Resilience informed organising: a Northern Rivers case study

Resilience has been lauded as a universal conceptual focus and goal for how society can be organised to respond to crisis. Amongst the plethora of academic and grey literature that draws on resilience thinking (Walker & Salt, 2006), building resilience can be presented uncritically as a panacea that will improve the capacity of communities to manage disruptive change. Yet, decades into this resilience turn there remains a lack of empirical and theoretical insights as to how communities put resilience thinking into practice in response to crisis. Drawing on interviews with key participants and contemporaneous media reporting, this research applies assemblage thinking (Conway, Osterweil, and Thorburn, 2018) to trace how resilience practitioners from the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, Australia, learned to, and were affected by, operationalising resilience principles as they organised community-led responses to multiple crises. These practices contributed to mobilisation of a community-led movement in response to a changing climate in ways that were unexpected. The thesis also finds that assemblage offers a means to realise the radical and innovative possibilities of a resilience informed organisation (RIO) paradigm. Beyond interpreting the complex dynamism and multiplicity of community-led responses, the thesis opens up the potential for reflection on how insights generated through this research may be applied elsewhere.