Accountants of adaptation? Cost benefit analysis and the politics of resilience

Abstract

The role of expertise in climate adaptation has been widely debated in the field of resilience. Scholars argue that resilience is either a form of technocratic expertise to dealing with complex issues through top-down managerial interventions, or that resilience marks a limit to expert knowledge due to complexity thus indicating that planning is futile; both casting resilience as depoliticizing as a result. However, these works do not adequately grapple with the fact that expertise is not only deployed but also demanded to bring about interventions in the wake of climate change, and the unsettled and unsettling nature of expert knowledge and its production. In this paper, I address the issue of expertise in the making of resilience with special attention to its role in the opening up of political possibilities through facilitating rather than short-circuiting debate and contestation about resilience. Specifically, I look at the practice of Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) in coastal resiliency projects in New York City, showing how this expert practice is used to articulate – and debate – the substantiation of resilience in specific geographical contexts. I argue that CBA gives resilience a practical reality in infrastructural interventions by framing a whole set of quintessentially political questions around scope and valuation, and that CBA is best understood as organizing resilience politics. The search for resilience can be an exercise in democracy – and a politicization of ways of living revolving around the potentiality of future environments – if instead of viewing expertise and ‘the technical’ as something to be minimized we understand it as a site of problematization.