic that means they are more malleable and as such better able to deal with the complex environment in which we find ourselves. It is as if this inexactness gives the terms their own characteristics of sustainability and resilience. The first thing we can say about the new trinity, therefore, is that from a conceptual or epistemological point of view, we are dealing with something that is almost deliberately ill-defined, what in the resilience literature Brand and Jax (2007) refer to as the ambiguity of boundary objects. These are three concepts whose promise has resulted in them being injected into politics and policy before being clearly defined, but that have gathered converts who act in the belief that they are in the process of being more clearly defined (and measured) and that this must be so in order to govern more effectively. In the resilience literature, we have noted a profusion of fuzzily defined notions of resilience (Joseph 2018): in the wellbeing field, post the Stiglitz report of 2009, this studied ambiguity is highly evident and is expressed in ‘the alliance of expediency’ that characterises the global wellbeing movement at this time (McGregor 2018), and in the debates over sustainability, we find the vague but ominous concept of the anthropocene coming to dominate narratives about the environmental crisis. If it is so difficult to pin any exact meaning on the trinity terms, then where do we start when trying to understand their appeal? Our central argument has been that the new trinity is best understood when

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considered as new ideas on the governing of populations and their interactions with their wider environments. In particular, these terms help us deal with conditions characterised by complexity and uncertainty when traditional, rationalist and calculative forms of understanding are subject to epistemic scepticism. But beyond the formalism of epistemic scepticism, these three concepts have traction because the public at large understands them. Wellbeing, resilience and sustainability have public appeal and they are comprehensible ideas, or have become comprehensible, to people in their everyday lives (we all know that our wellbeing is important, we can identify with the need for resilience through how we handle challenges in our private lives and we have all become aware of environmental crises—‘the Attenborough effect’). And furthermore, many people are motivated to do something about one or all of these ideas. From this perspective, and in the spirit of governmentality, the new trinity is being co-constructed by a peculiar alliance of academics, philosophers, scientists, visionaries, spiritualists and activists and in some ways politicians and policy-makers can be seen as just trying to catch hold onto the coat-tails of shifts in public consciousness. But then, of course, the trick then is to try to get control of it again. Thus, a distinctive feature of the new trinity is its appeal to human qualities. What the three terms have in common is their concern with distinctive human capacities that shape who we are and imply a particular relationship to our wider environment, both natural and built. The new trinity builds on precursors in ecology, in new institutional economics and in the sustainability sciences but it aligns particularly with the so-called human development approach as developed by economists such as Amartya Sen and philosophers like Martha Nussbaum. Human development thinking has branched out in many different directions: into work on the measurement of poverty and development via the UNDPs Human Development Index; into international relations through the idea of a ‘human security’ approach to a world of violent political instability (Thomas 2001; Commission on Human Security 2003); and as a foundation for the resurgence of work on wellbeing in the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (Stiglitz et al. 2009). The human development approach has been at the forefront of a broad movement, ranging across a wide range of disciplines and in policy circles that has been calling for a more ‘human-centric’ approach in our efforts to understand and tackle humanities problems. The idea of

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being more human-centric is to be contrasted with preceding modes of analysis that have been system-centric (whatever the system in question is): in political science and economics, this includes state-centric or market-centric frameworks of analysis and in the natural and environmental sciences being ecosystem or eco-centric. In some senses, this shift to a more human-centric perspective looks like a part of a broader ‘turn to the social’, but there is a problem in how human-centric approaches relate to our understanding of society. There has been a long-standing criticism of the weakness in the conception of the relationship the individual and society in human-centric analyses and of Amartya Sen’s capability framework in particular (Gore 1997; Evans 2002; Stewart 2005; Deneulin and McGregor 2010). At its heart the capability approach is liberal, its central agent is ‘the individual’ and it builds around the values of freedom and opportunity. There are many commentators that have sought to defend the capability approach against the criticisms of its failure to adequately conceptualise the relationship between the individual and society, noting that the social context plays a vital role in whether capabilities are translated into valued functionings and that an individuals’ valued functionings can be ‘other regarding’, that is they can be concerned with the wellbeing of human and no-human others. So it is not the case that a capability informed, human-centric approach generates an a social analysis but that there is a deeper problem at the level of its ontology. A key question posed by this book and of significance for our understanding of possible future directions of the trinity is whether we are to conceive of the human at the centre of the analysis as an individual or a social being (Douglas and Ney 1998). The implications of this ontological question are crucial for how the new trinity is evolving in relation to governance. Part of the ambiguity of the three narratives is that at times they have either quietly or explicitly sought to distance themselves from homo economicus, but the ‘individual’ at the heart of the human-centric approach taken up in much of the writing on all three concepts is still very much akin to homo economicus.1 Although this ‘human’ may be much more socially involved, environmentally aware and personally conscious, ‘he’ is still an individualised

1 As

we shall see later, Davies (2017) refers to this agent as homo psycho-economicus.

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rational and calculating agent.2 As we argued in the earlier chapter, the ‘happiness’ conception of wellbeing is characteristic of this and does not internalise the social in the ontology of the central agent. This means that social and human issues in this type of analysis are dealt with as externalities or second order matters. In the ‘social being’ ontology, the human at the centre of the analysis is co-constituted in their social and cultural context. From this ontological perspective, the human cannot be understood separate from the societal and environmental context in which they operate. When we take a complex-systems view, this means that ‘the context’ must be understood as ranging from relationships that are face-to-face to those in nationally and globally imagined communities, from relationships with the planet (as per Helne and Hirvilammi 2015) to relationships through meanings and ideas (as per Bourdieu and Foucault). What is up for contention in the concepts of the trinity at this time is whether we see human-centrism as dealing with networks of individuals or of collectivities of social beings embedded in social and cultural relations, and which of the two dominates has major implications for how our societies will be organised and governed. A second distinctive feature of the new trinity is that the context in which people struggle is now viewed as complex and messy with no easy solutions available to deal with what the literature now commonly refers to as ‘wicked problems’—‘problems that involve complex social challenges that by their nature are ill-defined …’ (Bache and Reardon 2016, p. 127). In the development of all three of the concepts of the trinity, we have noted the influence of complexity thinking. The three ideas have been developing in ways that reject the simple linear models that have hitherto underpinned modes of governance. The acceptance of insights from complexity science demands recognition of the interconnectedness between people, between agents at different levels of the system and between the multiplicity of crises that people and governments face, but at the same time it challenges the capability our rational and silo’d sciences to comprehend and make predictions in this holistic and dynamic system. Following the financial crisis, in an era already characterised by environmental crisis, and alongside political disillusionment and instability, the terms of the trinity manage to convey both the urgent need for change, and the view that things are beyond our control, so we

2 The

masculine form is used deliberately here.

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are left with no choice but to change ourselves, to adapt and survive. For this reason, the strong emphasis on human capacities is highly appealing to policy-makers because it suggests that we (and they) still have something valuable to hang on to, even in the face of adversity. In adopting these three concepts, policy-makers make use of the idea of complexity, but they do not necessarily have a deep understanding of this, or the tools to work with it. While academics have written more philosophical accounts of ‘governing through complexity’ (Chandler 2014) we suggest that for most policy-makers at this time, complexity simply means a complex world with difficult challenges. This might relate to such things as the degradation of the environment and ecosystem functioning, the multidimensional nature of the reproduction of poverty, the challenges of global terrorism and transnational threats, the shifting geopolitical picture or the aftermath of the economic crisis, but it does not, and perhaps cannot in policy terms, stretch to the full joined-upness of complexity system thinking. What does tend to be common is the argument that the world is now less knowable and less predictable than we thought and that consequently our interventions and behaviour must become more pragmatic and adaptable. There is one further arena in which the existing policy paradigm struggles against complexity thinking and that is in its desire for metrics and measurement. As we have noted in the three chapters, each of the three concepts has been subject to intense efforts to produce metrics that can be used by policy-makers. We noted the profusion of sustainability measures, but also that many of these are partial, often dealing with one aspect of sustainability and often founded in traditional hard science models; the measurement of resilience remains very much in its infancy and struggles to cope with the complexity that lies at the very core of this concept, and in the wellbeing field, there is a measurement cacophony generated by the struggle to advance different frameworks that might provide us with alternative measures of progress. As we have noted, some of the frameworks for wellbeing measurement give some nod to complexity through their recognition of multidimensionality but other measures drive back to align with traditional linear and compartmentalised thinking. Thus, for example, the idea that a single happiness score can proxy for a complex notion of human wellbeing is favoured in many corners of science and policy partly because it allows the happiness number to be inserted and manipulated in simplistic analyses and makes it amenable to stock statistical techniques such as linear regression.

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These techniques can say little about unpredictability and about the issues of dynamism, immanence and emergent properties that are so much part of complexity thinking. The difficulties of fully engaging with complexity have led to significant criticisms of the three concepts since they can appear to lead in a direction that suggests that the world is unmanageable and that we should give up on intervention designed to eliminate crises and hardship (e.g. Evans and Reid 2014). While on the one hand the three concepts are presented to us as empowering human agency, we can see that on the other they also allude to a strong element of resignation and a feeling of powerlessness in the face of adversity. This contains the danger of a fatalistic worldview that undermines the very human qualities the concepts are claimed to encourage. We should contrast, therefore, the arguments for wellbeing, sustainability and resilience as empowering human agency and take this up against the tendency to see these ideas in behavioural terms, particularly as adaptive behaviour in the fact of complexity and uncertainty. The latter lends itself to neoliberal interpretations that emphasise reflexive self-governance as the best means of surviving and (possibly thriving) in a hostile or uncertain environment. Complexity ought to allow for a lot more than this. Rather than emphasising our limitations, there is a hint of ‘possibility’ present in the way it fits in the current governance discourse. But rather than limiting this to our better being able to govern ourselves, complexity should open up a much wider array of social possibilities that truly encourage human flourishing.

Implications for Politics The emergence of the new trinity has implications for politics in a crises prone era. In nation-state politics, the human-centric ideals of trinity resonate with the distrust in politicians and other members of governing elites that has been witnessed after the financial crisis. This distrust already had some momentum as a consequence of the way that many people have experienced accelerated globalisation. The results appear to be inequitable with huge gains for some while others are left behind, losing jobs or being placed in positions of greater vulnerability and precariousness. For the public at large, this growth of distrust has often manifested itself in anti-establishment populism and for critical commentators in the belief in the need to do things differently. The aftermath

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has seen something of a blame-game with voters expressing their ­dissatisfaction with mainstream politicians and their advisors (‘drain the swamp’, Brexit) and politicians blaming ‘experts’. Whichever direction the dissatisfaction moves the concepts of the trinity can offer some appeal because of their more human character and their apparent encouragement to move beyond instrumental and technocratic approaches to decision-making and life choices that appear to have failed. But at the same time, these approaches are renewing the practices of governance rather than challenging them, using critique and scepticism to recalibrate them. Thus, these approaches support the narrative that past practices have brought us to the point of crisis, but they shy away from acknowledgement that the crises might be the consequence of deeper underlying structures, processes, ideas and values that need to be challenged. The focus is on bad practices, bad models and bad actors, not on deeper structural questions which instead, if they are acknowledged, are framed as quasi-natural deep conditions of complexity and uncertainty. Things can be fixed by tweaks, modest reform and reorientation. Various critical social theorists have charted the shift towards greater individualism in what is referred to as late, liquid or reflexive modernity (Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck). We would argue that the trinity can and has been playing a role in speaking to this shift in political terms. It speaks to the ‘me-culture’: it is my wellbeing that is at stake and my resilience that is important. It can be argued that this was the genie that successive twentieth-century politicians let out of the bottle in their efforts to reconcile the logics of capitalism and socialism from the 1980s onwards—an acceptance of the notion that we all as individuals deserve to have the best that we can have, while shifting the popular understanding of social justice from a collective to an individualised notion of rights. While the concepts of the trinity have taken some time to come to a level of maturity, they are now accepted and promoted by a diverse range of political leaders. It is important that the trinity defies easy allocation to the old right or left in politics, and indeed it looks and is often presented, as if it has nothing do with these historic ways of thinking about politics. Whereas the politics of left and right were firmly grounded in the historical experiences of the industrialising countries of the North, which were then translated back into other types of society around the world, the trinity provides a new, globally intelligible lexicon. The new trinity can claim not have this eurocentric baggage and

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the three terms can be claimed to be applicable and comprehensible in all societal and cultural contexts. In that sense, the new trinity provides an underpinning for new universalist thinking. We are all confronted with these crises (they tend to be global in character): we all therefore need to be resilient; we all aspire to wellbeing in some form or other; and the environmental crisis, we are told, affects everyone and as such the challenge of sustainability is a challenge to us all. The politics of the ‘me-culture’ has ensured that the concept of wellbeing in particular has global leverage. Political leaders as diverse as Vladimir Putin in Russia, David Cameron in the UK and Evo Morales in Bolivia have all expressed a commitment to improving the wellbeing of their citizens. It therefore cannot come as much of a surprise, having had politicians who promise almost endless improvements in wellbeing, that when a financial crisis hits and people’s wellbeing is adversely affected either directly by the crisis (losing jobs, losing homes or being pushed into more precarious employment) or by the policies that have been put in place to cope with it (austerity), then disillusionment with those politicians will follow. This of course has had knock-on effects in international politics. As populist political leaders have seized on the disillusionment with established political elites and their agendas, they have offered nationalistic political alternatives. These have usually involved some toxic combination of chauvinism, more bellicose language towards other nations that are blamed for exploiting their relationship with the mother/­fatherland, protectionist trade policies, reductions in de facto international aid spending and hostile treatment of international migrants. It has also entailed a withdrawal of support for international institutions and agreements. This has weakened the internationalist and cosmopolitan political projects that were characteristic of the start of the new millennium. There have also been popular countermovements espousing different ideologies and mobilising different critiques of the various crises. These have ranged from the Occupy movement in the wake of the financial crisis through to Les Gilet Jaune and Extinction Rebellion, with its call for more direct and urgent action on the environmental crisis. While some of these align to a limited extent with formal political parties such as the various Green parties or have pushed some parties in a more radical direction, they have not significantly consolidated into mass support for formal political parties that fully seize on the discontent that the population at large has experienced. In Europe, it is only Podemos in Spain and

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Syriza in Greece that have gained serious mass popular support, while elsewhere the momentum of mass support that was behind Chavez’s ascent to power in Venezuela and Lula’s leadership of Brazil appears to have eroded.

Implications for Government and Intervention If not intrinsically so, the current direction of travel for the new trinity lends itself to arguments against ‘big government’, supporting publicly shared scepticism towards large-scale international intervention. The trinity does so when attached to narratives about past failures of planning, regulation and intervention and may also lend support to arguments for post-crisis austerity. This shift has been long in the making and has taken some paradoxical twists. While neoliberalism built a powerful critique of the post-war economics of Keynesianism and welfarism, it had been slower to profoundly critique the liberal interventionism of international organisations. Despite the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1970s to its subsequent dominance in domestic policy arenas of the United States and the UK, the major interventionist projects of international institutions remained largely intact. Indeed with the fall of the Soviet Union and ‘the end of history’, the international order embarked on series of major interventionist projects that were propelled by an almost unbounded confidence in the idea of the market economy. Polanyi had noted in respect of the European imperial project of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that, ‘The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism’ (Polanyi 1957, p. 140) and so too, in the hey-day of neoliberalism, governments and international institutions were assigned central roles in the global neoliberalisation project. In the wake of the economic crises of their time (in the 1970s, these were the oil crisis and the debt crisis) the World Bank and IMF embarked on an approach to economic rescue and stabilisation for developing countries that was given the shorthand title of ‘Structural Adjustment’. Structural adjustment was characterised by economic conditionalities that required borrowing governments to transform their economies from being state controlled towards free-market principles. Referred to as the Washington Consensus, the structural adjustment prescription involved the elimination or reduction of government subsidies,

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the privatisation of state owned enterprises and boards, and the opening up of the economy to international business. It reached too far and the human costs of these drastic and rapid reform programmes in economies and societies that were not ready for them soon became apparent and a critical countermovement emerged under the banner of ‘Adjustment with a Human Face’ (Cornia et al. 1987). Despite the growing criticism of economic conditionalities and ‘one-size fits all’ thinking, the appetite for interventionism continued and the ‘Good Governance’ agenda in the World Bank ushered in the idea of political conditionality (Landell-Mills and Serageldin 1991). Motivated by the ongoing challenges of ‘nation-building’ and a renewed belief in the centrality of the role of the state, the good governance agenda addressed issues across the political and administrative spectrum and called for the introduction of multi-party democracy, the strengthening of civil society, and administrative reforms, all seen as elements of change that were intended to improve the transparency and accountability of governments. Following the car crash of structural adjustment, a Post-Washington Consensus (PWC) emerged in which the more human-centric human development approach has become more prominent (Stiglitz 2002; Öniş and Şensis 2005). This new consensus encouraged a move away from a pure market approach and emphasised the possibility of a constructive combination of market and state in the pursuit of development. However, the PWC shared neoliberalism’s emphasis on the primacy of the individual and its belief in market principles. The role of government was to be supportive, regulating and investing in the infrastructure and human resources that markets needed and in getting the democratic institutions of society right. Where government has to take on interventions or major activities, then these should be undertaken in partnership with the private sector or by creating organisations that operated according to market principles. Throughout the period of conditionalities, a key issue that was at stake was the sovereignty of the nation state vis a vis its citizens and the role of international intervention. Structural adjustment had signalled a significant shift away from the Bretton Woods principles where, at least nominally, respect for sovereignty of states to set their own economic policy direction was retained. Although there were many instances of the exercise of overt and covert power to subvert this, at least the principle of state sovereignty was maintained and was bolstered in part by Cold War competition over influence in the developing world. But, the move

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into economic and then political conditionality represented a willingness to consider a new scale of interventionism. The failure of post–World War II development aid, in either its command economy or neoliberal phases, to make significant impact in reducing destructive poverty in developing countries was an important driver for the more human-centric turn in international intervention thinking. The ideas of the PWC were reflected in a new phase and type of conditionality. Under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC), the World Bank, IMF and most other major bilateral aid donors now required aid recipient governments to have Poverty Reduction Strategies and to generate Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), that were produced using a prescribed participatory methodology. The scale and ambition of international interventionism were brought to its apotheosis in the UN Millennium Declaration (UN 2000). The Declaration, which was signed by all UN member countries and by most of the major international development agencies, was operationalised in the form of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which consisted of eight targets for the reduction of global poverty by 2015. The MDGs were ambitious and rallied considerable governmental and public enthusiasm. They were also moderately successful, although the claims for the amount of global poverty reduction achieved as a consequence of the initiative is somewhat muddied by the rapid growth of a number of countries, and particularly China and India, during that period. The newly discovered concern for the wellbeing of people was not restricted only to those in extreme poverty and a humanitarian basis for intervention in oppressive states or in countries in which there was conflict was also launched. In international relations, the emergence of the idea of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), UN (2005) raised the prospect of taking international action against governments and political leaders on humanitarian grounds and this logic could easily be stretched to the entertain the possibility of regime change, where circumstances were deemed to be sufficiently extreme. In 2003, some two years after the attacks of 9–11 in the United States and the launch of the ‘war on terror’, the United States and the UK led an international coalition into the Iraq War, where the explicit objective was the overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein. The Iraq war was a deadly shambles and in the wake of the financial crisis, the United States and UK began their military withdrawal from Iraq. The experience contributed to a realisation of the limitations of

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large-scale military intervention, no matter how sophisticated, as a means of solving complex political problems and it further undermined trust in politicians and their experts in respect of what had been presented as the basis for the war. Ten years after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, with the conflict in Afghanistan rumbling on, the war of terror in disarray, the war on drugs proving ineffective, harmful poverty persisting in some parts of the world, and the environmental crisis deepening, the complexity and difficulty of fixing these the global challenges was apparent. This is reflected in the way that resilience has been worked into most of the current national security strategies. Most notably, resilience is used in the new European Union Global Strategy to justify the turn to ‘principled pragmatism’ (High Representative [HR/VP] 2016). With many countries under fiscal pressure as a consequence of the worst global economic crisis since the Great Recession of the 1930s, the confidence in and capacity for large-scale intervention had evaporated. Although neoliberalism had been ascendant, the idea of a strong role for government had been difficult to throw off, but there has been a shift. Some time ago authors such as Miller and Rose (1990) proposed that we were experiencing ‘government at a distance’, but a central argument of this book is that we have entered a new phase of government at a distance and that the new trinity has provided a renewed impetus for and legitimation of this as a mode of governance. There are two sides to the legitimation of governance from a distance. The first reflects the condensed history that we have just presented and entails the rather pessimistic argument that the world itself and the problems we face are just too complex and difficult to be able to manage directly. This leads to arguments for adaptability, resilience and sustainable living. The second, more positive justification is that this ‘hands-off’ governance is better at encouraging people to live better, happier, more sustainable or more secure lives and that the best form of governance is that which starts with self-reflection. As we noted in the earlier chapter on sustainability, where we discussed the promotion of the earlier concept of the consumer citizen, the narrative around the idea of ‘government at a distance’ talks of empowerment and responsibilisation. In these terms governing at a distance appeals to the idea of freedom and autonomy of communities and individuals, accompanied by the idea that the state should not govern too much and should instead leave things, wherever possible, to individuals, to families and to communities but through a notion of

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voluntaristic communitarianism (what David Cameron called ‘big society’), civil society and the private sphere. In relation to the ideas of the trinity, we see this working through the promotion of good lifestyles, informed life choices, sustainable living, reflexivity, awareness of risks, promotion of self-responsibility and various forms of self-regulation. This type of approach is built up from the micro-level of everyday lives—this governance through the encouragement of self-awareness is seen as an alternative to large-scale macro-level state intervention. International organisations such as the EU therefore embrace wellbeing, resilience and sustainability as a way of encouraging ‘human-centred approaches’ addressed at ‘individual life cycle risks’ (European Commission 2012, p. 3, emphasis added), life choices and individual responsibility. This approach is presented in a positive way as empowering individuals and communities, giving them ownership and responsibility while enhancing their individual and collective capacities and capabilities. As we have suggested, these ideas are in part a recognition of the messiness of social life and the complexity of the social and political choices we face, combined with a belief that the old ways of doing things—notably statebuilding abroad and state intervention at home—have not been able to deal with new challenges or keep up with the fast pace of social change. But there is also an element of stark fiscal realism about this, because in an era of low growth and austerity many governments believe that they can no longer afford to meet these challenges. The costs are devolved onto communities, families and individuals. Many would argue, however, that this new ‘governance from a distance’ is not about leaving things to themselves. We have noted that each of the three concepts of the trinity has affinities with the idea of ‘nudging’ and that this has become a more significant part of the technologies of governance. This has seen insights from behavioural sciences being used by governments to ‘nudge’ individual decision-making in what is deemed to be an appropriate direction. The increased use of indicators is also part of the new technologies of governance, as governments continue to seek to manage ‘through the calculating metric of transparency and the entrepreneurial ethic of self-responsibility’ (Best 2007, p. 102). The heightened obsession with indexes and performance highlights a major possible contradiction in an approach to governing that both highlights the importance of incalculables and unmeasurables in the concepts of wellbeing, resilience and sustainability and then diminishes their qualities by trying to quantify and measure them. This is somewhat similar

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to Michael Sandel’s position in ‘What Money Can’t Buy’ (2012) where he argues that putting a monetary value on a good, a service or relationship that is important for our wellbeing and for our relationships in society can diminish, destroy or corrupt the important qualities of that good, service or relationship. Similarly, in trying to impose numerical values on some of the things that are important for wellbeing, resilience or sustainability we may lose sight of some of the intangible qualities that have made the concepts attractive. The idea of measuring better in an individualised age where increasingly omniscient personal technology can provide corporations and governments with large quantities of big data. In this historic march towards a loss of belief in the role of government and large-scale intervention, the Sustainable Development Goals represent an important enigma. On the face of it the 2015 Agenda for Sustainable Development could be seen as the last great hurrah of interventionism. Carried along by the momentum of the MDGs the international community found itself bound into a commitment to a major collective initiative to tackle what was now presented as the conjoined crises of human development and the environment. We have argued in the preceding chapter that the SDG’s efforts to develop a framework for sustainable development that truly integrates human and planetary thinking have been largely unsuccessful, but what is important to note in the context of this book is the way that the implementation of the SDGs demonstrates the new principles of government at a distance. In an authoritative evaluation of the initiative, Bob Deacon argues that the SDGs represent the first truly global social policy (in as much as that the goals apply to all countries and the initiative seeks to place obligations on all countries), but that they fail in providing a framework for more effective global governance (Deacon 2016). He assigns some of the blame for this on the era of conditionalities and notes that the SDG negotiations were a site where, ‘in the name of resistance to northern impositions the Global South was asserting claims of the right of countries to act autonomously’ (ibid., p. 119). This has been reflected in the Implementation Goal of the resolution. Goal 17.15 calls for signatories to ‘Respect each country’s policy space and leadership to establish and implement policies for poverty eradication and sustainable development’ (UN 2015). While this may have a been a principle of resistance for countries in the Global South that were wary of new conditionalities, it can also be seen as fitting conveniently to the direction of travel in

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governance thinking for austerity-wracked industrialised countries where the confidence in large-scale intervention had disappeared. The SDGs conform to the new norm of devolving responsibility for tackling the challenges of complex human and environmental crises down to ever-lower levels. Alongside this devolved interventionism, Deacon argues that neither the original SDG statement nor the necessary follow-up agreements, on financing and on global institutional reform, strengthen the global governance institutions such that they would be better able to tackle the global crises that the Agenda addresses. Instead they have signalled a retreat back to ‘an era of strengthened national sovereignty and national self-reliance’ (Deacon 2016, p. 129). The SDGs can be seen as an exemplar of Blühdorn’s idea of the politics of unsustainability and demonstrate how the broad-brush globalism of universal intervention of the late twentieth century has now been replaced by a new universalism of distanced (or devolved) intervention.

Implications for Governance A key argument of this book is that the three concepts of the new trinity are now central to the evolution of our systems of governance. However, governance is in flux and central to this flux is the contestation over the way that the three concepts are being defined and deployed. Most observers agree that the financial crisis of 2008 has had a considerable impact on neoliberalism as a form of governmentality. The experience of a global economic crisis precipitated by out of control financial market behaviours and the massive interventions of nation-state governments and international bodies to rescue banks and stop economies plummeting into economic chaos have both served to undermine confidence in core elements of neoliberal thinking. In his pithier of two definitions, Will Davies defines neoliberalism as, ‘the pursuit of the disenchantment of politics by economics’ (2017, p. 6), but in the changes in politics since the economic crisis we can equally detect the disenchantment of economics by politics. While many thought or hoped that neoliberalism would be brought to a reckoning by the 2008 crisis, this has not proven to be the case. The economic growth paradigm underpinned by neoliberal thinking is still largely in place as evidenced by the continued centrality of growth in major initiatives such as the SDGs or the new struggle for inclusive growth. Some have argued that we are experiencing ‘zombie

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neoliberalism’: ‘“Dead but dominant”, neoliberalism may indeed have entered its zombie phase. The brain has apparently long since ceased functioning, but the limbs are still moving, and many of the defensive reflexes seem to be working too’ (Peck 2010, p. 109). But neoliberalism is far from dead and a key aspect of the struggle over how wellbeing, resilience and sustainability are to be conceptualised hinges around the extent to which these three can made to fit with and perhaps even advance neoliberal governmentality. As we have outlined there can be positive and negative interpretations of the new trinity of governance, but they all suggest a critique of classical liberalism. The positive view of resilience, sustainability and wellbeing is that they are about enhancing human capacities and capabilities and empowering local communities. In contrast to the universalism of intervention of classical liberalism, this emphasises the power of the local and the everyday. The more critical view of the trinity terms sees them as a means of shifting responsibility onto people and getting them to deal with their own security and wellbeing, while still allowing the state to govern from a distance. As we have noted this builds on a negative assessment of previous forms of state intervention and international development strategies. But both views are critical of the intervention universalism of the liberal approach as well as questioning the record of actual interventions. It is a matter of debate as to whether these new approaches are contributing to liberal, post-liberal, neoliberal or post-neoliberal forms of governance. As we have sought to demonstrate different conceptions of the elements of the trinity can be informed by and can bolster any of these ideologies. However, there are many elements of these approaches than can be detected as being consistent with neoliberalism when understood through a Foucauldian lens of governmentality. In particular, the emphasis on self-awareness, self-governance, flexibility, adaptation and care for the self, all broadly fit with neoliberalism. Bevir (2016) suggests that we are entering an era of governmentality ‘after neoliberalism’, insofar as our systems of governance operate more aware of the limits of the market, and this has involved a shift to more variegated networks of governance. This has some plausibility in as much as the ideas of the new trinity can also be seen to add something further to governance through invoking certain human and social qualities that do not fully conform to neoliberal modes of behaviour. But Davies sees this differently and argues that what we are now seeing is

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the emergence of what he calls ‘contingent neoliberalism’, in which the various failures of economic rationality are dealt with through incorporating an ever broader range of cultural and political resources (Davies 2017, p. xxi). One of the main instruments in this, and one that echoes our earlier argument about the significance of the individualistic ontology, is what Davies calls ‘homo psycho-economicus’, ‘which is provided by a combination of methodological assumptions of economics, wedded to contingent empirical findings of economic psychology and, where possible, neuroscience’ (2017, p. 169). Along with the behavioural economics behind ‘nudge’, these are ideas that come together in the wellbeing as ‘happiness’ movement. Davies notes that in recent years it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that we are witnessing a range of behaviours at both the individual and societal levels that appear to be irrational and at odds with the neoliberal sensibility. Apparently, in the real world (and as confirmed by elections, behavioural studies, surveys and big data), people do not always act in ways that are rationally in their own best interests. As such, he argues, we have reached a point where ‘Homo-economicus is no longer assumed but taught, nudged, mimicked and nurtured into existence’ (p. 157). This step towards a contingent and bolstering co-option of insights from the burgeoning field of wellbeing studies has encouraged a return of teleology in governance thinking: ‘new interventions must be designed and counteract individual and collective irrationalities’ (p. 169). He goes on to assign a central role to the concepts of the trinity in this contingent form of neoliberalism and also notes the significance of the desire to find appropriate metrics for this new form of governance. ‘This teleological rationality remains technocratic, with the socio-economic telos captured in metrics of “wellbeing”, “resilience” and “sustainability”, and the means of pursuing these goals remains organised in terms of incentives, choices, strategies and individual agents’ (p. 175). Despite the claims that our systems of governance are moving beyond neoliberalism, we must consider whether we are really witnessing a significant break from past practices. As we have shown, there are a number of different ways that each of the concepts of the trinity could be interpreted and deployed to change our governance arrangements, but at present the dominant direction of uptake is consistent with, supports and extends neoliberal governance. A particular illustration of this is the contradiction in the claim that the absorption of wellbeing into our governance thinking can help us move ‘beyond GDP’ but then narrowing

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the concept of wellbeing to happiness—a suitable and superior alternative to money as a proxy for utility—limits the scope for change. Homo psycho-economicus is a familiar character that allows the maintenance of the dominant economic paradigm but at the same time may foreshadow a move to a post-liberal era where government at a distance, aided and abetted by personal digital technologies, surveillance and big-data mining, will tell us what constitutes freedoms and how those should be exercised. From our review of the new trinity we conclude that following the crisis, neoliberalism has been seeking to reinvent itself through a consideration of its own limitations and failings, modifying its methods, adopting new mechanisms and nuancing its techniques of governance rather than breaking from its logic. Conveniently, of course, in a time of austerity, turning to ourselves is the cheap option, while at the same time appearing to be empowering. This is encouraged by the realist and pragmatic qualities of these ideas— encouraging us to make the most of what we have and draw on our own reserves, resources and experience to find ‘best fit’ solutions. This works in domestic policy where governments such as the UK’s are keen to promote community resilience as a way of ‘outsourcing’ responsibility but also shedding costs. Domestically, states are faced with increasingly unsustainable costs caused by things like demographic change. In the international arena, DFID and other organisations are explicit about the cost-benefit case for resilience noting the ‘growing evidence that building community resilience to shocks and stresses saves money as well as lives’ (DFID 2011, p. 2). The EU likewise argues that that investment in resilience is cost-effective and delivers maximum impact from minimum funds (European Commission 2012, p. 3). As Haldrup and Rosn (2013, p. 130) have noted, this is an aspect of the scaling back of global intervention, at least in terms of large-scale statebuilding and development projects. The new trinity is consistent with and can evolve this neo-­neoliberal framing in that the main principle of neoliberal universalism can be upheld (in as much as market principles still apply everywhere, albeit modified by insights from psychology), but the broad-brush universalism of intervention is critiqued. As we have discussed a new form of universalism that accompanies the trinity takes a step back. This is the universalism of distanced intervention—there is now no longer a single prescription but rather guidance on how solutions must be developed at lower levels, adapted to local cultural and social conditions. Here, there

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is a search for locally founded solutions to problems now deemed too complex to completely resolve by grand-scale external intervention. This shift can be noted across a range of literatures. In the peacebuilding literature, for example, there have been moves from ‘liberal peace’ to ‘hybrid peace’, where universal liberal principles are merged with local traditions, practices and customs (MacGinty and Richmond 2013). In much of this literature, there is talk of the importance of the everyday and the need for more pragmatic responses to complex problems. Past forms of intervention such as peacebuilding, statebuilding and development strategy are regarded now as having led to significant failures and against such a backdrop of things gone wrong a more flexible approach is promoted. Similarly, in the environmental literature on the governance of natural resources, contributions from a legal pluralist perspective emphasise the importance of local values, regimes and institutions in the sustainable management of threatened resources such as fisheries and trees (Bavinck and Gupta 2014). When placed in these contexts these new approaches, founded in the logics of wellbeing, resilience and sustainability, appear empowering, but whether they are or not depends entirely on how the concepts of the trinity are framed, owned and used.

Concluding Thoughts This book has made a number of claims. Foremost is the idea that wellbeing, resilience and sustainability can be seen as a new trinity due to their related characteristics and usages. Equally important is the idea that these concepts are best understood in combination as contributions to emergent forms of governance. We have argued that these approaches to governance are best understood as recalibrations in the face of ongoing crises and following the financial crisis in particular. In short, wellbeing, resilience and sustainability help recalibrate governance for a time of multiple crises, uncertainty and reflexive scepticism. However, following this path of argument reveals a strong tendency towards the view that the trinity currently is evolving to support and extend a neoliberal mode of governance. We have seen this primarily in terms of the individualising dynamics at play, particularly in AngloSaxon understandings of these ideas. We are doubtful whether the new approaches as they are currently being shaped really challenge existing market logic, ‘me-culture’ and homo economicus. We have also suggested that these approaches fit with a form of ‘governance from a distance’—or

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governmentality—that encourages self-regulation and adaptive behaviour rather than significantly confronting the most important structural aspects of global challenges. Indeed, at their worst, these approaches can be said to abandon the idea that we need fundamental social change in favour of ameliorating our current state of affairs. We conclude, however, by claiming that the struggle is not over and that we still have a choice. While the new trinity of ideas are prominent in current ways of thinking about how we organise our lives and societies and confront crises, the ideas are open to multiple interpretations, are vulnerable to critique, and neoliberal interpretations of them need not go uncontested. Indeed, although neoliberalism continues to assert a strong influence over our ways of thinking about governance, there is enough in the literature around these ideas to suggest that there are strong alternative articulations that are at odds with this dominant set of interpretations. We conclude by suggesting some ways in which the trinity might be radicalised. First of all it is important to reject interpretations of the three concepts that present themselves as being non-political. This is not to speak of the applications of the concepts, which will always be political, but that it is important to be conscious of the political values that are inherent in the ontological and epistemological positions of the concepts. Thus, the idea of wellbeing need not be focused on ‘the individual’. The new trinity draws our attention to the inescapably human dynamics of our existence and the messy, socially embedded nature of our interactions. Rather than understanding this in individualistic terms—as control, freedom and maximising behaviour—it is possible to adopt a social conception of human wellbeing. This starts with a more socially embedded view of the human whose wellbeing is co-constructed in communities, social groups, cultural values and collective understandings. Many contributions to the wellbeing discourse recommend that such an approach is necessary to fully comprehend the dynamic multidimensionality of wellbeing, but the idea of wellbeing is being appropriated in the form of ‘happiness’, in a contribution to the recalibration of existing liberal and neoliberal practices. The alternative social ontology is also proposed in the literature on sustainability, where the persistent failure to integrate social and natural science thinking has consistently frustrated a meaningful understanding of what sustainable development might consist of. The alternative ontology involves conceiving of humans and the planet as interdependent

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elements of a complex system. As such the wellbeing of people and the sustainability of the planet are inextricably interdependent. This then requires a more sophisticated analysis of the social and economic systems in which people live in order to identify the key drivers of unsustainable practices. This is precisely what the currently dominant concept in the sustainability literature—‘the anthropocene’—does not do. The anthropocene presents itself as a politically neutral concept, but its ontological starting point (humans—an undifferentiated aggregate of desocialised individuals) obstructs a politicised analysis of what the problems are. More worryingly, it misdirects possible ways of addressing the environmental crisis and masks the potentially dire political and human costs of those solutions that ‘the anthropocene’ points to. Second, we have argued that the way that the trinity is being taken up promotes a form of governance that pushes responsibility down to individuals and to communities. However, rather than this being an instrumentalised process of ‘government at a distance’ there are alternative readings of the three concepts that suggest a more genuinely grassroots-based and democratic approach where richer conceptions of wellbeing, resilience and sustainability are adopted and nurtured. Such a move could also address the current political crisis, where people feel disenchanted both by elite politics and orthodox economics. While the current emphasis in the trinity is on handing down responsibility, it is possible to think of all three concepts in ways that encourage participation and empowerment. If the worst anti-liberal possibilities of the new trinity are to be avoided then an active democracy approach represents one possible antidote. Conceiving of local active democracy in the context of a complexsystems framework also points to the unavoidable interconnections between different political levels. The pursuit of meaningful outcomes in terms of wellbeing, resilience and sustainability requires democratic participation at the local, national and international levels. Here, the democratic challenge is to reach an understanding not just of how we might live well as individuals but how we might live well together in environmentally sustainable and socially just arrangements. In short, the three concepts could encourage a shift from the ‘me-culture’ to the ‘we-culture’. Third, we can return to the issue of epistemology and use the ideas to challenge the dominant logic of rational calculation. While it may be that the trinity is part of a wider discourse that seeks to recalibrate neoliberal governance ‘after the crisis’, the very fact that it is appealing to

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neoliberals suggests that there is something irreducibly human about these qualities that evades the dominant logic. This suggests that the drive to measure wellbeing, resilience and sustainability as an element of the new mechanisms of governance and monitoring ‘at a distance’ should be tempered with the more meaningful understandings present in alternative formulations of the three concepts. Thus, for example, if ideas like resilience have little resonance in certain communities, then they should not be imposed in order to ‘govern better’, nudge or cajole. If communities come up with lists of what is important for their wellbeing that are different from elite prescription then these should be debated rather than being dismissed and overridden. We propose that the emphasis should be on something meaningful over something measurable. Finally, if all else fails, then the unsuitability of such ideas, or the inability of policy-makers to use them as means to govern ‘all the way down’ leaves enough space for alternative expression of local agency. From our survey of the ways these ideas are understood, we find comfort in the plurality of different political traditions, institutional path dependencies and cultural processes that results in different meaning (or indeed no meaning) being given to these ideas in different contexts. Different understandings of wellbeing and sustainability are clearly evident in different countries, and we have noted how the dominant Anglo-Saxon view of resilience does not always translate into other national policy strategies, leaving room for other options (Joseph 2018). It is too early to speculate on the relationship between the different elements of the trinity, but we might also be starting to see some tensions between resilience and sustainability, with resilience more heavily dependent on an Anglo-Saxon understanding of ‘living with complexity’ and sustainability perhaps suggesting a more socially embedded and enduring approach to our social and ecological precariousness. How this plays out, however, is a matter for cultural and political interpretation. Indeed, we conclude by emphasising a social and cultural understanding of the trinity—not scientific, rational and calculative—but politically contested and culturally sensitive. We emphasise deep social and cultural embeddedness over and above economistic calculation and current attempts to socially and culturally embed a new form of individualism.

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Index

A adaptation, 48, 49–50, 62–63, 77, 79 adaptive capacity, 46–47, 61, 62. See also complex adaptive systems Adger, Neil, 45 Alkire, Sabine, 17 Anderies, J. Marty, 46, 49, 50 Anglo-Saxon culture, 7–8, 49, 64–65 anthropocene, 89–92, 123 Arctic Resilience Report, 57 Aristotle. See eudaimonic wellbeing Atlantic Council, 45 B Bangladesh, 41 Barr, S., 81–82, 84 Barry, John, 83, 93 Bauman, Zygmunt, 33, 109 Beck, Ulrich, 33, 109 Beck, W., 20 Behavioural Insights Team (‘Nudge Unit’), 29–30, 52, 82, 115 Bentham, Jeremy, 16

Berkes, Fikret, 44 Bevir, Mark, 63–64, 118 Bhutan, 22–23 biodiversity, 86–87 Biswas-Diener, R., 21 Blühdorn, I., 94 Bolivia, 23 Bouchard, Gérard, 48 Brundtland Commission Report (Our Common Future), 75–79 Buddhism, 23 ‘buen vivir’ tradition, 23–24 business continuity management (BCM), 55 C Cabinet Office (UK), 51–53 capabilities, 20, 50–51, 59, 77–78, 105 capitalism, 91–93 carbon footprints, 88 Care Act 2014, 28 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 90

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020 J. Joseph and J. A. McGregor, Wellbeing, Resilience and Sustainability, Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32307-3

145

146  Index Chandler, David, 47–48, 60 change, resilience and, 47–51, 62–63 citizenship, 82–83 Clarke, John, 82–83 climate change, 74, 79 Club of Rome, 72, 73 colonialism, 77 complex adaptive systems, 42–43, 46, 61–62 complexity, 106–108 humans and ecosystems, 87 resilience and, 49, 60–61 complex systems, 31–32, 33, 87, 106 consumerist culture, 84, 92–93 Crutzen, Paul, 89 Cummins, Robert, 18, 43

eudaimonic wellbeing, 15, 16–18, 30, 44 European Union, 20, 56, 59, 88, 115, 120 Evans, Brad, 62

D Davies, Will, 29, 33, 118–119 Deacon, Bob, 116–117 Deci, E., 15, 18 degrowth (décroissance) movement, 93–94 Department for International Development (DFID), 55, 60, 63, 120 developing countries, 21–24, 75–76, 77, 85, 86 Diener, E., 17, 21 Douglas, Mary, 27 Doyal, L., 19–20

G Germany, 64 Giddens, Anthony, 33, 109 Gough, I., 19–20 governance, 102–103, 111–117, 117–121, 123 resilience and, 51–58, 63–64 sustainability and, 79–89 wellbeing and, 26–33 ‘government at a distance’, 29, 33, 41, 96, 114–116, 118, 120, 123, 124 greenhouse gases, 79–81 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 13–14, 26, 88 Gross National Happiness (GNH), 22–23 growth, sustainability and, 75–76, 96

E Earth Summits, 73–74, 86 ecosystems, 45, 86–87 Ecuador, 23 Engelke, Peter, 45, 62 enlightened prosperity, 24, 92 environment. See sustainability

F fatalism, 50–51, 62–63, 94, 108 financial crisis, 8, 14, 24, 25, 40, 51, 96, 106, 108, 110, 113, 117– 118, 121 Florentin, Bressa, 23 Folke, Carl, 42, 50 Fotopoulos, T., 93–94 Foucault, Michel, 63, 93 Fournier, V., 93

H Ha-Joon Chang, 77 happiness. See wellbeing hedonic wellbeing, 15–16, 21, 27–30

Index

Helliwell, John, 15, 21, 44 Helne, T., 95–96 Hirvilammi, T., 95–96 Holling, C.S., 41–43 homo economicus, 24, 27, 105, 119, 121 homo psycho-economicus, 27, 119, 120 homo socialis, 27 Hornborg, Alf, 90–92 human-centric approaches, 26–28, 57, 58–60, 75–79, 104–105, 112–113 Human Development Report (UNDP), 55, 57, 59, 61 human epoch (anthropocene), 89–92, 123 humanitarian intervention, 113–114 Humankind Index (Oxfam), 25 Huppert, F., 43 I inclusive growth, 24–25 indigenous populations, 57 individualism, 109, 114–115 resilience and, 58–60 sustainability and, 81–84 wellbeing and, 26–28, 29, 32, 33 inequality sustainability and, 77–79, 84–85, 88, 90 wellbeing and, 25, 33 Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 87 international aid and development, 55–57, 63, 111–113 International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 74 intervention, 58, 63, 111–117, 120–121 Iraq War, 113–114

  147

J Jackson, Tim, 92–93 Jevons, Stanley, 16 K Kahneman, Daniel, 16 Kasser, Tim, 30 Kennedy, Robert, 13 Kyoto Protocol (1997), 80 L Latin America, 23 Latouche, Serge, 93–94 Layard, Richard, 15, 16, 27 legal pluralism, 121 Legatum Institute, 24 lifestyle, life choices, 81–86, 88, 96, 114–115 Limits to Growth, The (Club of Rome), 72 living well together, 32–33, 78–79, 123 M Malm, Andreas, 90–92 Martin-Breen, Patrick, 46, 49, 50 McAfee, Kathleen, 90 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), 45, 49, 87 mindfulness, 23 Mirowski, Philip, 64 modernity (late, liquid, reflexive), 33, 109 Moore, Jason, 91–92 N national security, 51–55, 61 Needham, C., 83

148  Index needs, human, 18–19, 77–78 neoliberalism, 48, 57, 63–64, 75, 92–94, 111, 117–121, 123–124 neo-Malthusianism, 90 neo-utilitarianism, 16, 27, 64 ‘nudge’ techniques, 29–30, 52, 82, 115 Nussbaum, Martha, 17 Nye, Steven, 27 O ontology, 27, 83, 105–106, 119, 122–123 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 20, 22, 30, 61 Our Common Future (Brundtland Report), 75–79 overseas strategies, 55–57, 63 Oxfam Humankind Index, 25 P panarchy, 46 Paris Agreement, 80 people-centred approaches, 26–28, 57, 58–60, 75–79, 104–106, 112–113 Personal Wellbeing Index, 18 person, concept of the, 26–28, 93 Pickett, K., 25 planetary boundaries, 75, 90 politics, implications for, 108–111, 123 pollution, 85–86 populism, 110–111 Post-Washington Consensus (PWC), 112, 113 poverty, 17, 19, 21–22, 26, 33, 76–77, 113

Preparing for Emergencies: Guide for Communities (Cabinet Office), 53 Prosperity Index, 24 psychology resilience and, 43–47 wellbeing and, 15–18 R Raworth, Kate, 75, 92 Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD), 80 Reid, Julian, 57 resilience, 40–65, 103 Anglo-Saxon culture and, 64–65 applying to public policy, 51–57, 120 change and, 47–51, 62–63 complexity and, 49, 60–62 dynamics of, 58–65 of individuals and communities, 58–60, 114–115 introduction, 5, 40–41 measuring, 60, 107–108, 115–116 psychological and societal, 43–47 sustainability and, 49, 59, 77, 82, 94 systems, 41–43 wellbeing and, 43–44, 58–60 Resilience Alliance, 75 Responsibility to Protect (R2P), 113 Rio Earth Summit, 74, 86 risk, 50–51 robustness, 49–50 Rockstrom, J., 75, 90 Rojas, Mariano, 27 Ross, Helen, 44 Ryan, Richard, 15, 18, 44 Ryff, C.D., 17–18

Index

S Sachs, J., 15 Salgado, F., 23 Sandel, Michael, 116 Scotland, 25 Self Determination Theory (SDT), 44 Sen, Amartya, 17, 59, 77–78 Shue, Henry, 85 Skoll Foundation, 24 Smith, Adam, 19 social capital, 21, 44–45 Social Progress Index, 24 social quality, 20–21 societal resilience, 43–47 Solow, Robert, 78 standard of living, 78 Stiglitz Commission Report, 14–15, 20, 26, 88 Stiglitz, Joseph, 25 Stockholm Declaration, 73–74 Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience (Cabinet Office), 52–53 structural adjustment, 111–112 Sumak Kawsay, 23–24 sustainability, 72–97, 103–108, 122–123 anthropocene concept and, 89–92, 123 applying to public policy, 79–89 biodiversity, 86–87 business responsibility, 80–81 capitalism and, 91–93 climate change and, 74, 79–82 degrowth (décroissance) movement, 93–94 dynamics of, 89–97 evolution of sustainability thinking, 73–79 individual responsibility, 81–84, 114–115

  149

inequality and, 77, 78–79, 84–85, 88, 90 introduction, 5–6, 72–73 measuring, 87–89, 107–108, 115–116 politics of unsustainability, 94 pollution, 85–86 resilience and, 49, 59, 77, 82, 94 weak and strong conceptions of, 96 wellbeing and, 33, 77–78, 82, 88– 89, 94–95, 95–96, 122–123 sustainable development, 76–79, 82, 92, 94, 95 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 12–13, 79, 89, 95, 116–117 systems resilience, 41–43 T Townsend, Peter, 19 U UN Development Programme (UNDP), 55, 57, 59, 61 UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), 73 United Kingdom (UK) resilience strategy, 51–53, 55, 120 sustainable development strategy, 82–84 United States, resilience strategy, 53–55 UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 113 UN Scientific Conference on the Human Environment (Earth Summits), 73–74, 86 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 12–13, 79, 89, 95

150  Index UN System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA), 88 V van der Maesen, L., 20–21 ‘vivir bien’ tradition, 23 W Walker, A., 20–21 Washington Consensus, 111–112 welfare, 18–19 wellbeing, 12–33, 103 applying to public policy, 26–33 defining, 14 ecosystems and, 45, 87 eudaimonic, 15, 16–18, 30, 44 hedonic, 15–16, 21, 27–28, 28–30 history and academic disciplines, 15–21 individual responsibility for, 29–30, 32, 82–83, 114–115 inequality and, 25, 33

introduction, 4–5, 12 measuring, 13–14, 22, 29–31, 88–89, 107, 115–116 non-governmental perspectives, 24 non-western perspectives, 21–25, 95–96 psychological approaches, 15–18, 27 resilience and, 43–44, 59–60 resurgence of, 12–14, 64, 110 sociological approaches, 18–21, 122 sustainability and, 33, 82, 77–78, 88–89, 94–95, 95–96, 122–123 Wellbeing in Developing Countries Research Group (WED), 21–22 Welsh, I., 94 wicked problems, 106–109 Wildavsky, Aaron, 50 Wilkinson, R., 25 World Bank, 40, 56–57, 60–61 World Happiness Report, 15–16, 21 Z Zebrowski, Chris, 62