Etzold, Benjamin

Sakdapolrak, Patrick

English

DIE ERDE – Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin

230 DIE ERDE · Vol. 147 · 4/2016Editorial to the special section “Geographies of Vulnerability and Resilience – Critical Explorations” Patrick Sakdapolrak1, Benjamin Etzold21 University of Vienna, Department of Geography and Regional Research, Universitätsstr. 7/5, 1010 Vienna, Austria, patrick.sakdapolrak@univie.ac.at2 Bonn International Center for Conversion BICC, Pfarrer-Byns-Str. 1, 53121 Bonn, Germany, benjamin.etzold@bicc.dePatrick Sakdapolrak and Benjamin Etzold 2016: Editorial to the special section “Geographies of Vulnerability and Resilience – Critical Explorations”– DIE ERDE 147 (4): 230 - 233DOI: 10.12854/erde-147-20Vol. 147, No. 4  ·  EditorialD I E  E R D EJournal of theGeographical Society of BerlinIn the past 30 years the concept of vulnerability has been an important paradigm in human geography and development studies. Vulnerability analyses have sig-ni icantly enhanced our understanding of everyday life under conditions of poverty and food insecurity in the Global South and of people’s capacities to live with risks and natural hazards (Wisner et al. 2004; Bohle 2007c). A vulnerability perspective has also been adopted by practitioners and served as a guiding principle for policies and development interventions (e.g. IPCC 2015). In the last ten years, we have, how-ever, witnessed a paradigm shift from vulnerability to resilience, a concept that has its roots in ecosystems science and psychology (Luthar 2003; Folke 2006). Some have argued that resilience and vulnerabil-ity are like two sides of a coin and are thus compat-ible (Miller et al. 2010). For many, resilience thinking seems to be more positive and promising. Others ar-gue that the systems perspective of resilience think-ing cannot fully capture the everyday life experiences of poverty, hunger and exploitation and people’s crea-tive responses to crises, which stands at the centre of vulnerability research. Some have also argued that resilience thinking is largely apolitical and uncritical of power structures at different scales, and thus plead for an integration of social theories and politics in the concept (Bohle et al. 2009; Cannon and Müller-Mahn 2010; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013). With this special section we would like to take stock of the debate and reconsider some of the basic conceptual questions in vulnerability and resilience research. What does the paradigm shift from vulnerability to resilience mean for doing research? What roles do social theories, po-litical discourses and critical thinking play for each concept? Where is the geography in contemporary vulnerability and resilience research? And what is the role of human agency for vulnerability and resilience?In the academic ield of geography Hans-Georg Bohle – to whom this special section is dedicated – would have been the best scholar to address these questions, as conceptual re lections on and empirical research about people’s vulnerability and resilience shaped his academic life for over more than 30 years.1 Before he died all too suddenly in September 2014, he had been an inspiring researcher and teacher in the interlinked ields of human geography, political ecology and de-velopment studies. Hans-Georg Bohle’s career began with studies in geography in Göttingen, where he com-pleted his PhD in 1979 on the green revolution in the Indian Cauvery Delta. After his habilitation on South Asian farmers’ markets in 1985, he held a professor-ship in cultural geography in Freiburg (1989-1995), a professorship in geography of South Asia in Heidelberg (1995-2004) and a professorship in cultural geogra-phy and development geography in Bonn (2004-2013). He was inspired by innumerable personal encounters with marginalized people throughout empirical ield studies for research projects in South Asia (India, Pa-kistan, Bangladesh, Nepal) and Africa (Chad, Sudan, Ghana, Egypt). Moreover, he always had a deep inter-231DIE ERDE · Vol. 147 · 4/2016est in social and development theories. On this basis, he contributed crucially to the establishment and success of actor-oriented vulnerability studies. The two key articles in which he, Michael Watts and Tom Downing formulate the concept of social vulnerabil-ity (Watts & Bohle 1993; Bohle et al. 1994) are some of the core references of the ield ( Janssen et al. 2006). Overall, his conceptual and empirical work has made a fundamental contribution to development studies, hazard research and human geography. As member of the editorial board of DIE ERDE from 1998 to 2013, he has in luenced the scope of addressed topics and concepts in DIE ERDE, contributed to maintaining and increasing the academic quality of this journals’ pub-lications, and productively contributed himself to DIE ERDE with own articles (Bohle and Krüger 1992; Bohle 2001b; Bohle and Adhikari 2002; Etzold et al. 2009) and moderated special issues (Bohle 2002; Bohle and O’Brien 2006).The authors who have contributed to this special sec-tion have all worked with and have been inspired by Hans-Georg Bohle’s scholarship. Their contributions engage with and build on Bohle’s meticulous stud-ies on the spatial dimensions and social productions of vulnerability in terms of poverty, hunger, margin-alization and violence (e.g. Bohle and Krüger 1992; Watts & Bohle 1993; Bohle et al. 1994; Bohle 2001ab; Bohle 2002; Bohle and Adhikari 2002; Bohle 2007a, b, c); his stimulating work on human agency, sustain-able livelihoods, and the discourse of human security (Bohle 2001b; Bohle and O’Brien 2006; Bohle 2007b, Bohle 2009; Etzold et al. 2009); and his more recent re lections on the paradigm shift from vulnerability to resilience (Bohle 2007d; Bohle et al. 2009).Benjamin Etzold and Patrick Sakdapolrak have both pursued their Master’s, PhDs and early Post-Doc stud-ies under the supervision of Hans-Georg Bohle dur-ing his professorships in Heidelberg and Bonn. Hans-Georg Bohle’s understanding of socio-spatiality and social vulnerability has deeply in luenced their way of thinking and doing research. Behind the background of successive social-spatial turns in human geography and 23 years after the publication of “The social space of vulnerability” by Watts and Bohle (1993), they take stock of the role of spatiality in vulnerability research. In their review of the literature, they found that all four key socio-spatial categories – place, network, territory and scale – have been taken up by scholars for vulnerability analysis. Inspired by Jessop et al.’s (2008) theorization of social spatial relations, they argue that a critical geography of vulnerability must acknowledge the polymorphy of socio-spatialities and assess the interplay of place, network, scale and territory in the (re)production of vulnerability. The argument is exempli ied with case studies from Bang-ladesh and Thailand.Michael Watts has been professor of geography and development studies at the Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley since 1979. Dur-ing Bohle’s visit to Berkeley in 1991-92, they worked together on their seminal paper “The social space of vulnerability” (1993) and thereby shaped the evolu-tion of the concept of vulnerability fundamentally. In this paper, Watts juxtaposes the notion of vulnerabil-ity developed by Hans-Georg Bohle and other critical scholars with the now omnipresent and dominant concept of resilience. He demonstrates that resilience has emerged as a crucial aspect of the technologies of contemporary governance and neoliberal rule. The way that resilience building envisions enabling peo-ple to anticipate and tolerate disturbances, dangers and radical contingencies is, as Watts argues, far re-moved from the understanding of a political ecology of vulnerability, which is sensitive to people’s embed-dedness in unequal power relations and to the politi-cized and contested nature of coping and adaptation. The dialectical relationship between social theory and political economy is identi ied as the blind spot of resilience theory.Birgit Obrist is professor of anthropology at the In-stitute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel and senior scientist at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. She and Bohle shared a com-mon conceptual interest in vulnerability and resil-ience and have often met and exchanged their views, in particular ever since Bohle joined the International Scienti ic Board of the Swiss National Centre for Com-petence in Research (NCCR) North-South in 2002. In her paper, Obrist addresses one of the blind spots of resilience theory identi ied by Watts. She argues that a clearer de inition of the notion of agency is crucial for understanding social processes of resilience build-ing. The capacities of actors to act and to overcome threats rests upon their habitus and past experiences (i.e. their iterative agency), upon their judgement of a present situation and available options (i.e. practical-evaluative agency), and upon their imaginations of the future and the active generation of new opportunities (i.e. projective agency). A more comprehensive ap-proach towards resilience building, she argues, would Editorial to the special section “Geographies of Vulnerability and Resilience – Critical Explorations”232 DIE ERDE · Vol. 147 · 4/2016enclose fundamental modi ications of societal, po-litical and economic structures. People’s capacities to resist discriminating power relations and to change the ields in which they are are embedded are termed transformative agency. The conceptualization is illus-trated through empirical indings from research on ageing and health in Tanzania.Overall, the three contributions of this special section can be read as pleas for a critical scholarship of vul-nerability and resilience that puts marginalized peo-ple’s everyday lives, the webs of power in which they are entangled and their potentials to seize oppor-tunities, to overcome risks and to resist patterns of discrimination and exploitation at center stage. Such scholarship also needs to engage critically with the re-production of speci ic socio-spatialities, i.e. places, networks, territories and scalar relations, how they underpin people’s vulnerability, and how they can serve as foundations for their social resilience. We are certain that is such a geographical scholarship that Hans-Georg Bohle always envisaged. NotesA complete archive of the scholarship of Hans-Georg Bohle (5 books, 110 articles and 53 chapters in edited volumes in between 1979 and 2014) can be found under: https://www.researchgate.net/pro ile/Hans_Georg_BohleReferencesBohle, H.-G. 2001a: Vulnerability and Criticality: Perspec-tives from Social Geography. – IHDP Update 2 (01): 3-5Bohle, H.-G. 2001b: Neue Ansätze der geographischen Risikoforschung. Ein Analyserahmen zur Bestimmung nachhaltiger Lebenssicherung von Armutsgruppen. – DIE ERDE 132 (2): 119 - 140Bohle, H.-G. 2002: Editorial: The Geography of Vulnerable Food Systems. – DIE ERDE 133 (4): 341 - 344Bohle, H.-G. 2007a: Geographien von Verwundbarkeit. – Ge-ographische Rundschau 59 (10): 20-25Bohle, H.-G. 2007b: Geographies of Violence and Vulnerabil-ity: An Actor-Oriented Analysis of the Civil War in Sri Lanka. – Erdkunde 61 (2): 129-146 Bohle, H.-G. 2007c: Living with vulnerability: livelihoods and human security in risky environments. – InterSec-Tions. Interdisciplinary Security ConnecTions, Publica-tion Series of UNU-EHS 6/2007. – BonnBohle, H.-G. 2007d: Leben mit Risiko: Resilience als neues Paradigma für die Risikowelten von morgen. In: Felgen-treff, C. and T. Glade (eds.): Naturrisiken und Sozialka-tastrophen. – Heidelberg: 435-441Bohle, H.-G. 2009: Sustainable Livelihood Security. Evolu-tion and Application. In: Brauch, H. G., Grin, J., Mesjasz, C., et al. (eds.): Facing Global Environmental Change: Environmental, Human, Energy, Food, Health and Water Security Concepts. Hexagon Series on Human and Envi-ronmental Security and Peace. Vol. 4. –  Berlin, New York: 521-528Bohle, H.-G. and F. Krüger 1992: Perspektiven geographis-cher Nahrungskrisenforschung. – DIE ERDE 123: 257-266Bohle, H.-G., T.E. Downing and M. Watts 1994: Climate change and social vulnerability: Toward a sociology and geogra-phy of food insecurity. – Global Environmental Change 4 (1): 37-48Bohle, H.-G. and J. Adhikari 2002: The Metropolitan Food System of Kathmandu – Conceptual Considerations and Empirical Evidence. – DIE ERDE 133 (4): 401 - 421Bohle, H.-G. and K. O’Brien 2006: The Discourse on Human Security: Implications and Relevance for Climate Change Research. A Review Article. – DIE ERDE 137 (3): 223-240Bohle, H.-G., B. Etzold and M. Keck 2009: Resilience as Agen-cy. – IHDP Update 2 (2009): 8-13Cannon, T. and D. Müller-Mahn 2010: Vulnerability, resil-ience and development discourses in context of climate change. – Natural Hazards 55 (3): 621–635Etzold, B., M. Keck, H.-G. Bohle and W.-P. Zingel 2009: Infor-mality as agency. Negotiating food security in Dhaka. – DIE ERDE 140 (1): 3-24Folke, C. 2006: Resilience. The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analysis. – Global Environ-mental Change 16 (3): 253–267IPCC 2014: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assess-ment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Field, C.B., V.R. Barros, D.J. Dokken, K.J. Mach, M.D. Mastrandrea, T.E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K.L. Ebi, Y.O. Estrada, R.C. Genova, B. Girma, E.S. Kissel, A.N. Levy, S. MacCracken, P.R. Mastrandrea, and L.L. White (eds.)]. – Cambridge, New YorkJessop, B., N. Brenner and Jones, M. 2008: Theorizing socios-patial relations. – Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26 (3): 389-401 Luthar, S.S. (ed.) 2003: Resilience and vulnerability: Adapta-tion in the context of childhood adversities. – Cambridge Miller, F., Osbahr, H., Boyd, E., Thomalla, F., Bharwani, S., Zier-vogel, G., Walker, B., Birkmann, J., van der Leeuw, S., Rock-Editorial to the special section “Geographies of Vulnerability and Resilience – Critical Explorations”233DIE ERDE · Vol. 147 · 4/2016ström, J., Hinkel, J., Downing, T., Folke, C., and D. Nelson 2010: Resilience and vulnerability: complimentary or con licting concepts. – Ecology and Society, 15 (3): 11Watts, M. and H.-G. Bohle 1993: The space of vulnerability: the causal structure of hunger and famine. – Progress in Human Geography 17 (1): 43-67 Wisner, B., P. Blaikie, T. Cannon and I. Davis 2004: At Risk - Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability, and Disasters. – LondonEditorial to the special section “Geographies of Vulnerability and Resilience – Critical Explorations”

Editorial to the special section "Geographies of Vulnerability and Resilience – Critical Explorations"

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Editorial to the special section "Geographies of Vulnerability and Resilience – Critical Explorations"

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