About the project
PIANO NAZIONALE DI RIPRESA E RESILIENZA (PNRR)
Missione 4 “Istruzione e Ricerca” – Componente C2
Investimento 1.1, Fondo per il Programma Nazionale di Ricerca e
Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN)
About the project
The RESILIENCE project, conducted between October 2023 and February 2026, critically investigates the concept of resilience as a key category of contemporary political discourse and governance. In recent decades, resilience has moved from its origins in ecology and engineering to become a central paradigm in global policy-making, particularly in response to crises such as pandemics, climate change, economic shocks, and security threats. Yet resilience remains a deeply contested term, frequently mobilised within neoliberal frameworks that emphasise individual adaptation, responsibility, and the internalisation of risk—rather than collective protection and structural transformation.
Against this backdrop, the project pursues a twofold objective. On the one hand, it aims to deconstruct the dominant understanding of resilience, tracing its genealogy and exposing its function within contemporary biopolitical and governmentality apparatuses—what scholars such as Foucault and Butler have theorised as the production of differential vulnerability and the abandonment of disposable lives. On the other hand, the project seeks to explore whether a “resilience turn” is possible: that is, whether resilience can be rearticulated as a politically transformative tool capable of reducing vulnerabilities, empowering local communities, and fostering inclusive, sustainable transitions.
To address this complex research agenda, the project is structured around three interconnected research units, based at the Universities of Palermo, Salerno, and Bari. Each unit—while sharing a common methodological framework—focuses on different thematic areas: small-scale fisheries and food sovereignty in the Mediterranean; migrant women’s labour and rights; migrant communities, culture, and inclusion; and territorial risk mitigation policies. This framework combines critical theoretical analysis with empirical, territory-based research, drawing on capacity development and praxeological approaches to ensure continuous feedback between conceptual reflection and concrete practices.
Throughout its duration, the project is developing a rich programme of interdisciplinary research, international collaboration, and public engagement. It aims to contribute to the advancement of knowledge across multiple fields—political philosophy, migration studies, gender studies, ecological transition research, cultural and visual studies—while remaining firmly grounded in the analysis of local experiences and governance practices. By critically interrogating the nexus between resilience, vulnerability, and neoliberal governance, the project ultimately seeks to open new conceptual and practical spaces for reimagining resilience as a collective, democratic, and emancipatory project.
Project at a Glance
Full Title: RESILIENCE – Rethinking Resilience: Vulnerability, Social Security, and Political Inclusion
Funding Scheme: PRIN 2022 (Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale)
Duration: October 2023 – February 2026 (28 months)
Coordinating Institution: University of Palermo
Research Units: University of Palermo | University of Salerno | University of Bari–Lecce
Principal Investigator: Prof. Serena Marcenò (University of Palermo)
Key objectives
- Deconstruct the dominant understanding of resilience, tracing its genealogy and exposing its function within neoliberal governance
- Explore whether a “resilience turn” is possible – rearticulating resilience as a politically transformative tool for reducing vulnerabilities and fostering inclusive transitions
Thematic Areas
Palermo Unit: Small-scale fisheries and food sovereignty in the Mediterranean; migrant women’s labour and rights
Salerno Unit: Migrant communities, culture, and rights; cultural heritage and inclusion
Bari–Lecce Unit: Territories, risk mitigation policies, and institutions; locally designed resilience strategies
Methodological Approaches
- Critical theories: Deconstructing resilience through genealogical and conceptual analysis
- Capacity development: Analysing local effects of global resilience policies
- Territory-based: Comparative empirical research on concrete experiences and active subjectivities
- Praxeological: Continuous feedback between theory and practice
State of the art
In recent years the term resilience has acquired an extraordinary diffusion and relevance, becoming a transversal conceptual paradigm in a large number of discourses and disciplines. Starting from the 1970s, the concept of resilience has undergone a transformation, shifting from a static conceptualization – typically used by engineering technologies – to the dynamic approach of complex systems. Such a shift, particularly promoted by Holling’s works, allowed the term to become part of the ecological discourse.
Since the late 1990s, the concept of resilience has become a typical buzzword of the political discourse, yielding all-new systems of governance and actors. The recent global pandemic situation contributed to ascribe resilience a central role both in crisis management policies and among the implementation tools to be used in recovery policies from a social and economic perspective. According to Walker and Cooper, the current understanding of resilience arises from discourses and practices on security, development, and ecology, and has been acquired by the political discourse as a response to conditions deriving from external threats and shocks. In this sense resilience is an ability to adapt and absorb damage that is acquired through some specific skills that can be traced back to three keywords: awareness, preparedness, responsibility. In this way, resilience has been introduced into the sphere of individual agency, functioning as a performative concept that produces spaces of neoliberal governance centred on the abilities that individuals have to govern themselves, usually competing with each other.
The concept of resilience has been based on an idea of security in which external risks and threats go far beyond our control capabilities, and resilience represents the only rational and universal response that allows us to survive shocks by increasing our ability to adapt. Resilience is based on an adaptive model of human resource management which, since the 1990s, has been integrated by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other national and international actors, in the emergency and disaster management systems: wars, natural disasters, pandemics, financial crises, etc. This understanding of resilience becomes part of the securitization of the political agenda, locally and globally, first in the human security paradigm and then in that of human resilience.
The concept of resilience has been increasingly linked to that of vulnerability understood as the incapacity of individuals to activate mechanisms to maintain their own security. The vulnerability-resilience nexus was defined in the framework of human resilience by UNDP in 2014: “How far shocks translate into reduced human development depends on people’s ability to adjust and cope with shocks, and this ability of people to cope and adjust may be termed human resilience. Vulnerability can be reduced by preventing shocks or by building resilience at the individual and community levels”.
Despite UNDP’s understanding, analysis on human resilience, as far as COVID pandemic, shows us a frame in which security runs by assuming risk in a permanent state of emergency. The poor, the excluded, the vulnerable are agents of their own protection, and their resilience activates the devices for differentiating their lives into targets according to different typologies and degrees of vulnerability. The resilient subject embodies neoliberal rationality, conforms to its principles, and never questions the causes of its vulnerabilities. Obviously, risk could also have positive potential, and for those who enjoy adequate resources and protection, it can lead to improvement through adversity. Resilience is the effect and produces a shift from external risk exposure factors to internal damage absorbing factors. The disjunction between liberal protection-prevention devices and neoliberal resilience produces – according to Butler – a differential value of lives, generating lives worthy of protection and abandoned lives. That is – in Arendtian terms – a banal thoughtlessness that produces a de-humanized and de-realized global underclass: “human debris” normalised through the structural conditions of global capitalism, excluded from the benefits of globalisation and marginalised in terms of political participation and social belonging.
Faced with the pandemic crisis spread in the last two years, it is time to analyse what resilience strategy we are adopting in harm reduction and policies of vulnerability reduction: whether we are reactivating prediction, prevention, and protection devices through a revival of welfare policies, or an exacerbation of securitization and emergency policies. The elements that emerged over the last two years show us the presence of both strategies, sometimes harmonically, sometimes in conflict. A reflection on the conceptualizations and practices of resilience seems more necessary than ever.
Objectives
The project aims at looking at the concept of resilience keeping a critical perspective aimed at promoting its turn by placing resilience in relation with the current need for a transition able to build on the knowledge and practices of local communities without abandoning them to fragmented, uncoordinated and individualised processes.
The local communities elected on the ground of the specific phenomena described below will represent a special focus in order to verify practices and instruments of recovery plans aimed at reducing vulnerability of individuals and groups facing the damages produced by the current social and economic crisis caused by: economic and financial crisis, climate change, pandemic, and the recent international crisis.
The research will be based on a double track architecture:
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Verify the practical and heuristic dimension of the concept of resilience through the analysis of its genealogy, foundations, implications, and biases;
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Enhance a locally tailored ecological transition based on local communities’ practices and governance.
The objective is to provide intervention models that follow a criterion of political transformation and innovation able to face crisis situations, in order to elaborate a flexible and effective intervention scheme able to provide local networks with a series of tools (good practices, up-to-date research in the field, intervention models, training and capacity building) to implement social policies aimed at reducing the vulnerability of individuals and groups in a crisis context.
The objective of the double track on which the project moves will be to bring out the applicative potential of locally situated experiences, and the possible resources deriving from specific practices implemented by localised subjects and institutions. The privileged perspective in this sense will always be that of the inclusive potential of resilience, both on the social and political side. In line with this objective, the theoretical and critical direction of the project declined by the local units hence focuses on specific contexts and experiences at the local and global level in different fields of application: economics, institutions, social networks, etc.
Methodologies
In line with the objective of the project – i.e. to verify a possible resilience turn – the Units embrace a multifaceted methodology that follows four different and interchangeable approaches. According to its systemic and holistic approach, the project responds to National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) priorities by encouraging a multi-disciplinary approach to specific issues, such as risk, ecological transition, sustainability, vulnerability, and human resilience.
The working method is inspired by a double track, in line with the double – theoretical and empirical – objective of the project:
Critical theories approach. The research work focuses on the theoretical framework of the category of resilience, and its related concepts (risk, local communities, sustainability, vulnerability, human security, social and political inclusion, sovereignty, democracy, etc.). The project carries on analysis of the texts, authors and especially the documents in which such a category appears, highlighting the current and potential links with other categories of contemporary discourse, such as norm, decision, governance, inclusion, etc. Through a critical approach, the Units deconstruct the concept of resilience, with the aim of identifying and unveiling the use of the term that perpetuates – rather than eradicates – exclusion of vulnerable individuals and communities.
Capacity development approach. Such an approach is employed in order to analyse the practical local effects of global resilience policies. According to UNDP’s rationale, the achievement of national and international targets, such as the NRRP, hinges on the capacities of societies to transform themselves in order to reach their own “human resilience” objectives. While financial resources are vital to success, they are not sufficient to promote human development, democratisation and capacity building processes in a sustainable way. Capacity development is a process of transformation from the inside, based on local communities’ determined priorities, policies and expected results. It encompasses areas where new capacities have to be introduced and hence the building of new capacity is also supported. Enhancing local existing capacities in the selected local communities is used as a starting point of the methodologies of the project, with the aim of using such capacities to support national efforts to recovery and sustainable development.
Territory-based approach. The approach is implemented through a critical observation of concrete experiences and active subjectivities, in which the idea of resilience manifests its dynamism. The project selects and analyses, applying a comparative empirical research method, specific case studies at global level with the aim of identifying the peculiarities of local communities and of their acts of resilience, and the forms of differential inclusion into transition and recovery policies. Specific network of stakeholders and focus groups with selected local communities and vulnerable groups are involved in public engagement activities (training, awareness and share of the results).
Praxeological approach. It is applied with a view to increasing the resilience of a complex apparatus able to respond to social emergencies. Such methodology is based on the implementation of research actions in continuous feedback with the territorial areas able to process the information in line with the real needs of local communities. The theoretical dimension is related to the data provided by the observation of different concrete practices (local communities, institutions, groups, movements) and experiences of resilience implemented by heterogeneous subjects within the Italian territory and at the international level.