ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses how resilience scholars mobilize a topological sensibility attuned to systemic interconnection, non-linear emergence, and multiple-equilibrium systems to visualize resilience as a process of de- and reformation, or changing form and function while maintaining identity. It also discusses how resilience proponents argued that managing for efficiency and optimization reduces diversity, inhibits flexibility, erodes adaptive capacity, and thus makes social and ecological systems susceptible to disturbance and collapse. The book describes there is a more complex relation between resilience and critique. It describes how work in geography and anthropology on world-making in the Anthropocene introduces new ethico-political concerns that de-center the privilege resilience thinking gives to future systemic security and sustainability. Recognizing the designerly roots of resilience and its paradoxical relation to critique suggests that we cannot simply dismiss resilience as nothing more than the latest fold in neoliberal environmental governance.
