From social reproduction to resilience: a Bourdieusian framework to critically approach capital (re)-distribution and power inequity in community resilience processes

Abstract

Understanding how inequities in power and agency shape community resilience is key to advancing social-ecological systems scholarship. Some scholars have explored how the capitals metaphor can be leveraged for building resilience. However, few of those scholars have meaningfully engaged with critical social theory to realize the explanatory power of the capitals metaphor in addressing power and agency inequities, and the drivers and root causes that undermine resilience. Unless this gap is addressed, prevailing resilience frameworks and practices inadvertently perpetuate understandings that drive inequities and marginalization in social-ecological systems. In response, we critically review social-ecological resilience, community resilience, and capitals scholarship, and reveal that unreflexively expanding the scope of the capital metaphor to encompass diverse human and more-than-human domains has inadvertently reinforced the assumption that the purpose of capital is merely to maintain and reproduce capital, effectively placing all forms of life in service of capital production and reproduction. Our proposition to problematize and critically deepen the framing of capital in relation to resilience scholarship is twofold. First, we propose an alternative framing to the dominant conceptualization of “capital” so that the metaphor is mobilized in service of all forms of life. Second, we draw on the Bourdieusian theory of “social reproduction” of inequities and inequality to construct a novel community resilience framework to address the underlying social dynamics of community capital mobilization and its (re)-distributive processes for resilience building. This framework advances social-ecological systems scholarship with respect to the conceptualization and praxis of resilience.