El éxtasis estético

The Need-to-Know? paradigm did not end neatly with the end of the Cold War and, as we have seen, nor did civil defence morph seamlessly into civil emergency planning.

Similarly, the new paradigm which for reasons that will become clear I have labelled the Resilience Paradigm cannot be ascribed to any particular driver be it the New Labour Government elected in 1997, growing Europeanisation, mentioned earlier, the general clamour for reform following the Decade of Disasters, or the conflated threats of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and international terrorism. Information, that is its availability, accessibility, quality and quantity, and the realisation of the state’s limitations in terms of resources and organisation were probably the drivers for the step change or paradigm shift.

In 1997 the outgoing Conservative government had taken steps to reduce the size of the Civil Service and modernise it whereas the new government had planned extensive programmes where the state would play an important part in public and even private life (Richards 1996). As far as civil emergency planning was concerned, apart from acting on promises made in opposition such as the public inquiries referred to below, reform was slow in coming on “this low policy priority and, potentially, financial black hole” (Rogers 2011:93). Early in the new Millennium a number of crises were handled badly and caused embarrassment to government, namely flooding in 2000, a fuel ‘crisis’

caused by non-violent protests by the haulage and farming industries, also in 2000, and the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak. All were managed by separate government departments and none was recognised as a crisis until later.

4.2. Resilience

In February 2001, the UK Government instigated another Emergency Planning Review (Cabinet Office 2001) and transferred responsibility for overseeing emergency management to the new Civil Contingencies Unit in the Cabinet Office (O’Brien & Read 2005). This was prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US although those events soon overshadowed UK domestic threats. The Review reported in October 2001 and contrary to previous reviews called for a hierarchical national, regional and local approach to “...

do everything that can be done to enhance our resilience” (Walker & Broderick 2006:

46).

III. PARADIGMS of CRISIS

46 To the practitioner ‘resilience’ is a convenient collective neologism, but it is a very old idea given new life (Alexander 2013). A “veritable cottage industry on resilience”

(Kahan 2015:1) has arisen that is global in its adoption and resilience has been used as an “interdisciplinary boundary object” in both crisis research and politics (Welsh 2014:15). In the UK, the concept was initially able to link the divergent strands of civil emergencies, civil defence, counter-terrorism and especially the growing focus on risk and business continuity management under a unifying policy agenda and do so with relatively little reorganisation and cost to government. The latter is an important advantage because adoption of the resilience doctrine enabled government to gradually shift the state’s responsibility for the protection of its citizens to self-help by citizens and corporations (Anderson 2015), by “harnessing local resources and expertise to help themselves in an emergency, in a way that complements the response of the emergency services” (Cabinet Office 2011b: 4), only possible with greater access to information about hazards, risks and threats. A council official noted that the change in title from emergency planning officer to resilience manager seemed to “enhance the term’s visibility and embed the term within the council’s decision making” (Shaw & Maythorne 2011: 49). The ad hoc arrangements that had evolved post-Cold War to fill a need with their language of ‘association’, ‘society’, ‘groups’, ‘panels’ and ‘liaison’ (Norman & Coles 2003) were replaced by Local Resilience Forum, Resilience Team and, to convey action and order, simply ‘Resilience’ as in London Resilience and RESILIENCE-UK (Rogers 2013).

Internationally the term resilience was defined for disaster risk reduction purposes as

“The ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and function” (UNISDR 2009:24). This is not dissimilar to the definition promulgated by the Cabinet Office of the “ability of the community, services, area or infrastructure to detect, prevent, and, if necessary to withstand, handle and recover from disruptive challenges” (Cabinet Office 2013d). However, the devil is in the detail.

To the UN definition was added the important caveat, that “The resilience of a community in respect to potential hazard events is determined by the degree to which the community has the necessary resources and is capable of organizing itself both prior to and during times of need” (UNISDR 2009:24) and it is this link between the policy and

III. PARADIGMS of CRISIS

47 the resourcing of that policy, or failure to do so, that raises doubt about the usefulness of resilience for future catastrophic crises (see Chapter IV).

The Coalition government 2010-15 published its policy on emergency planning online in two separate documents, and both were re-affirmed on 8 May 2015 by the new Conservative government. The policy on Emergency Planning opens with “It’s important that local communities can be resilient in the event of major emergencies” and then rather briefly focuses on the local authority role as though it were only a holding policy.

Reflecting the difference between aim and delivery in the longer more detailed policy on Emergency Response Planning the government claims “We work to ensure society is better prepared for, and able to recover from, emergencies … working with organisations and individuals from across the UK” in an inclusive way coupled with a pro-active information strategy, utilising the opportunities presented by technology (Cabinet Office 2013b; 2015b).

In the USA, a definition of resilience as “the ability to adapt to changing conditions and withstand and rapidly recover from disruption due to emergencies” was offered by President Obama (US DHS 2011) and resilience features in the Quadrennial Homeland Security Reviews (US DHS 2010 & 2014). Homeland Security policy analyst Kahan (2015) has found that despite the above guidance there exists “a spectrum of definitions” and that “innumerable variations of definitions abound, depending upon the needs and perspectives of the definer” (p2). In his conclusion Kahan draws our attention to the danger of relying on this new policy of resilience. Firstly, the complexity and ubiquitous nature of its application defies performance measurement, a major concern for any government. More importantly, he expresses concern that whilst the American implementation of resilience policies at all levels will inevitably lead to increased preparedness and resilience, that implementation is so complex and such a challenge to governance that improvement may fail. In other words, the same argument about resourcing and organising that was raised by the UN caveat above. Concluding on a humorous note he notes that resilience will “remain resilient for a long time, although not competing with the cockroach” (p11).

Resilience has other critics. The concept of community resilience is challenged by Rogers (2013) using the 2011 August riots in the UK as an example. He describes three types of resilience in UK policy, that is organisational, technological, and community, highlighting the negative aspects of the community’s reliance on “state-centric expert

III. PARADIGMS of CRISIS

48 knowledge” and “technological fixes that govern at a distance” of the first two types.

The paradox of community resilience is that “it excludes citizens from decision making but seeks to render them more responsible for their own safety” (p322).

In the wider context of disaster risk and climate change adaptation, influenced by her interdisciplinary research in Nepal 2008-11 on communities affected by landslides Sudmeier-Rieux (2014) reminds us that those literally ‘living on the edge’, displaced by more affluent groups, and characterised by poverty and food shortages are often quite resilient because they have adapted to the conditions, are familiar with the dangers, and although they are the first to suffer an event they are the first to recover or

“bounce-back” (p68). Summing up the literature on resilience and development she points to the contradiction that resilient communities may still be vulnerable and at risk as well as corrupt and inequitable (Levine et al 2012) and resilience as a policy can be a

‘Band-Aid’ that ignores the “dangerous living conditions and high vulnerability that created risk as well as resilience in the first place” (Sudmeier-Rieux 2014: 69). In a similar vein Grint (2009) raises the question of resilience inhibiting necessary changes

“... what if we become so resilient that we withstand forces that ought to lead to change and ought not to be resisted” (p1).