Key messages

• Care and resilience do not stand in opposition to each other.

• Resilience from above and below firmly guided by principles of care can be seen as serving socially and environmentally just ends.

• When coupled with a politics and practices of care, resilience can be rethought as a feminist transformative device.

Introduction

In today’s Anthropocene, relentless processes of capital accumulation have reshaped the web of human and non-human relations, creating ephemeral life prospects for a privileged few, while contributing to the depletion of bodies, labour, natural stocks and sinks as well as ecological services. Life-sustaining work takes place within a capitalist economic system grounded on the privatisation and commodification of care services and ecosystems, and the concomitant devaluation of the gendered, racialised and often migrant labour that maintains and mends a world replete with crises (Fraser, 2022; Mezzadri, 2022). In this context, resilience has acquired a ubiquitous status in policy making (Chandler, 2019; McRobbie, 2020). It is often called upon as a practice and behaviour that can allow individuals and communities to respond to ongoing socio-economic and environmental challenges; to bounce back from a shock and adapt to ever increasing resource-strapped conditions. At the same time, hegemonic discourses of resilience have been heavily critiqued by feminist academics and activists for assuming that women’s unpaid labour and care work would help society at large coping with and moving out of crisis. In particular, while policy makers call for resilience, feminist academics and activists have insisted on the importance of centring and revaluing care in public policy and everyday life (Care Collective, 2020; Dengler and Lang, 2021). Wendy Harcourt (2023) has, however, suggested that care and resilience ought not to stand in opposition to each other. Care, she argues, can overhaul the inequalities resulting from care and resource extractivism, potentially leading to fairer, more resilient and more sustainable lives.

Inspired by this subversive possibility, in what follows, we first focus on the feminist critiques surrounding the concept of resilience to then present recent examples of how care and resilience are jointly mobilised from above to reimagine welfare, and from below to enact socio-economic realities that place life-making and its sustenance at the centre. In the latter section, we conclude by encouraging colleagues, particularly feminist scholars, to move beyond critiques of neoliberal resilience and push further their work merging care and resilience. Doing so could show that far from being just a ‘pro-capitalist, therapeutic device’ (McRobbie, 2020: 62), when coupled with a politics and practices of care, resilience can be rethought as a feminist transformative device.

Resilience and its feminist critiques

Resilience can be broadly defined as a set of capacities for bouncing back and adapting in the face of various shocks (see, for example, Nightingale, 2015; McRobbie, 2020). The concept is intrinsically dynamic and directs attention to the interplay between social structures and the agency of social actors (Keck and Sakdapolrak, 2013: 10). It can be understood as a conservative and pacifying rationality of governance – that is, resilience ‘from above’ – and as the activation of mutual aid ties at community level – that is, resilience ‘from below’ (Vrasti and Michelsen, 2017), thus as a political goal of making citizens and social groups self-reliant in a context of scarce resources and increasing social complexity, and as a strategy of endurance that people and communities adopt to facilitate their day-to-day living (MacLeavy et al, 2021). Defined in this way, resilience seems to have an irresistible appeal: should we not all want or even need to be more resilient? The allure of the hegemonic discourse of resilience has nonetheless been powerfully demystified by feminists from different disciplinary extractions. Their critiques have converged around (1) the compatibility between resilience and neoliberalism; (2) the representation of women in resilience discourses; (3) the consequences of (coercively) imposed resilience policies on groups and communities and (4) resilience as individual dispositions rather than processes or relations.

To address the first point, Estêvão and colleagues (2017) describe resilience as uncannily compatible with neoliberalism, thus referring to a heroic notion of resilience by which is meant the celebration of the self-reliant and self-sufficient individual, that can be used to downplay the importance of collective action and public intervention. Heroic resilience, then, may stand as a substitute for other possible, more caring, regimes (Derickson, 2016: 162; McRobbie, 2020: 62). In particular, McRobbie (2020: 63) conceptualises resilience as a ‘pro-capitalist, therapeutic device’ that responds to collective feminist demands for structural change with exhortations for self-management and self-care and policy interventions in the lives of not-yet heroic others. What resilience idealises is a ‘bounce-backable’ neoliberal subject, represented by affluent middle-class women, which in turn render less resilient groups, like working-class single mothers, redundant and disposable (Gill and Orgad, 2018: 490).

Second, the representation of gender in Anglo-Saxon policy reports on the relation between climate change, migration and resilience tends to reproduce stereotypical images of women, casting them as either victims of climate change, conflict and war, or as change agents in these circumstances (Rothe, 2017: 45). This tendency of generalising, oversimplifying and decontextualising feminist insights creates gender myths in resilience discourse which help sustain patriarchal hegemonic structures (Rothe, 2017: 45; Juncos and Bourbeau, 2022: 868) that dovetail with neoliberal governance.

Third, policy interventions in the name of resilience have been ostensibly critiqued for their paternalism and for marginalising local understandings of resilience and livelihood security (Nightingale, 2015: 183; Derickson, 2016: 162). Wijsman and Feagan (2019: 70–1) observe a tendency in the knowledge systems literature towards holding on to dominant knowledge systems rather than making room for radically different alternatives.

Fourth, conceptualisations of resilience have denoted assemblages of individual dispositions and qualities rather than processes or relations (Flynn et al, 2012; Gill and Orgad, 2018; McRobbie, 2020). Admittedly, this critique is not confined to a feminist perspective on resilience. However, what stands out in the reviewed literature is the emphasis on feminist interpretations of resilience as a social, relational and processual phenomenon, characterised by mutuality, togetherness, collaboration and care (Flynn et al, 2012; Gill and Orgad, 2018; King et al, 2021). For example, Flynn et al (2012: 7) explicitly connect their understanding of resilience with feminist conceptions such as social justice, equity, gender and care. Building on such insights, in what follows we offer new insights on how care and resilience intersect ‘from above’. Thereafter we identify practices that are congruent with a feminist politics of care and resilience ‘from below’.

Care and resilience ‘from above’

Berenice Fisher and Joan C. Tronto (1990: 40) have defined care ‘a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’. Care is thus conceived as any life-sustaining mental, physical and emotional activity that connects bodies, bodies and nature in complex relations of giving, receiving and mutual interdependence (Tronto, 1993; Zechner, 2022). Examples include cooking, cleaning, caring for the elderly, the sick and children as well as caring for the earth (Barca, 2020). Historically, the provision of care has been organised around intersecting hierarchies of gender, class and race that have made for its invisibility, devaluation and, more recently, a source of profit-making in lucrative care markets (Wichterich, 2019).

Exacerbated by COVID-19, the stark inequalities in the provision of care gave further impetus and visibility to feminist movements advocating for the recognition, reduction and redistribution of care work (Wichterich, 2019; Oxfam, 2020). Even before the pandemic the value and contribution of care work had been recognised in the constitutions of Bolivia (art 338) and Ecuador (art 333). At the global level, the recognition of unpaid care and domestic work was notably included within the Sustainable Development Goals (Sen, 2019). Additionally, and related, a concept that has emerged since the 2010s within the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that of climate-resilient development, which refers to the need to address the challenges posed by climate change by ensuring that adaptation and mitigation happen in an innovative, effective, participatory and equal manner (IPCC, 2014). This concept advances sustainable development by stressing that sustainability, given current climate adverse conditions, can only be reached if equality, diversity, innovation and climate adaptation and mitigation are taken jointly into consideration (IPCC, 2023). When, however, imagining a climate-resilient future, there is a tendency to equate care to stewardship, focusing mostly on what could be defined as environmental care, that is a form of unpaid carework, relying on volunteer organising that, although not counted in economic analysis, is crucial in the work of climate change adaptation and mitigation as in, for instance, reforestation and water restoration and management (Corwin and Gidwani, 2021; UN Women, 2023). Additionally, the mitigation-led green transition, relying on metal mining for its completion, promotes further commodification and technological fixes while assuming that all the work that is required to maintain everyday life will continue to be carried out in private, for free (Di Chiro, 2019; Barca, 2020). Therefore, although climate-resilient development aims at equity, in practice it relies on structural nodes of gender and racial inequality to bring about resilience (Caretta, 2020; Chauhan, 2021; UN Women, 2023).

A more pronounced coupling of care and resilience has recently taken place in prominent institutional spaces of policy making dedicated to gender equality and women’s rights (UN Women, 2022a; 2022b; 2023). Recommendations to address the climate–care nexus and ensure the resilience of care systems have underscored the fragile and often negative relation between compound crises – such as climate change, conflict and the COVID-19 pandemic (UN Women, 2022b: 12) – and the gender unequal provision of care. Unlike hegemonic forms of resilience reviewed in the previous section, the political subjects interpellated in this discourse are not heroic gendered individuals but powerful actors such as capitalist states and corporations. Moreover, and in contrast to climate-resilient development, in calls to develop resilient care systems, powerful actors often depicted as uncaring (Care Collective, 2020) and commonly viewed as responsible for the onslaught on social provisioning and nature, are asked to (re)imagine their responsibilities for welfare, equity and towards nature.

Care and resilience ‘from below’

While, as we have shown in the previous section, resilience from above can both disrupt and add an extra burden to care, care can enhance ‘resilience from below’ in ways that facilitate and transform everyday life. Following Martin de Almagro and Bargués (2022), we identified in recent literature specific practices of care that communities and women’s groups cultivate in times of hardship, to exemplify how resilience may thrive outside global governance projects and state policy. As we were writing this piece we looked for discrete examples that could show how care reinforces resilience while also facilitating gender equal and sustainable outcomes (Dengler and Lang, 2021).

Yet, as others (King et al, 2021), we found that major knowledge gaps remain in terms of understanding how resilience is enacted and mobilised locally. The literature highlights few examples of care-based practices that can enhance resilience. For instance, Jacobs and Wiens (2024) show how the Providence Seed Library enacts care through slowness, mutuality and interdependence by distributing for free seeds linked to culturally significant foodways or family traditions that can be harvested year after year. Drawing on cases from Himalayan Bhutan, Allison (2023) shows how caring practices of attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness, as well as humility and vulnerability, serve as important strategies for increased ecological sustainability and resilience in Bhutanese society. Portocarrero Lacayo (2024) focuses on Fundación Entre Mujeres, a Nicaraguan feminist peasant cooperative enacting care through food sovereignty, agroecology and the economic, ideological and organisational empowerment of peasant women, ultimately making them more climate resilient, we argue. An example of how the reduction in women´s care responsibilities may enhance climate resilience is the Union of Women Cooperatives for Argan Oil project, which worked to disseminate solar cookers across southern Morocco that women assembled themselves. This project benefited both the environment by reducing deforestation of the Argan forest, but also reduced women care work involved with collecting firewood (WECF, 2016).

Although emerging from different sociocultural contexts, what these examples show is that the centring of care in everyday life nurtures non-transactional and more equal social relations between humans and non-humans. Significantly, such care practices sever the ties between resilience, capitalism and the idea of a ‘bounce-backable’ neoliberal subject. Instead, what they undergird is resilience based on mutuality, gender equity and sustainability, and thus a resilience consonant with feminist values (Flynn et al, 2012).

Conclusion

Although, as Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) stresses, care should not be idealised, thinking with care is intrinsically linked with action and thus an imaginary of change. What our provocation highlights is that what binds resilient efforts from above and below and across scales is the expansion of care thinking (see also Harcourt, 2023). In order to achieve resilient institutions and communities, we argue, actions and changes need to be shaped by thinking with care. In other words, for a system to become truly resilient, care needs to become its guiding principle. In this time of compound crises, if we do not put care for each other, and for the environment, front and centre in how we envision our common future, both at the institutional and local level, we risk replicating the empty discourse on resilience that has been promoted by the capitalist system that has brought us precisely to the point of rupture we are experiencing nowadays.

Additionally, we note that research engaging with care and resilience mostly focuses on local initiatives and relations between human and non-humans in ways that are not transactional or profit generating. Thus, we first want to encourage our colleagues to turn their gaze to communities and projects where care and resilience intersect in a reciprocal way that can benefit the well-being of those involved and ensure the true sustainability of such initiatives. Second, and most importantly, we would like our provocation to resonate particularly with feminist colleagues in a collective effort to reclaim resilience as a feminist device, as a ‘force oriented towards difference and the creation of new values for the future’ (Martin de Almagro and Bargués, 2022: 981). Therefore, we argue, demonstrating how care can contribute to resilience being less subservient to neoliberal logics needs to be taken one step further. What remains to be shown is how care thinking may reappropriate resilience and retool it to push back against extractive, profit-making and socially depleting dynamics.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.