Resilience as Practice - An Ethnographic Study of the Paradoxes Resulting from a Top-Down Implemented Vision of Climate Resilience in Dominica

Abstract

Throughout my fieldwork on the Caribbean Island of Dominica, I gathered stories and perspectives from people’s experiences with Hurricane Maria that struck the island in 2017 and Tropical Storm Erica in 2015. This MA thesis explores how policymakers’ concept of “resilience” as a “mobilizing metaphor” can create paradoxes both in the world of policy and, most notably for this project, among regular people in Dominica. The concept of resilience in the context of climate change stands as a “tool” used by policymakers and disaster mitigation specialists to conceptualize a community or a “system” ability to mitigate a disaster and “bounce back” to its previous state. The concept becomes problematic in social science as it assumes that a community is stable and with an unchanging membership that pre-exists a catastrophic event, then experiences it, and then recovers to its former pre-existing state. Dominica, an already climate exposed island, is dealing with exceedingly destructive natural hazards and is in many ways “on the front line in the war against climate change” (Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, 2017). This project discusses how regular people from different social contexts in Dominica live amid a top-down implemented vision of becoming “the world’s first climate resilient nation” and their everyday realities characterized by dependency and material needs. Through empirical examples from distinct social contexts, I aim to clarify the significance of understanding resilience as practice that resides in social relations and shared responsibility between community members.