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Short abstract:

I discuss expertise in climate resilience, focusing on its role in opening up political possibilities through facilitating debate and contestation, using the Cost Benefit Analysis technique as a case.I show resilience can be an exercise in democracy if we see expertise as a site of problematization.

Long abstract:

The role of expertise in climate adaptation is widely debated in scholarship on resilience. Scholars argue that resilience is a form of technocratic expertise through top-down managerial interventions, or that resilience marks a limit to expert knowledge due to complexity; both casting resilience as depoliticizing. However, these works do not adequately grapple with the fact that expertise is not only deployed but also demanded in the wake of climate change, nor do they engage with key insights on the unsettled and unsettling nature of expert knowledge and its production from STS. In this paper, I address the issue of expertise in the making of resilience with attention to its role in the opening up of political possibilities through facilitating, rather than short-circuiting, debate and contestation. I look at the technique of Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) and its use in resiliency projects, showing it as a critical tool used to articulate – and debate – what resilience is in specific geographical contexts. I discuss CBA use in two cities built on low-lying marshlands, New York City and Paramaribo, where disputes about resilience as gray or green infrastructure intervention play out through the CBA. I argue that CBA as a calculative technology has effects, but not determinative ones, and that in its contested use and authority helps organize resilience politics. I conclude that resilience can be an exercise in democracy – and a politicization of ways of living revolving around the potentiality of future environments – if we view expertise as a site of problematization.