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Paper short abstract

Using political ethnography, this paper examines Okinawa’s drinking water disputes to reconceptualize resilience as a contested mode of welfare governance shaped by subnational actors and asymmetrical power relations.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates the complex notion of resilience through a critical examination of safe drinking water conflicts in Okinawa, Japan, focusing specifically on welfare governance. Despite its growing popularity in policy discussions, critics often highlight its ambiguity between narratives of local endurance and adaptation. In practice, resilience frameworks sometimes privilege top-down policy approaches that preserve existing political and economic arrangements at the expense of local suffering. In the context of rural Japan, however, I further argue that conventional state–society binaries on resilience may not suffice to capture the meso-level policy dynamics where subnational governments play a central role in safeguarding residents’ everyday welfare. Focusing on Okinawa—a region often regarded as an internal colony of modern Japan and influenced by an extended U.S. military presence—the paper explores how local actors, such as civic networks and local administrations, manage resilience in the face of conflicting interests that affect access to safe drinking water. The occurrence in Ginowan-shi, which hosts the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, serves as an important case for analyzing these dynamics. Ongoing water pollution from chemical materials linked to base-related operations has triggered public outcry. The civic networks advocated against health hazards and environmental injustice through various media channels, legislative elections, and appeals at the international conferences. The Okinawa prefectural administration confronts the problem of addressing public welfare concerns under restricted jurisdiction and minimal recognition of responsibility from higher-level authorities. Drawing on political ethnography, the analysis demonstrates how structural power dynamics influence resilience practices in Okinawa, highlighting how the region's historical experiences have cultivated a distinctly robust civil society and proactive local governance. The disagreements over drinking water highlight the limitations of resilience as a technocratic policy concept and emphasize the necessity to redefine resilience from a humane welfare perspective. By investigating subnational governance and civic action, the paper contributes to broader debates on resilience by framing it not as a neutral capacity to adapt but as a contested mode of governance embedded in asymmetrical power relations in rural settings.