What Have We Got to Lose? Uncertainty, Resilience and Anticipation

On the one hand, strategies regarding climate futures are often regarded in terms of either mitigation, amelioration or adaptation (e.g. Prasad & Seijan, 2015). In all cases a level of control is required. On the other, there is a growing literature within innovation and management – especially that from a creative or designerly perspective – that values the creative power of a lack of control. Given a body of scientific research that attests to the certainty of a damaged future due to the impact of the Anthropocene on the climate (Latour, 2014) – which is positioned in the realm of risk and its management (through amelioration, mitigation or adaptation) – one wonders: what a more creative approach to the complexity of the whole scenario might bring? That is, what might a more out-of-control, complex or aleatory approach bring? Such an attitude would favour a focus upon the creative power of uncertainty, the complex characterisation of resilience (as an ongoing and dynamic response to change; rather than its engineering definition close to elasticity, or its ecological definition as retaining homogeneity though deformed (Davoudi, 2012)), and on the imaginary aspects of anticipation.

This proposition offers a philosophical encounter with these concepts in order to tease out the ontological concerns that energise them.