Resilience Without Reform?

The Rise of “Resilience” in Economic Discourse

It is now commonplace to hear policymakers and markets praise the "resilience" of supply chains, of financial systems, of growth trajectories, and of investor sentiment.

In its popularized form, resilience suggests strength, adaptability, and an underlying systemic vitality. What does it mean for an economy to be resilient?

The global economy has shown surprising robustness amid geopolitical shocks recently. Yet, it also warns of a "resilience paradox": the appearance of stability may conceal deeper structural fragilities.

Resilience often functions as a system-preserving discourse that privileges continuity over transformation, adaptation over justice, and survival over reform. In doing so, it reconfigures the boundaries of economic reasoning and masks the urgency of structural change. A genuinely critical philosophy of economics must therefore move beyond celebrating resilience and begin asking: resilience of what, for whom, and at what cost?

From Ecology to Macroeconomics

To understand how "resilience" functions in economic discourse, we must first examine its historical and disciplinary origins. The term was first formalized in ecological systems theory by C. S. Holling, who distinguished between two senses of resilience: engineering resilience, the speed at which a system returns to equilibrium after disturbance, and ecological resilience, the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change. This latter definition emphasized persistence through transformation rather than restoration.

Resilience then migrated into disaster risk management literature, particularly through the work of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), where it became central to frameworks like the Hyogo Framework for Action and its successor, the Sendai Framework. Here, resilience was framed as a cross-cutting imperative to prepare for and mitigate the effects of systemic shocks, particularly in vulnerable regions.

It was during the post-2008 financial crisis period that resilience entered economic discourse explicitly. Institutions such as the IMF, OECD, and ECB began using it in their communications to describe how economies had "weathered" crises and adapted to new realities. The term appeared in G20 declarations and in the World Bank's language on development strategies. Financial regulators also embraced the term, incorporating it into stress-testing frameworks and macroprudential risk models.

As resilience moved from ecology to economics, its meaning subtly shifted. The earlier ecological focus on system transformation and adaptation was increasingly replaced by an emphasis on restoration, continuity, and performance stability. In the context of financial markets and global capitalism, resilience began to connote a system’s capacity to absorb shocks without altering its fundamental logic. In this sense, resilience becomes a form of system-preservation.

Ontology and Epistemology of Resilience

Ontologically, resilience typically presupposes that the economy is a bounded, coherent system with functional interdependencies, akin to a biological or cybernetic organism. It is often treated as having identifiable components (e.g., labor markets, financial systems, supply chains) whose integrity can be monitored, assessed, and preserved. This functionalist view implies that the economy has a natural or desirable state to which it should tend even if that state is dynamic rather than static.

Epistemologically, resilience raises further concerns. What counts as evidence of resilience? Is it the absence of collapse? A return to pre-shock growth rates? Maintenance of investor confidence? Such criteria often depend on retrospective justification, leading to the problem of post hoc rationalization: if a system did not break down, it is deemed resilient.

Moreover, the resilience narrative typically presumes that resilience can be inferred from macroeconomic indicators, GDP growth, inflation stability, trade volume, etc., without interrogating the limitations of these metrics. Yet, as Nancy Cartwright has argued, economic models often rely on idealized, context-sensitive capacities that do not translate into universal laws. Models that predict resilience may be fragile themselves, resting on epistemic assumptions that fail under genuine uncertainty.

Here, Tony Lawson's critique of econometrics is instructive. Lawson argues that most economic models implicitly assume closed systems where event regularities can be expected to hold, but real-world economies are open systems characterized by emergent properties and structural change. From this perspective, resilience is not something we can easily model or predict.

Thus, both ontologically and epistemologically, the discourse of resilience leans on problematic assumptions. It treats economies as knowable systems with stable functions and uses data-driven methods ill-suited to conditions of radical uncertainty. A more philosophically rigorous account of resilience would demand that we rethink both the nature of economic systems and the limits of our knowledge about them.

Resilience as a Discourse of Power

Resilience is also a political instrument, a discourse through which power is exercised and legitimated. I draw from Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality and Philip Mirowski's critique of neoliberal rationality to show how resilience operates as a technology of depoliticization.

The repeated invocation of resilience in economic policy documents often serves to naturalize austerity, normalize volatility, and render structural inequality tolerable. If citizens are told that "the system is resilient," then calls for redistribution, regulation, or fundamental transformation can be dismissed as unnecessary or even dangerous. Resilience becomes the new form of legitimacy, replacing prosperity or justice.

Mirowski has argued that neoliberalism is not the absence of governance but its reconfiguration around market metaphors. Within this logic, individuals are responsibilized to become "resilient subjects"—self-optimizing, self-monitoring, and endlessly adaptive. The same logic is now extended to institutions, nations, and economic systems. Instead of demanding social safety nets, we are told to build "buffers." Instead of reforming the structural causes of inequality, we celebrate those who "bounce back."

Moreover, resilience enables what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic violence: the imposition of a dominant worldview under the guise of neutrality. When the economy is described as resilient, it implies that its current configuration, its institutional architecture, distributional outcomes, and political priorities, are somehow optimal or natural. This forecloses alternative imaginaries.

Finally, resilience discourses tend to marginalize those who do not fit the model. The informal worker, the displaced community, the climate-vulnerable region—these are not seen as failures of the system but as entities lacking sufficient resilience. The burden of adaptation is shifted downward, while the system itself remains unexamined.

In this light, resilience should be understood not simply as an empirical claim about economic performance, but as a normative and ideological claim about what kinds of suffering are acceptable, what kinds of lives are valuable, and what kinds of futures are worth preserving.

Rationality and Planning Under Uncertainty

One of the most striking features of the resilience discourse is its implicit redefinition of economic rationality. Classical economic theory, especially in its neoclassical and rational expectations variants assumes that agents form beliefs about the future based on stable probabilities and available information. These beliefs are presumed to be internally consistent and dynamically updated in response to new data. Planning, in this framework, is an exercise in optimization under constraints.

When policymakers and markets speak of "resilience to shocks," they are often acknowledging that economic agents face environments where probabilities are unknown, causal structures are unstable, and surprises are endemic. This is precisely the world of Knightian uncertainty and Keynesian fundamental uncertainty. 

In such contexts, rationality cannot be defined as optimization. Instead, it must be understood as satisficing, rule-based behavior, or even institutional learning. As Herbert Simon and Gerd Gigerenzer have argued, humans often rely on heuristics that are adapted to specific ecological environments, not global maximization. The resilient system is not the one that optimizes perfectly, but the one that learns adaptively, avoids systemic ruin, and tolerates error.

From a policy perspective, this shift implies a transformation in the philosophy of planning itself. Instead of seeking to design optimal interventions based on predictive models, planners must build institutions that are robust to model failure. This aligns with the work of Elinor Ostrom, who emphasized polycentric governance and the importance of institutional diversity for coping with environmental and social complexity.

Resilience, in this light, becomes not a property of individual actors or isolated markets, but an emergent feature of institutional configurations that support flexibility, redundancy, and learning. Yet, this raises further questions: Are current economic institutions designed to promote such qualities? Or do they systematically penalize experimentation, suppress feedback, and reward short-term gain?

The resilience framework opens the door to these questions, but rarely walks through it. Instead, it is often deployed in vague terms, gesturing toward adaptation without specifying the structural reforms needed to make adaptive planning possible. The real philosophical task is to rethink rationality under uncertainty not as a technical constraint, but as a normative imperative. What kind of economy should we build if the future is unknowable? And what kind of knowledge, ethics, and institutions do we need to sustain it?

This demands not only better heuristics, but a reflexive economic epistemology: one that acknowledges its limits, embraces pluralism, and privileges survivability over precision. Resilience, properly understood, is less about bouncing back and more about thinking forward under conditions of doubt.

Normative Ambiguities: Resilience for Whom?

While resilience is often presented as a universally desirable goal, its normative contours remain opaque. The invocation of resilience suggests that it is good for economies to survive and adapt, but rarely interrogates the distributional consequences of that survival. Whose interests are served by the persistence of the existing system? What costs are borne by those at the margins? In short, resilience for whom?

To answer this, we must confront the ideological work performed by resilience discourse. By celebrating continuity and adaptation, resilience narratives often erase the historical and social inequalities embedded in economic systems. A financial system that survives a crisis by consolidating around "too big to fail" institutions may be deemed resilient, even if it increases market concentration and weakens democratic oversight. Similarly, labor markets that maintain employment levels through precarious gig work may appear resilient on paper, but fail to support long-term human flourishing.

The capability approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum offers an alternative normative framework. Rather than judging economic success by aggregate outcomes (like GDP or investor sentiment), the capability approach evaluates whether individuals have real freedoms to live the kinds of lives they value. From this perspective, a resilient economy is not one that simply absorbs shocks, but one that expands human capabilities in the face of them.

Current uses of resilience rarely engage with such ethical dimensions. Instead, they conflate system persistence with social good. This is a category error: just because a system endures does not mean it is just, desirable, or worth preserving. As Mark Duffield argues in his critique of "resilience thinking" in humanitarian and security policy, resilience can serve as a strategy of containment, keeping vulnerable populations afloat without addressing root causes.

Moreover, the resilience framework often obscures questions of agency and responsibility. When economic actors are told to "build resilience," the burden of adaptation is individualized and moralized. Structural reforms become optional and systemic inequality becomes a matter of personal unpreparedness. This logic parallels neoliberal discourses of responsibilization that shift risk management from public institutions to private individuals.

In this way, resilience functions as a form of normative minimalism: it sets the bar at survival rather than emancipation. It risks replacing visions of justice, equality, and transformation with mere durability. Unless normatively anchored in a broader ethical framework, resilience can act as a substitute for political vision.

Thus, a critical philosophy of resilience must insist on normative clarity. It must ask not only whether systems survive, but whether they should. Not only whether shocks are absorbed, but whether harms are justly distributed. It must measure resilience not by institutional continuity alone, but by the preservation and enhancement of human dignity. Without this, resilience remains an empty virtue, a technocratic shell devoid of moral substance.

A Philosophical Alternative: Antifragility, Degrowth, or Institutional Pluralism?

If the prevailing discourse on resilience is conceptually thin, epistemologically fragile, and normatively ambiguous, then what alternatives might a critical philosophy of economics offer? What frameworks allow us to conceptualize economic systems not only in terms of their survivability, but in ways that prioritize justice, transformation, and ecological sustainability?

One candidate is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of antifragility. While resilience denotes the ability to withstand shocks, antifragility describes systems that benefit from disorder, volatility, and stress. For Taleb, antifragile systems are decentralized, modular, and experimental. They avoid overoptimization and overcentralization, instead favoring redundancy and optionality. While his formulation is largely apolitical and lacks a distributive justice component, its philosophical thrust is useful: to move from resisting crisis to learning through it.

Another alternative is offered by the degrowth and post-growth movements. These frameworks reject the assumption that economies must always grow in scale or output to be successful. Instead, they emphasize ecological limits, social well-being, and democratic reorientation of production. Scholars like Giorgos Kallis, Tim Jackson, and Jason Hickel have argued that current growth-dependent systems are structurally unsustainable and that resilience, without growth critique, can serve as a greenwashed form of stasis.

From this angle, the problem with resilience discourse is not only what it includes but what it excludes: the very possibility of planned contraction, redistributive reorganization, and alternative metrics of progress. A degrowth-oriented resilience would not seek to preserve the current system, but to transition away from it deliberately, ensuring ecological survival and social equity. It would embrace the fragility of the current system not as failure, but as an invitation to rethink its goals.

A third avenue lies in the theory of institutional pluralism. Drawing on thinkers like Elinor Ostrom and Erik Olin Wright, this approach highlights the need for multiple, overlapping institutional forms that can respond to different dimensions of economic and social life. Instead of relying solely on state or market mechanisms, pluralist approaches promote cooperatives, commons-based governance, mutual aid networks, and polycentric arrangements that distribute power and learning capacities more broadly.

Institutional pluralism resists the monoculture of resilience as a single metric or framework. It instead advocates contextual flexibility, epistemic humility, and the cultivation of institutional ecosystems that support experimentation, reflexivity, and collective care. This approach understands that no one model or blueprint can ensure resilience in a world of radical uncertainty. Instead, it calls for resilience through diversity.

These philosophical alternatives do not reject resilience outright, but they insist that it be embedded in explicit value frameworks: antifragility seeks vitality through stress, degrowth seeks sustainability through limitation, institutional pluralism seeks adaptability through democratic diversification. Each, in its own way, offers a thicker conception of what it means to endure well.

A reimagined economics would borrow from all three: combining adaptive learning, ethical grounding, and structural diversity. Such an economics would no longer treat resilience as a slogan, but as a question: resilience of what, for whom, toward what end?

Conclusion: The Need for a Reflexive Economics

Resilience has become one of the most powerful tropes in contemporary economic discourse. It promises a kind of adaptive strength in the face of mounting crises, offering reassurance in an age defined by shocks, uncertainty, and systemic fragility. Yet, as this paper has argued, the concept is not epistemically innocent nor politically neutral. It is a deeply loaded term that reflects and reinforces a particular way of seeing, knowing, and governing the economic world.

When used uncritically, resilience becomes a placeholder for deeper systemic questions it cannot answer. It is invoked to explain performance without explaining causality, to celebrate continuity without acknowledging cost, to suggest virtue without asking for justice. In doing so, it risks functioning as what Raymond Williams once called a "keyword" of ideology: a concept so widely accepted and loosely defined that it obscures more than it reveals.

We have traced the genealogy of resilience from ecology to macroeconomics, unpacked its ontological and epistemological premises, examined its political uses and misuses, and proposed alternative philosophical orientations rooted in antifragility, degrowth, and institutional pluralism. What emerges is not a call to abandon resilience altogether, but a call to deepen, contextualize, and politicize it.

A truly reflexive economics would not treat resilience as a technical property, but as a contested social objective. It would ask not just how to preserve systems, but which systems deserve preservation. It would insist that survival cannot come at the expense of dignity, nor stability at the expense of transformation.

Ultimately, resilience must be reclaimed as a critical, not complacent, concept, one that enables us to confront structural injustice, anticipate future shocks, and reimagine institutions that are not merely resistant to collapse, but capable of fostering human and ecological flourishing. This demands not less philosophy of economics, but more.

In an age of climate tipping points, democratic backsliding, and political uncertainty, we need an economics that is less concerned with bouncing back and more committed to moving forward, deliberately, ethically, and collectively. Resilience, if it is to mean anything worthwhile, must become a philosophy of resistance with vision.