An approach to pluralizing socionatural resilience through assemblages

Abstract

Resilience provides a forward-looking framework to understand human–environment relations. Yet, adopted through a system-modelling approach in coupled social-ecological systems, it often reinforces a functionalist vision of the world as an interconnected whole, unable to engage with the multiplicity of people’s practices navigating change. I argue for sustained engagement with resilience and propose a socionatural approach to overcome its system-modelling limitations, thinking through the world’s entities as inherently social and natural. I discuss how socionatural resilience can be pluralized through assemblage ideas and reflect on the implications that an ontological politics of resilience poses for our conceptual framing and methodologies.