Resilience, responsibility and state abandon: The changing role of the government in emergencies

Abstract

Scholars have explored how governmental agendas pursued in the name of resilience redistribute the responsibility for attending to emergencies amongst governments and communities. In this paper, we draw on two years of research with community groups responding to Covid-19 in the United Kingdom to deepen these debates concerning the effects of so-called 'responsibilization' amid appeals for resilience. Against popular claims that equate resilience to state abandonment in an era of neo-liberal reform, we argue that resilience has also prompted new forms of coordination between government and non-government community actors that in themselves are fraught with political complications warranting critical scrutiny. After years of public spending cuts, the government increasingly plays an enabler role in emergencies; orchestrating other actors rather than directly intervening themselves. This role is important to consider because it reshapes people's affective encounter with the figure of ‘the government’ when emergencies happen by sequestering the government's activities and generating feelings of government inaction. With the government's obfuscation, community actors valorise their own interpretation of 'resilience' as a way to deal with emergencies without government support, despite the government's ongoing presence. This belief in successful non-state resilience could have grave consequences if it is used to justify future government-led attempts to accelerate a long-established policy of reducing expenditure on public services, thus engendering in the future the very state abandon through which some scholars diagnose the present. Overall, the paper challenges popular conceptualisations of the re-distribution of responsibility under resilience agendas, unpacks how resilience agendas reconfigure relationships between people and governments in times of crisis and elaborates on the ramifications for public emergency governance if belief in resilience as non-state responsibility proliferates in the future.