Resisting resilience? Negotiating responsibility, counter conduct and agency in participatory risk management

Resilience remains a central motif across environmental governance, yet has become deeply problematic. While critical scholarship highlights how resilience policy responsibilises citizens and depoliticises risk, emerging research demonstrates that resilience is frequently challenged, negotiated and reworked. However, less attention is paid to the specific modalities through which such contestation unfolds across everyday governance settings. Drawing on five years of longitudinal qualitative research (semi-structured interviews, participant observation) with three UK-based flood action groups, the paper extends these insights, reframing resilience not as a coherent neoliberal project but as an unsettled socio-political terrain shaped through struggle, resistance and negotiation. Extending repoliticised articulations of the concept, it develops a typology of contestation and resistance, revealing how communities actively repurpose and contest resilience. By challenging accounts portraying resilience as inevitable or internalised, the findings expose the fragility of "top-down" governance frameworks that assume compliance. These dynamics are traced over time, demonstrating how contestation is relational, evolving and situational, revealing insights largely absent from short-term studies. Through identifying the modalities by which such contestation unfolds, the paper foregrounds community agency, illuminating the everyday politics of adaptation. Ultimately, the analysis reveals resilience not as a neutral concept, but as a contested terrain of dissensus in which the meanings, responsibilities and practices of adaptation are continually negotiated.