Resilience and the neoliberal counter-revolution: from ecologies of control to production of the common

This paper argues that resilience, as a dominant paradigm for the administration of life, presents new possibilities for resistance. I begin from the proposition that resilience theory was an important part of the neoliberal counter-revolution. Resilience's counter-revolutionary origins attest to a critical potential that points beyond its enrolment in neoliberal strategies of control. To pursue this, I outline two different trajectories for resilient ecologies: first, I explore current trends in climate change adaptation in which fostering adaptability means integrating flows of social, natural and monetary ‘capital’ in a continuous framework of financial control. Second, I engage recent literature on social-ecological transformation to demonstrate how resilience theory can be (re)appropriated as a critical tool. With an understanding of system potential in terms of a social-ecological common rather than capital, resilience theory can inform a radical ecological politics that finds its conditions of possibility precisely in the accelerating financialisation of social-ecological systems.