Responsibilised Resilience? Reworking Neoliberal Social Policy Texts

Introduction This essay begins with the premise that resilience, broadly defined as positive adaptation despite adversity (Garmezy and Rutter), and resilience building are important concepts and practices for social policy because they are concerned with the quality of people’s lives forged within conditions of marginalisation and disadvantage. Although it will focus on trends in contemporary neoliberal policies and practices, it builds on the tradition of scholarship that has provided critical alternative accounts to the encyclopaedic knowledge of the “pathologies” of the oppressed. Resilience research constitutes one such field of disruption in its turn to understanding how people endure, cope or indeed thrive despite adversity. Over forty years of research has explored a wide range of adversities, protective, buffering, restorative or promotive processes enabling people’s coping, recovery, wellbeing and capacity to lead dignified, meaningful, successful lives (O’Doherty Wright and Masten). Essentially, resilience research has sought to understand what makes a difference in the lives of children, young people and adults with a view to applying this knowledge through policy, professional intervention and practices within families, schools, other public systems and communities. Early research on resilience focused on individual traits to explain people’s wellbeing despite the effects of significant stressors or challenging circumstances. However, it is now widely accepted that resilience involves diverse processes embedded in ecological systems. How resilience manifests is shown to vary according to the kind of barriers, traumas and ongoing adversities people experience in their cultural, social and political contexts. At the individual level, personal agency and the capacity to act in and on the world are posited as important mechanisms of resilience (Edwards; Rutter). But these are always enabled in relationship with others and take on meaning in specific activity domains and cultural contexts. For example, for Indigenous peoples, language, culture, land and “caring for country” have been important resources for surviving and coping with the lasting effects of colonisation (Dockery; Weir, Stacey and Youngetob). Access to cultural and material resources, political activism for land rights and scope for self-determination are significant to individual and collective Indigenous resilience (Kirmayer et al.). Across diverse cultures and contexts, resilience is shown to be contingent on community capacities and resources (Ungar). For young people and families in poverty, these include “resilience-generating institutions” (Fine, Stoudt, Fox and Santos 32) such as schools and community centres and access to housing, transport, local infrastructure and opportunities that are, in turn, shaped by social and economic structures and systems of distribution (of adversity, opportunity and social goods) including the policies that facilitate them (Bottrell and Armstrong; France, Bottrell and Armstrong). Discrepancies between these understandings of resilience processes and policy orientations have been noted. Seccombe’s analysis of influences on the resilience of families in poverty concludes that “careful attention must be paid to the structural deficiencies in our society and to the social policies that families need in order to become stronger, more competent, and better functioning in adverse situations” (385). Similarly, O’Dougherty Wright and Masten argue that it is well established that there is the need for supportive “multifaceted, community-based intervention” to promote the resilience of children and families living with chronic adversity, yet progress in this direction has been slow and uneven (32). However, in resilience research there is little analysis of these discrepancies in terms of how resilience is framed in social policy and how its meaning has emerged as very different from the contextualised ecological systems approach. Resilience researchers have questioned the limits and costs of resilience in conditions of extreme adversity such as poverty and racial oppression, yet in the main, these critiques have received little attention. For example, Luthar (1993) and Liddle (1994) emphasised the importance of not losing sight of the human suffering that is often experienced in the process of developing resilience. More recently, Bottrell has emphasised the utility of resilience to neoliberal policy in asking the following questions: “[T]o what extent will adversity be tolerated, on the assumption that resilient individuals can and do cope? How much adversity should resilient individuals endure before social arrangements rather than individuals are targeted for intervention?” (Qualitative Social Work 335). This paper takes up these questions in arguing that the meaning of resilience in social policy is distorted by its neoliberal reworking for governance purposes. As economic, ideological and political systems, neoliberalism’s key tenets are that, human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. (Harvey 2) As economic policies and practices, neoliberalism distributes benefits and opportunities highly inequitably; as “ontoformative, it creates new social realities on a very wide front” (Connell 43). These dimensions of neoliberalisation are particularly evident in social policy and practice because this field has been and continues to be a focus for privatisation and activating new social relations to accomplish market rule. These shifts are infused with the tensions, contradictions, crises and ideological inconsistencies that are characteristic of neoliberalisation globally and in sovereign contexts (Brenner, Peck and Theodore). The ascendance of resilience as a social policy text articulates these shifts. In the following sections it is argued that key trends in neoliberal social policy point to the political, ideological and structural processes that produce the need for resilience. However, its production lies not only in policy that explicitly claims to focus on building resilient communities but through other neoliberal policy agenda. It is proposed, then, that resilience as a policy concept and related practice is better understood in its intertextuality, that is, as embedded in the interrelationship of policies and strategies directed toward the realisation of neoliberal ideals. The paper focuses on the articulation of resilience and responsibility as twinned texts of neoliberal governance. The Neoliberal Text of Resilience In Australia, the United States and other advanced capitalist democracies, the policy framing of resilience encapsulates the principle of individualisation that has been characteristic in the neoliberal realignment of social policy to economic aims. Resilience is typically represented in social policy as a matter of individual attributes that are integral to autonomy, self-invention and choice biographies (Bottrell and Armstrong). For example, in Australian youth policy, resilience is described as important for all young people, to “navigate life’s challenges” and particularly important for youth “at risk” (http://www.youth.gov.au/ayf/media/Pages/NationalStrategyforYoungAustralians.asp). In national educational goals, resilience as a “personal attribute” is linked to young people’s confidence and self-management essential for “fulfilling, productive and responsible lives” (http://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum/curriculum.html#). Similarly, US Health and Human Services policy links resilience to strategies promoting healthy behaviours and reducing risky behaviours (http://www.hhs.gov/secretary/about/priorities/priorities.html). The emphasis on individualised resilience is evident too in policy strategies for “community resilience”. Common approaches, for example in Australia, the US, and other liberal welfare states (Esping-Anderson), include parenting, pre-school and school programs focused on improving individual skills to diminish the impact of “risks”; while communitarian elements tend to focus on self-help initiatives as the means of individuals accessing skills and support to manage their lives. Although supported through interagency co-ordination and community work, there are often minimal program funds attached for long-term, participatory community development (Fawcett, Goodwin, Meagher and Phillips). The emphasis on individuals, their skills and attitudes and is an outmoded notion of resilience that decontextualises it from cultural contexts, social structures and political processes. As recognised in resilience research, whether a young person, parent or community endures, copes or thrives is dependent on the resources of the community that are accessible and culturally meaningful (Bottrell; Massey, Cameron, Ouelette and Fine; Ungar). According to Dorothy Smith, “texts” as the “foundational media” co-ordinating people, activities and institutional relations, reposition people as institutional subjects. The abstraction of people’s lived situations and their repositioning through generalised and ideological messages is an essential function of “texts”, as governing documents and the co-ordinated social relations and practices flowing from aims and strategies. We see these processes in the policy text of resilience as it articulates the neoliberal ideology of entrepreneurial individualism and repositions young people, families and communities in terms of the capacities relevant to this ideal. In this way, it takes them out of their everyday lives, actual concerns and the social organisation of ruling relations that give rise to them (Smith, Everyday World). Resilience then becomes a basis for “p