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Jordie Blanc Ansari (associate professor in anthropology at IEDES, UMR Développement et sociétés, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne-IRD)
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Cecilia Rodrigues (clinical psychologist, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Unité Transversale de Recherche Psychogenèse et Psychopathologie)
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Elaine Moreira (anthropologist, full professor at the Department of Latin-American Studies, Universidade de Brasília; member of the Brazilian Anthropology Association’s Commission on Indigenous Issues; and coordinator of the Observatory of Indigenous Rights and Policies)
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Mohamed Mahdi (development sociologist, École Nationale d’Agriculture de Meknès, founding member of the Targa-Aide organization and of the Centre de recherche et d’étude sur les sociétés contemporaines)
Resilience of the Commons in the Age of the Anthropocene The early 21st century has been marked by a multiplicity of heterogeneous crises: armed conflicts, popular uprisings, environmental disasters, epidemics, and famines. Far from being unprecedented events, they seem to be lasting and almost inherent to the existing economic and political systems. These crises evolve and are reconfigured in an interconnected, even interdependent world that is characterized by the rapid circulation of ideas and flows (whether financial, informational, commercial, or technological), and the strengthening of reticulated networks (whether social, political, or academic). What is more, these crises often echo each other, respond to one another, or even overlap. These phenomena are nested in global scales (Appaduraï, 1996), at an unprecedented time in history known as the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2002) or the Capitalocene (Bonneuil, 2017), when anthropic actions – or even the capitalist system – may be powerful accelerators of climate change. These notions, which have been hijacked and reinterpreted by various actors, are still up for debate.
While the Anthropocene used to appear until recently as a new temporal division characterized by the over-determining weight of societies on their global environment and the ecosystems that are their homes, this epoch now goes well beyond: the term has been popularized by the media, and it reflects the impossibility of understanding nature without the human actions that disrupt and transform it (and vice versa).
Due to the accelerating negative effects of anthropogenic actions, these same human societies are faced with the urgent need to adapt and construct the transformations that are necessary for their own survival. However, it remains difficult, if not problematic, to define the stages and forms of this transition. Indeed, while many adaptations may seem to have stemmed from a sense of short-term urgency, conceiving of these transformations rather implies a strategic agenda and founding participatory policies to leverage the effects that are essential for their implementation. Thus, what are the narratives, constructs, and viable strategies in the Anthropocene? For more than a decade, resilience has occupied a special place at the heart of complex, interlinked crises, although it has not always been clearly defined and implemented.
The field of global crisis analysis and response is permeated by the notion of resilience (Giovalucchi, 2014). Numerous disciplines, schools of thought, and professional communities resort to it, more particularly in the field of development aid, human security, and international relations (Rothe, 2017). In many ways, during this decade, it has been inserted into projects by a set of actors and institutions with immoderate ambition, producing mixed results (Janin and Chapus, 2023). While the development aid community borrowed the notion from systemic analysis (Haimes, 2009), the definition and use of resilience have failed to achieve consensus (Lallau, 2016; Johnson et al., 2023).
To some, resilience is not a state, but a dynamic process linked to the ability to recover after a shock (Cyrulnik, 2013); for others, it refers to agency, in line with the work of Amartya Sen (Sen, 1985). It can also be understood as all the adaptive changes at the heart of critical situations. For many authors, it is plural, as over time, the ability to be resilient revolves around practices of resistance, adaptation, and transformation (Béné, 2012). It belongs to a continuum of existing practices (Ancey, 2017), the result of a construction made of legacy, persistence, and innovation. It thus reveals a set of economic and social processes, ranging from the technical to the political (Pelling, 2011). It is strongly linked with governance. Beyond its instrumental role, it also seems to be a political object that should be considered as such.
Several challenges thus arise: who should be resilient? When? At what price? In what way? And in reaction to what? Often thought of and implemented through the prism of individual responsibility (as the ability to overcome difficulties or to withstand shocks), the notion hence de facto leaves aside collective dynamics and actions, which are more complex to construct and to reproduce. This state of affairs has generated debates, discredit, and criticism about its origins and its neoliberal meaning (Chandler and Reid, 2016), as a “technocratic avatar of the development aid sphere” (Lallau et al., 2018). Ultimately, resilience may serve to “normalize the abnormal” (Giacaman, 2020). What about its relevance and “positive” nature today?
In this issue, we would like to reflect on: 1) the uses and misuses of the term resilience in the field of development, 2) by examining knowledge and know-how as forms of resilience in situated practices 3) to study the management of common goods as a new approach to resilience 4) by opening up onto social movements and legal transformations as possible levers for the resilience of the commons.
With several possible lines of inquiry, the authors should reflect on the different responses and alternatives (and more rarely strategies) in the face of crises based on case studies, at several scales of time and space (local, regional, and global). How is this standardized notion used by market players and by the field of development aid? What are the limits to the use of resilience in numerical measures, which have become a parametric element in the service of neoliberal logics? What relationships are fundamentally created between knowledge and resilience-making? What possible dialogues does resilience open up to conceive of the viability of natural resources and of new forms of governance? What innovations have actors developed to build the future that they aspire to in the Anthropocene?
These numerous open questions can likely be fed by varied fieldwork and different disciplinary approaches, from local strategies to more institutional approaches in the face of extreme emergencies and socio-environmental crises. Such studies may also intersect with gender issues, whether they concern gendered movements, or specific gendered knowledge or know-how.
In many cases, the notion of resilience has replaced the use of the term “vulnerability” (Barroca et al., 2013). While vulnerability has a negative connotation, resilience is somewhat positive (Holling, 1987), and emphasizes adaptive abilities and contextual possibilities in the present time (Chandler and Coaffee, 2016). However, what of its operational nature? The emergence of the pro-resilience discourse seems to have been at work in development aid projects as a way of concealing neoliberal logic and donors’ interests (Quenault, 2017). Could resilience be the new form taken by imperatives to adapt or technocratic injunctions? What theoretical and practical avenues could allow going beyond this vision?
We call for contributions that analyze the doctrinal divergence between the notion of resilience put forward by international institutions and that put forward by civil society and the communities concerned. Indeed, its use does not have the same connotations in the narratives of international financial institutions and in those of peasant organizations. Thus, the World Bank refers to it in its new agenda to “encourage collective action and improve the well-being of populations in contexts of risk,” with a top-down, performative, number-oriented perspective (resilience score). However, for the Via Campesina peasant movement, resilience is associated with agricultural and food sovereignty based on indigenous know-how, which thus calls into question its neoliberal meaning and construction (Hall and Lamont, 2013). With this first distinction, the questioning (which is also a confrontation) of development actions and policies in the light of environmental challenges implies numerous reconfigurations: of time scales, no doubt, but even more so of scales of action. What are the contexts in which resilience, thus bounded, is not viable or even possible for local actors?
In this line of inquiry, we propose to analyze knowledge production and peripheral epistemology (whether subordinate, postcolonial, or decolonial) to apply a “bottom-up” approach to resilience. The studies produced will preferably examine the ability to produce meaning and act in the context of crises that directly impact actors’ daily lives. What traditional knowledge or know-how and collective resilience actions are at work in civil or local societies and communities? Is it possible to talk about resilience-making when social actors “absorb, anticipate and adapt to climate-related shocks and stresses” (Ulrichs, Slater and Costella, 2019)? In the Bolivian Andes for example, several measures have been gathered, produced, and used by farmers, thus allowing them to diagnose the climate, anticipate the weather, and therefore adapt their agricultural activities (Mamani Gomez, in Nuñez Villalba, 2018).
Here, we call for proposals that address the different, plural forms of resilience, in a situated and practical manner. For example, in the Sahel, faced with increasing climatic uncertainty, actors have sought to make the most of it thanks to their social relationships (hospitality, sharing of watering places, etc.), techniques, and know-how (Ancey, 2017). This is also true in other geographical areas where local actors emphasize the inclusion in family and community networks and customary rights, which allows them to cope with climatic, environmental, and/or agricultural imperatives (Folke, 2006). The High Atlas also exemplifies this phenomenon (Mahdi, 2022), as indigenous knowledge and know-how in natural resource management have enabled farming communities to ensure their food sovereignty.
The submissions within this line of inquiry will aim to examine uses and practices, and to adopt a situated, empirical perspective, in particular based on the ethnographic method.
This line of inquiry emphasizes a commons management that concomitantly encompasses the political, social, and environmental dimensions. Here, the notion of “common” refers to “social systems in which resources are shared by a community of users/producers, who also define the modes of use and production, distribution and circulation of these resources through democratic and horizontal forms of governance” (De Angelis et al., 2014). Recent research draws a link between the study of the commons and resilience. It combines the concepts of care, regeneration, and resilience (Petrescu, 2022) to examine the capture of common goods and the adaptability of populations in the face of the neoliberal economy (Haller, 2019).
Submission may focus in particular on forms of collaborative and participatory governance as a key to building resilience, whether these are actions carried out by local societies or taking place at the interface with development projects (Janin and Chapus, 2023). What long-term governance can there be in the face of the challenges of climate change? Are more participatory, cooperative, even inclusive forms of natural resource management likely to promote the construction of certain forms of resilience? Will the commons be able to resist the destabilizing and potentially devastating effects of climate change even though recognition and support for them is scarce as it is?
For Ostrom (1990), the ideal system of governance of the commons should be resilient in the sense that it does not threaten their future or that of societies. However, the notion of commons considers natural resources as a collective good; it remains polysemous and is thus up for debate. Conversely, all forms of self-organization do not necessarily promote the commons ideal (Le Gouill and Poupeau, 2020). Worse yet, in the event of strong tensions around the resource-society nexus – such as dams, road construction, mining, or even intensive agriculture – local populations may lose their ability to manage natural resources (Moreira, 2016). In such contexts, how do actors (re-)think commons management?
This final line of inquiry concerns the relationships built between collective actions, indigenous demands, local movements, and forms of resilience. The aim here is to examine the legal outcomes relating to the commons following these movements. How do the latter participate in the transformation of or protest against legal frameworks in the face of increasing environmental challenges?
This undoubtedly requires moving away from a utilitarian and extractivist approach to resources (Svampa, 2019), as naturalist ontology has (Descola, 2005). Some institutional breakthroughs have precisely granted the environment a real legal status. In Ecuador, the 2008 Constitution put forward nature’s right (Landivar and Ramillien, 2013). In 2010, the Bolivian state also included Madre Tierra in its legislation as a set of non-human entities: animals, plants, natural resources, and spirits. More recently still, the New Zealand parliament recognized the legal identity of the Whanganui River following indigenous Maori claims (David, 2017). Can these acts of resistance and demands be considered as the expression of a form of resilience, or are they calls for other dynamics of change?
Should resilience be reduced – and resigned – to being only a passive form of adaptation to change or can it be conceived of and constructed by combining forms of resistance with political, legal, and social transformation? This line of inquiry will also examine the efficiency of these legal frameworks and their limits in the face of power struggles.
The authors must submit an abstract in French, English, or Spanish, presenting their proposal in approximately 4,000 characters (with spaces), i.e. about 500 words or one page.
The Word file for the abstract must be entitled “AUTHOR’S SURNAME-Proposal-259,” and must include:
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the title: short and precise, 70 characters maximum (with the possibility of adding a subtitle);
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the research question, the theoretical framework, the fieldwork, and the main results;
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the bibliographical references (not included in the character count).
For each author, a second file entitled “AUTHOR’S SURNAME-info” must include their first name and last name, their discipline, status, institutional affiliation, email address, and the name of the corresponding author.
For the proposals to be examined, it is essential that they follow these guidelines. Their suitability to the call for papers will be determined by the guest editors and the journal’s editorial board.
The authors whose proposals have been selected will be invited to send a first draft of their article, which must absolutely follow the guidelines for Authors. The articles will then be submitted to a double-blind peer review by two external reviewers who are experts on the topic.
The articles (45,000 characters with spaces, excluding the abstract and references) may be written in French, English, or Spanish. They must be original work. They may however have been presented at a conference (with proceedings), as long as they have been adapted to the format required by the Revue internationale des études du développement, but the author must not submit their paper to another journal simultaneously.
The references cited must be presented in APA format.
The authors agree to comply with the calendar.
The proposals must be submitted by September 10, 2024 to:
The authors preselected by the editors and the editorial committee will be notified by the editorial team the week of September 16, 2024.
The first draft, following the journal’s guidelines for authors, must be submitted by the authors to the aforementioned email addresses by November 18, 2024.
The evaluation process will take a few months; each – anonymous – article will be submitted to a double blind peer review by two external reviewers who are experts on the topic. Requesting a first version of the article does not constitute a commitment from the journal to publish the aforementioned article, which must be approved by the editorial committee, following the different steps in the evaluation process. No 259 2025-3 is expected to be published in November 2025.