Resilience, infrastructure and the anti-social contract in neoliberal Britain

Abstract

‘Resilience’, a quintessentially neoliberal concept, has never been a politically neutral discourse, its intellectual roots situated in the work of Friedrich Hayek and the birth of neoliberal economics. Nevertheless, resilience in infrastructure is often cast as a technocratic, apolitical consideration. This article argues that this is not the case. Using data collected during fieldwork with the UK Government Cabinet Office during a consultation on how to make infrastructure ‘resilient by design’, resilience discourse is shown to be a tool with which government departments, regulators and companies make communities increasingly responsible for the provision and maintenance of their own infrastructure while justifying service failures as inevitable. This is an under-explored discursive battleground in the neoliberal reframing of the social contract as anti-social; concerning the profit-driven logics of corporate entities as balanced by the rights of individual consumers, and no longer about the relationship between ‘the state’ and a collective civil society.

Scales of disaster: Intimate social contracts on the margins of the postcolonial state

“…As these conversations help to illustrate, however, citizens usually placed the burden of responsibility for basic security on community leaders, very occasionally mentioning municipal offices. None of the respondents ever referred to government bodies in either Davao 4 or Manila as being responsible for their safety, as would be ‘expected’ in a conventional state–citizen social contract (see also Bowles, 2022, this volume), thus providing evidence of a social contract experienced in intimate geographies of scale.…”

“…In eastern Mindano and South Andaman, despite their marginality, a top-down central state exercises enough power to set the framework for citizen–authority interactions through local authorities and community leaders. This arrangement, reliant on traditional forms of governance and political community, works well for the national state as it conveniently places the responsibility for safety and security on individual leaders or informal relationships (see Bowles, 2022, this volume) that assume culpability even when they have scarce access to formal channels of support at the political margins of the state. Yet this social contract also demonstrates that the leaders in these intimate geographies (still carrying significant responsibility) are at the same time able to make these spaces of engagement work for them by drawing on central state authority and local relationships.…”

Ethical Endeavours

“…Similarly, Gwen Burnyeat (2022), in her analysis of the Colombian peace accord, shows how the government and the public had fundamentally diff erent assumptions of what a peace accord should entail and especially about how it should be voiced and communicated (the government deployed rational and contractarian language while the public longed for emotional engagement), which in the end led to the public's rejection of the deal. Benjamin Bowles (2022) draws attention to the way the UK government is undermining core ideas of a social contract by trying to create 'resilient' neoliberal citizens who are responsible for the provision and maintenance of their own infrastructure (and therefore no longer dependent on state services). Dave Cook (2022), by contrast, analyses how 'digital nomads' opt out of a social contract and try to become untethered from their nationalities and related state-society relations.…”

An anthropology of the social contract: The political power of an idea

“…Our contention is that an anthropology of the social contract can unveil the implications of persistent contractarian thinking. This project links up to multiple conversations in anthropology scrutinising the political effects of prevailing ideas and ideologies connected to contractarian assumptions, such as ‘responsibility’ (Trnka and Trundle, 2014), ‘public goods’ (Bear and Mathur, 2015), and ‘resilience’ (Bowles, 2022, this volume). All these authors bump up against the social contract in their analyses, but apart from Bowles, do not explicitly deal with it as an idea.…”