Resilience and the end(s) of the politics of adaptation

This closing article focuses on the problematic of the politics of adaptation and suggests that resilience appears to be increasingly exhausted as a governmental or analytical framing. The article is in three sections. The first provides an overview of the problems facing adaptation today, especially where 'top-down' or 'engineering' approaches to resilience are considered to be artificial or 'coercive'. The second section analyses alternative approaches to adaptation, from the bottom-up, often relying on the engagement of local communities, aided by the rolling out of ubiquitous computational technologies, like the Internet of Things. In closing, I suggest that resilience as a policy framework of adaptation appears to be drawing to a close as it lacks an adequate agential or transformative aspect: it is always too oriented to adapting to feedbacks and modulating around sustaining what exists.