Water and Resilience
Climate change asks for measures to reduce climate change but also measures to cope with and adapt to ongoing climate change. In recent years, resilience has emerged as one of the leading paradigms for adaptation policy. For instance, in the European Union, resilience is put forward as the best way to implement climate adaptation. Borrowing from ecology, the term resilience in this context is often linked to the ability of system to recover and adapt after a change. But what does it actually mean for a societal system to be resilient?.
Cities and communities as locus of resilience
This project focuses on the resilience of cities and communities, especially in relation to climate change. Policy aimed at strengthening the resilience of cities or communities often involves new roles or responsibilities for citizens. They may for example be expected to reduce the use of scarce water resources or to contribute to the ‘greening’ of their neighborhood. However, is everyone capable of doing this?
If a resilient city involves individual citizens having to do more while the government withdraws, this could result in undesirable inequalities between communities that are well-organized and communities that lack the social cohesion and self-organization to make their community a resilient one. The project combines philosophical analysis with qualitative methods and modelling tools to investigate under what conditions resilience and climate adaption policies are likely to be effective and socially just.