Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the uneven and discriminatory discursive facets of urban flood resilience - the mainstream policy framework addressing urban flooding - across Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, making theoretical and empirical contributions to racial capitalism and GPEE debates.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the discursive facets of urban flood resilience, a mainstream global policy framework targeting urban flooding, across socially established and maintained divides across the global North and South. It does so by interrogating the uneven and discriminatory nature of urban flood resilience across my two case studies, Dhaka, Bangladesh and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Thus far, debates on resilience in international political economy understand resilience as a policy framework that largely reformulates and mediates neoliberal governance through austerity measures, technocratic policies, and subject discipline. Despite the value of these studies, they overlook the powerful discursive narratives guiding the rollout of resilience across the global North and South that is deeply informed by historical legacies of colonialism and self-help development policies, which I argue depoliticize the causes and consequences of class-based, gendered and racial inequalities across and within societies. I further argue that a deeply hierarchical global political and economic system reliant upon racialized labour continues to rationalize global environmental inequality in favour of patch-work capitalist solutions. I will investigate the following discursive dimensions of urban flood resilience: 1) how resilience is presented as self-evidently positive, yet is simultaneously historically embedded within global dynamics of uneven development, 2) what levels of environmental inequality are justified and for whom across Dhaka and Amsterdam, and, 3) the manner in which resilience is a novel form of self-help development policies and the manner in which they support neoliberal solutions to systemic class, gendered, racial and environmental inequality.