The rise of resilience is intimately connected to the perceived failings of traditional, liberal or modernist forms of politics, which assumed that governance could be centrally directed on the basis of ‘command-and-control’ understandings.
Confidence in this framework has gradually eroded, with an appreciation that the world is much more globalised, interconnected and relationally entangled than ‘top-down’ forms of governance assume.
David Chandler, a leading international academic and commentator in the field of international theory and governance, talks about the new paradigm of governing through mapping, sensing and hacking.
1) The resilience mode of mapping shifts the focus from the ideas and understanding of governing agencies to the importance of the object of governance itself.
2) Sensing as a mode of governing resilience shifts the emphasis of thinking from causality to correlation.
3) Hacking as a process of ‘becoming with’ seeks to achieve resilience through enabling the creativity of contingent relations rather than merely seeking to resist or limit external effects.