Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=resi20 Download by: [Marygold Walsh-Dilley] Date: 23 November 2015, At: 20:50 Resilience International Policies, Practices and Discourses ISSN: 2169-3293 (Print) 2169-3307 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/resi20 Tensions of resilience: collective property, individual gain and the emergent conflicts of the quinoa boom Marygold Walsh-Dilley To cite this article: Marygold Walsh-Dilley (2015): Tensions of resilience: collective property, individual gain and the emergent conflicts of the quinoa boom, Resilience, DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2015.1094168 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2015.1094168 Published online: 09 Nov 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 3 View related articles View Crossmark data
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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=resi20
Download by: [Marygold Walsh-Dilley] Date: 23 November 2015, At: 20:50
ResilienceInternational Policies, Practices and Discourses
Tensions of resilience: collective property,individual gain and the emergent conflicts of thequinoa boom
Marygold Walsh-Dilley
To cite this article: Marygold Walsh-Dilley (2015): Tensions of resilience: collectiveproperty, individual gain and the emergent conflicts of the quinoa boom, Resilience, DOI:10.1080/21693293.2015.1094168
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2015.1094168
Tensions of resilience: collective property, individual gain and the emergent conflicts of the quinoa boom
Marygold Walsh-Dilley
Honors college, University of new Mexico, Albuquerque, nM, UsA
Introduction
As ‘resilience’ is now a central concept in development efforts across the globe, critiques that call out the problematic lack of attention to power within resilience frameworks and programming have become familiar. Yet, in good measure, Watt’s (2011) observation that ‘there is no point of intersection between system resiliency and virtually any contemporary account of social power’ (pp. 87–88) has not significantly altered how resilience-thinking has been put into practice around the globe. Nonetheless, political ecologists and others are building an increasingly sophisticated literature that draws out the power dynamics embedded in contemporary resilience frameworks. They contend that the politics of resil-ience must be more explicitly attended to.
This injunction rests on the basic observation that resilience is conceptualised and utilised by different interest groups to serve a variety of purposes (Cretney, 2014). This is not always recognised; there is often a hidden assumption of consensus in many resilience discourses and activities that falsely suggests there is agreement about priorities and the best policy
ABSTRACTThis article examines the tensions between the individual and the collective within resilience thinking. San Juan de Rosario, a quinoa-producing village in southwestern Bolivia, provides an interesting case to examine these dynamics. As an indigenous community, land and other resources are managed collectively. Yet, as individuals expand production of quinoa for international markets, traditional collective management institutions have come under stress. Rising inequality, private accumulation, a clandestine land market and increasing environmental degradation are leading to conflicts within the community. This article documents two overlapping tensions between the individual and the collective in this context: first, the emergent discursive tensions as people talk about resilience, what threatens it and what resources are needed to build it; and second, the actual conflicts generated by individual uses of common resources and the efforts to mobilise collective governance institutions in response.
and management to achieve it (hornborg, 2009). To unpack this and expose latent power dynamics, political ecologists increasingly ask questions of resilience: resilience by whom, resilience to what and resilience for what purposes (Beymer-Farris, Bassett, & Bryceson, 2012; leach, Scoones, & Stirling, 2010). Taking these questions seriously requires an appreciation for how knowledges about or understandings of resilience, or what constitutes a threat or an opportunity for building adaptive capacity, are situated in particular contexts, embodied in particular people and emerge from particular rationalities (Cote & Nightingale, 2011). Thus, the epistemology of resilience – how knowledge about and understandings of resil-ience are built and reproduced – must be interrogated as well (Aradau, 2014; Walsh-Dilley & Wolford, this collection). These who–what–why questions, then, can work to uncover the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of resilience discourses and activities. By asking these questions, we can begin to see how resilience frameworks are shaped by and reproduce dominant values and hegemonic economic and development discourses (Cretney, 2014; Walker & Salt, 2012).
From this perspective, knowledge generated about resilience, how to build it, or even what constitutes a threat must be situated as coming from particular standpoints (Cote & Nightingale, 2011). in this article, i draw upon subjective understandings of resilience among indigenous peasants in a rural community in Bolivia. San Juan de Rosario is a small farming community that is currently experiencing a significant economic transition related to the sudden and unprecedented boom in the global demand for quinoa. As with the other articles in this special issue, the examination of subjective conceptions of resilience helps to make visible some of the tensions or conflicts that can be hidden within mainstream knowledges and assumptions. My research uncovers, in particular, a set of tensions around and between individual and collective framings of resilience. That is, asking the question of resilience of whom – and at which level – unmasks how resilience-oriented activities may have significant distributional effects, and is certainly differentially effective.
in many resilience discourses, the individual has emerged as the principal unit of analysis and target of development efforts. This is despite the ways that social- ecological systems theories view resilience as a property of systems – indeed, coupled systems across scales. Yet economic and psychological theories of resilience also help shape resilience frameworks. And even as there is a greater recognition within the discipline of psychology of the social and ecological factors that influence individual resilience (Murray & Zautra, 2012; Ungar, 2012), popular and practitioner versions of resilience have rapidly focused on individual responsibility and preparedness. This methodological individualism tends to obscure processes and relations of power, culture and history that influence how people and places respond to challenges (Cote & Nightingale, 2011). O’Malley (2010) suggests this focus is tantamount to the generation of a new form of resilience subjectivity wherein the skills of resilience – ‘innovativeness, enterprise, responsibility, flexibility’ (p. 488) – are learned through new techniques of the self. The resilient subject of much of mainstream resilience discourses is self-sufficient, respon-sible and adaptable (Joseph, 2013).
These traits resonate with liberal political and neoliberal social organisation (Joseph, 2013; O’Malley, 2010; Reid, 2012; Zebrowski, 2013), what Joseph (2013) characterises as a
social ontology that urges us to turn from a concern with the world outside to a concern with our own subjectivity, our adaptability, our reflexive understanding, our own risk assessment, our knowledge acquisition, and above all else, our responsible decision-making. (p. 40)
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indeed, resilience-oriented development practice has been heavily critiqued as a hidden means of extending the reach of neoliberalism and justifying ideologies that displace the responsibility for social well-being onto the individual rather than the state (Aradau, 2014; Mackinnon & Derickson, 2012; Reid, 2012; Walker & Cooper, 2011), turning the poor and vulnerable development subject into, as Watts writes (2011), ‘“an entrepreneur of himself”, a hedge-fund manager for his own impoverished life’ (p. 90). Outside of the field of develop-ment as well, resilience has become a key dynamic of self-improvement trends among the lay public, military strategies for building better “warriors”, and medical responses to post- traumatic stress disorder – key arenas for the making of the “resilient subject” (O’Malley, 2010).
This certainly is not the only way to think about resilience. Many fields focus on different spatial units of analysis or epistemic spaces of inquiry, for example, in the work on commu-nity, regional, collaborative and systemic resilience (e.g. Brown & Shafft, 2011; Goldstein, 2012; Krovel, 2014; Magis, 2010; Plodinec, 2009). This work recognises that social resources and broader ecological conditions are key factors influencing adaptability, rather than sim-ply individual skills and abilities (Magis, 2010). The difficulty of these approaches, however, relates to how the boundaries around such entities are drawn; social-ecological systems theories emphasise that systems are nearly infinitely nested across levels. The critique, then, is that unless adequately specified, resilience becomes an empty concept (Brand & Jax, 2007). The question of the spatial unit to which resilience adheres is a central part of a pronounced confusion among many development practitioners as to how resilience is or should be oper-ationalised (Walsh-Dilley, Wolford, & McCarthy, 2013). As the concept of resilience is able to marshal significant resources and adjudicate to whom these resources should be targeted, the outcome of these discussions has significant impact.
This article is based on ethnographic and qualitative research in a region of Bolivia that is experiencing an unprecedented transition and prosperity due to the booming global market for quinoa. Quinoa is native to the area but is poorly adapted to other geographies, and thus the growing demand for quinoa outstrips supply, resulting in an elevated price. Thus, while this paper is about tensions of resilience, it is also about the kinds of conflicts that emerge in the presence of unexpected opportunity and related fortunes. While a number of other authors in this collection question how future-oriented resilience-building works for the most-poor and vulnerable (see the articles from Boke and Thiede), this case raises questions also about the relationship between prosperity and resilience – particularly the sudden opportunity for wealth that is itself perceived as tenuous. in Bolivia, the possibilities of the quinoa boom have generated an unprecedented demand for land and other resources used for producing the crop. This has led sometimes to violent conflict in southwestern Bolivia, as indigenous peasants there seek to expand their production of quinoa (see, e.g. Perdermo, 2012). i suggest that the conflicts over resources, and the governance mechanisms put into place as a response, are closely related to frictions between individual and collective inter-ests – precisely those tensions that are expressed in subjective conceptions of resilience. i argue that resilience frameworks must pay attention to how the tensions between individual and collective surface and are negotiated, particularly in the context of resilience-building development work.
Attending to this tension between individual and collective formulations of resilience is important for at least two reasons. First, it matters because it highlights the issue of equity. Despite hornborg’s (2009) hidden assumptions of consensus and harmony, critics increas-ingly point out that the resilience of one does not necessarily improve the resilience of all,
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indeed resilience of one may come at the expense of others (Cote & Nightingale, 2011; leach et al., 2010). Yet, to sufficiently understand distributional effects, vulnerabilities and opportunities must be placed into historical perspective (Watts, 1983). We must ask how it comes about that certain individuals are able to accumulate resources for resilience while others are more vulnerable to potential threats. These historical conditions are obscured through resilience’s episteme of surprise (Aradau, 2014); they are assumed away in its meth-odological individualism.
Being alert to the dynamic between individual and collective interests or framings also helps to draw out the possibilities for collective action and transformation. Aradau (2014) argues that resilience’s episteme of surprise forecloses political or collective action. Drawing on Arendt, she writes: ‘it is the negotiation of the boundary between uncertainty and cer-tainty, predictability and unpredictability that defines the possibilities for public action’ (p. 85). Collective action is excluded as a means of building adaptability if resilience is framed in terms of the constantly responding individual. But if resilience is instead framed as a collec-tive issue or problem, collective action becomes not only possible, but a more likely outcome.
in this article, i draw on participatory research in a rural community in Southwest Bolivia to explore the dynamics between individual and collective understandings of resilience. i first provide some background on the community of San Juan de Rosario, and describe how the global quinoa boom has contributed to a series of conflicts within the community. These conflicts, i suggest, are closely related to a tension around different visions of how individual households relate to the community as a whole. These visions can be examined through subjective framings of resilience, which i turn to in the next section of the paper. in particular, i highlight two opposing visions of resilience: on the one hand, resilience as an individual problem, solved through the pursuit of individual strategies of accumulation and flexibility along the lines of the resilience subjectivity outlined by O’Malley (2010), and on the other hand, resilience as a community problem undermined by individual pursuits. Because of the collective tenure and institutional management of resources, the community of San Juan is able to pursue collective action towards building resilience or responding to future threats. indeed, the community governance mechanisms are working now to respond to the future threats of resource conflicts, climate change and environmental degradation as a collective rather than individual problem.
By paying attention to the various ways that people in an indigenous community in rural Bolivia talk and think about resilience, we are able to situate resilience frameworks within a particular epistemic lineage. The case presented here suggests that there are very different ways of framing and building resilience other than those pursued by mainstream development practice. When framed as a collective issue, collective property institutions and resource governance are able to arbitrate the conflicts generated by individual pursuits and build upon the transformative possibilities of public and political action.
The quinoa boom and emergent conflicts over collective resources
The village of San Juan de Rosario is located in the lipez region of the southern Bolivian altiplano (high plateau), half way between the dusty outpost of Uyuni and the border with Chile. it is nestled in between the largest salt flat in the world (the Uyuni salt flat) and the Atacama Desert, among the world’s driest deserts. The region is seemingly desolate, a semi-desert plateau interrupted by outcroppings of volcanic rock and small hills covered in cacti 20 feet tall. At an altitude of over
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12,300 feet above sea level, this is a forbidding territory, extremely wind-swept, dusty, dry and cold. But, nonetheless San Juan has been inhabited for over 6000 years, and is currently home to over 120 families and roughly 800 people. indeed, despite the difficult landscape, the population is growing as migrants return and young people remain in the village, attracted by the economic prospects related to the booming price of quinoa.
San Juan is an indigenous community – an important legal designation that allows such communities to be self-governing and enables collective landholding (Assies, 2006). The 1952 revolution in Bolivia had land reform and formal protection of indigenous communities as a principal goal. Via post-revolutionary reforms, communities designated with the legal status of ‘comunidad orginario’ are entitled to collective land and resource holding, allowing them to manage such resources and undertake governance locally according to local ‘usos y costumbres’ (uses and customs, i.e. customary law). These collective lands cannot be held privately or sold. But while this means that these communities cannot be dispossessed of lands through private sale, as we see below, it does not preclude conflicts over access to land and its use.
The Salar region of the southern altiplano near the Uyuni salt flat is where the highly valued royal quinoa variety is grown. like in many of the villages throughout the region, the economy of San Juan is increasingly oriented toward quinoa production, principally for export. This is a significant departure for the community, which before the early 1990s relied principally on an economic strategy combining subsistence production and migra-tion. Beginning in the late 1980s, an international demand for quinoa began to grow for the first time. By 1990, a stable price for the crop was established, and local producers began to expand production oriented toward this growing market. These efforts were aided by village-level cooperation and institutions, as well as farmers’ associations and cooperatives at the regional level. For instance, the village established a ‘multi-activity community devel-opment association’ (ACiDeMAC), which pooled community resources to build infrastruc-ture and purchase technologies such as tractors and tools for hauling quinoa. All members of the community contributed to this effort, supplying fixed amounts of quinoa in order to build the capital to fund these efforts. At the time, quinoa was one livelihood strategy among a number of others, including migration, tourism, craft-production and subsistence production of quinoa, llamas and potatoes. But by the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, the global demand for quinoa began to grow substantially, and the price rose astronomically (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Producer price of quinoa in Bolivia.source: Author, with data from the statistical Division of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United nations (FAOsTAT). Available online at: http://faostat3.fao.org.
While quinoa production had expanded during the late 1980s and 1990s, the real extensification and specialisation of the economy around quinoa, that we see today, primarily occurred in response to the price spike since 2007. People in San Juan regu-larly told me that they couldn’t believe how high the price had risen – going over 1000 Bolivianos per hundredweight was shocking to them. This high price has contributed to the ability of people to live a ‘good life’: ‘with a good price, the people are tranquil. With a good price of quinoa there is a good life. With quinoa, we are saving ourselves’, one of my research participants told me. And while there is a widespread concern that this high price will inevitably fall, local producers are hurrying to take advantage of the opportunity while it remains lucrative.
As the demand for arable land and the intensification of quinoa production expands, a variety of land and resource-related conflicts have emerged in this region. By 2013, i observed various types of conflicts, both within the village of San Juan and in the area more broadly. For instance, disputes over community boundaries have increased, as previously unused lands are increasingly converted to quinoa farming or as llama herds are displaced from pastures to make way for more extensive crop production. The area, an expansive spread of semi-desert range and rocky outcropping, had heretofore been minimally used, and thus boundaries between communities were not always exact, well-marked or well-recorded. As community residents go in search of new lands to occupy, there is sometimes a genuine con-fusion as to which lands are available to whom. in the past, and still sometimes today, these conflicts were solved amicably, with village authorities meeting together and ‘talking it out’ according to historical custom. But not all struggles have been so easily solved. elsewhere in Bolivia, violent clashes over boundaries have led to deaths and injuries (Perdermo, 2012). While inter-community border conflicts have not escalated to this level in San Juan, they have been significant. For instance, in 2010, a conflict over a source of potable water left the village of San Juan without access to their main water source for over a year. This conflict was ultimately adjudicated by the Ministry of Potable Water and Sanitation, which declared that San Juan must have access to this water under the constitutionally protected principal that ‘water is life’.
There are a number of ongoing and regular struggles within the village as well that are closely related to expanding quinoa production. One outcome of this boom is that staying in San Juan has become a viable livelihood option; community members can now make a significantly higher income through agricultural production than they have in the past, reducing the incentive for migration. This is a boon for people whose self-definition centres on the countryside and where land has cultural and symbolic value that is closely linked to individual and group identities (see also hall, 2013; McMichael, 2009). Thus, with the rising price of quinoa, engrained migration patterns are shifting; the viability of rural livelihoods means that fewer people are leaving to make a living elsewhere and migrants living abroad are returning to forge a livelihood in their natal village. This, in combination with the expansion of quinoa production by people already residing in the village, is significantly increasing the private demand for land in ways never before seen in the region.
The land area around San Juan is an expanse of mud and salt flats, rocky outcroppings of volcanic rock and cacti, steep hills, and flat scrublands that are increasingly converted to quinoa fields. historic land practices were based on an extensive strategy whereby lands were cleared and planted for a few years, then left fallow as farmers moved on to other ‘virgin’
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lands. The lands left fallow were allowed to completely regenerate their native fauna before they would be used again, a process that could take a decade or more. Thus, while land was technically owned collectively, the existing custom for accessing use-rights to land required only the labour of clearing it. Once a family cleared the land, it remained under their control and they were able to use it however they wanted in perpetuity as long as they remained community-members in good standing. however, when land was not under active cultiva-tion, it was available as common pasture for anybody in the village. Conflicts rarely arose, since there was plenty of land for any family wanting to plant quinoa or pasture livestock. On some occasions when there was a concern that llamas were entering quinoa fields, the parties simply met to discuss the problem and the offending herd was relocated to a dif-ferent area. With abundant land, this hands-off approach to regulating land was sufficient and conflicts rarely arose.
More recently, however, the context of high demand and an emerging scarcity of culti-vable land coupled with a historical governance system whereby use-rights were not highly rationalised or systematically regulated, has led to a number of land-related conflicts. By the summer of 2013, it was clear that the local economy had been nearly entirely specialised in quinoa production. llama husbandry, subsistence production of potatoes and even tourism had declined,1 many migrants had returned, and there were many more young people who chose to stay in San Juan to build their families. The entire village seemed singularly focused on quinoa, and people were able to build prosperous livelihoods through this focus. But, with the expansion of quinoa onto new fields, available, unclaimed lands became increas-ingly scarce and quinoa production spread onto even the more marginal lands (see Walsh-Dilley, 2013). As residents search for more land, and in light of the historically poorly defined boundaries around fields and customary tenure arrangements based on memory rather than rational recordkeeping, disagreements have emerged as more than one person or family lay claim to plots.
A related set of conflicts has to do with the emergence of a clandestine de facto private market for land. While land is held collectively and its sale is not permitted, the exchange of land use rights is increasingly common. All land technically belongs to the community, but community members are able to claim land for their own private use. While there is a strict allotment and registration for parcels within the village itself, there is no allocation mecha-nism or oversight for the lands that surround and pertain to the community. Once a family claims land, it becomes in effect a private resource. But the scarcity of available land makes it difficult for young people or those returning from migration, and who do not have access through family networks and heredity. They do not have the option of clearing unused virgin lands as others had in the past, but nonetheless they seek the land that will allow them to remain in the community. increasingly, they look for other means to gain access to land, including through payments.
This issue is related to the way that San Juan’s current territory was allotted historically. As the regional population has grown, and villages have been settled and rationalised (Scott, 1998), the larger land area that originally belonged to San Juan has been cleaved off as other villages coalesced and sought to become separate entities. These divisions have not always been neat, as some residents of these newly independent communities held use-rights to land that was then technically in San Juan’s territory. They were not permitted to keep and continue working those lands since the territory of the community can only be used by its members. Those lands, however, did not simply return to the common lands of the
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community, and some dubious deal-making took place around this transfer. Some of this land was handed over to family members in San Juan, but some of it was sold to residents of San Juan, despite the prohibition on the sale of land. These sorts of dealings have led to a lack of clarity as to whom the land use rights belong, confusion that was exploited for individual gain despite collective tenure.
This clandestine land market is raising a series of issues within the community. First, the market itself generates conflicts due to overlapping claims and a lack of clarity around who has rights to land. Community residents told me stories of two different family members who no longer live in the village ‘selling’ land separately to different buyers. These sellers receive the payment, but leave the competing buyers, because such private and monetised transfer is not allowed, without any legal recourse. Furthermore, this emergent informal market has created strains within the community as it has led to growing inequality. Some families are now able to accumulate many hectares – i heard of young relatively well-off families accumulating up to 70 hectares – while other young families have none or very little.
in addition to these concerns about land allocation and use-rights, a second issue that has emerged relates to environmental governance. expanding production via the conver-sion of previously unused and marginal lands, and the increasing reliance on mechanised production, have contributed to erosion and other environmental maladies (see Jacobsen, 2011; Walsh-Dilley, 2013). ‘Before, just the nice lands were planted. Now, any old lands are used. even those without much topsoil are planted’, i was told in 2013. The expansion of production has contributed to the loss of land cover, as the native flora is removed to create the fields for quinoa, and extensification and intensification (via reduced fallowing) have raised a number of significant environmental concerns – concerns exacerbated by the dis-placement of llama husbandry.
llama herds are declining or being sold entirely as residents specialise in quinoa produc-tion. Not only is there less and less open pasture for these herds and the remaining pastures at risk of being overused, but husbandry is becoming increasingly labour intense as residents devote more and more time to herding their llamas to avoid quinoa fields. This shift has environmental consequences, as historically the pasture of llamas provided the only source of fertiliser for the fields. The decline of llama husbandry leaves no sustainable, affordable and local means of replacing the soil nutrients extracted through quinoa production. Climate change aggravates these conditions, as rains are delayed or erratic and water sources dry up without the snow and ice melt coming down from the mountain peaks. These conditions make it more difficult to raise livestock, as llamas can no longer be pastured in the more marginal spaces where there is less water. ‘[Now] there are few livestock. There just isn’t any good pasture, and there is no water for them to drink’.
The environmental impact of quinoa production is concerning. Though the specifics are debated (see Jacobsen, 2011, 2012; Winkel et al., 2012), there is rising concern about the environmental consequences of expanding quinoa production. Some reports indi-cate that a loss of yield due to degraded soil quality is already detectable (Jacobsen, 2011; Walsh-Dilley, 2013). There are a number of environmental concerns, but the largest is one of desertification; removing too much of the native cover, exposing soils to erosion, wind and pest infestation, and the continued exploitation of soil nutrients could push the region over a threshold from whence recovery would be very difficult, if not impossible. These concerns are widespread in the region, and technical experts from national development programmes, non- governmental development organisations and producers’ associations
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have been working with villages in the area to both make them aware of the dangers and to provide skills and knowledge of means to avoid such a disaster.
Understanding resilience in San Juan
i argue that these conflicts and issues are closely related to tensions between individual gain and collective resources. i suggest that we can better understand them when we look at subjective understandings of resilience in San Juan. When i asked community residents what they understand of the concept of resilience, perceive as key threats or feel is the best means to build resilience livelihoods, they answered in a variety of ways. That is, there is no consensus even within this small village of less than 1000 residents. What did emerge, however, was two general framings, or themes. i categorise these as, on the one hand, an individualistic framing of resilience, and a collective framing, on the other.
This research is complicated methodologically by the lack of a single word in Spanish to represent the english word ‘resilience’. A common translation into Spanish, ‘resaltar’, con-notes the idea of ‘bouncing back’, but lacks the element of adaptation of the english version mobilised most frequently in resilience discussions. instead, in this research, i often used the Quechua term ‘allin kawsay’ (also ‘sumaq kawsay’) as a way to enter into discussions about what people need to build happy, healthy and meaningful lives over the long term. Allin kawsay is a very broad and fluid term that captures an element of living well without imping-ing upon the ability of others to do the same, either now or in the future (see Zimmerer, 2012). This term has been central to Andean discourses of sustainable livelihoods and development, and has even been incorporated into the constitutional frameworks in Bolivia and ecuador. To get at resilience, i couple this concept with a discussion of what threats there are to ‘living well’, and how to best build long-term capacities for pursuing such a life.
There are some in San Juan who described a vision of resilience that very closely captures the dominant ideas of resilience in the ecology literature and among development agencies. These residents expressed resilience at an individual or household level, suggesting that they thought the best ways to build resilience was by having many options should the one currently exercised becomes less viable. They try to anticipate future threats or challenges, and work hard to build resources to weather them.
One young woman, in particular, stood out: Doña epifania, the mother of four children. i interviewed epifania in her family’s hostel, a tourist attraction constructed out of salt that continues to draw customers despite the reduction in tourism in the village. She described constantly working at varied activities to build a stable and expanding income potential for her family. She outlined the primary livelihood activities of her household:
Now we are beginning the epoch of quinoa. But, since there is already the tourism, there’s no reason to quit that. We do both. When it rains, it’s very good for the quinoa. But when it doesn’t rain, it’s good for tourism. There are times, though, when there is snow on the border or it snows in June, and there are no tourists. Well, there is my husband’s salary, right?
As epifania outlined, her family is engaged in three principal livelihood activities: quinoa production, their hostel for tourists and her husband’s employment as a nurse in the village clinic. She anticipates the various vulnerabilities of each strategy, and shows how diversifying her income allows her to respond to and cope with each threat. When it rains, the quinoa does well, but there are fewer tourists. When there is little rain, the quinoa fails, but tourism expands. Snow could cause both tourism and agriculture to fail, in which case, she says,
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they can rely on her husband’s salary as a nurse. She explicitly invests in this diversification, for instance, using the income generated by their tourism operation to expand their land-holdings through the clandestine land market so they can produce more quinoa. Mirroring the concerns of resilience theories, epifania understands that the future is uncertain, and diversification and redundancy helps withstand these risks. ‘You see’, she tells me ‘i think that you have to do many different things here because nothing is certain’.
This vision of building resilience suggests the resilience subjectivity proposed by O’Malley (2010), Joseph (2013) and others. epifania seeks to optimise her own autonomous capacities to withstand the constant uncertainty she describes (see O’Malley, 2010). Furthermore, as resilience theory promotes, epifania constantly seeks out learning opportunities, even if they are not directly applicable to her current livelihood strategies. She described the various capacity-building exercises available in the village, saying:
Yes, i do all of [the trainings]. You see, everything is useful for me. Because one day my daughter might become interested in crafts, and i will teach her. There was a training yesterday to make cake. i went. To be able to teach my children, i go. Trainings in hotel management, computers, tourism, cooking. i go. each one there is, if i’m in town, i go.
She did not anticipate that this capacity-building training, a stand-by of development prac-tice, would improve her livelihood in a tangible way now – and thus used the possibility of teaching her children as a rationale for her attendance – but she seeks to build as many skills as possible, given what she describes as never knowing what to expect. At the same time as pursuing learning opportunities, she also seeks to constantly accumulate resources and reinvest any profit into a greater state of readiness. This captures how an episteme of surprise (Aradau, 2014) contributes to the internalised techniques of the resilient subject.
in many ways, epifania and her husband are doing a good job building resilience capacity: they are pursuing a diverse livelihood that is not reliant on a single resource and they are thinking ahead about how to respond to key threats. They are constantly trying to learn new skills and anticipate what they might be able to use in the future. And, in fact, they are doing relatively well financially.
But not everyone in San Juan agrees that building individual or household resilience in this way is the best thing. indeed, there is the concern that individual resilience-building in this way comes at the expense of the needs of the broader community. A narrow focus on building one’s own livelihoods by diversifying and accumulating resources and opportunities in multiple sectors is not seen in a good light by the larger community, particularly since there are some in the community without the necessary resources to build a livelihood.
Don emilio, a soft-spoken man in his late middle age, spoke extensively of a very dif-ferent perspective of resilience, one that comes out of a direct critique of the individual conception of resilience held by epifania. We sat in a sparse kitchen as he told me about community discussions regarding those who accumulate resources in order to build resil-ience to uncertainty:
We’ve been talking about this. in the [village] meetings, we’ve been saying ‘everyone who has their employment and livelihoods, they should leave other resources for those that don’t have them.’ For example, we’ve been speaking about the land, [we say] ‘Those that have land, work those lands, but don’t try to claim lands that other people want too.’ We’ve got young people who don’t have anything, not a tractor, not a job.
emilio suggested that accumulating resources at the individual level was not laudable since it generates inequality in the community and precludes others from those resources. he
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described this type of ‘ambition’ as ‘avarice’. he suggested that accumulating material posses-sions as a way to build resilience comes at the expense of a set of other immaterial resources, such as solidarity and equity, which he described as central to building collective resilience.
This issue of equity is an important one in San Juan. i heard from many residents a vision of resilience that protects the ability of all community members to live well. For instance, a young woman told me:
We don’t want anybody to suffer. We always will give to those who don’t have, even if it’s not much, but what you have extra. Always a small support … in San Juan, we try to make it so that we are all equal, because there are some people that don’t have resources … Sumaq kawsay [living well] means … that all of us are equal.
There is the concern that this collective commitment to equality is being undermined by individualistic behaviours that pursue individual gain at the expense of collective capacities. For example, Don emilio expressed the concern that the resilience subjectivity described by epifania and others elides social interaction and association.
emilio outlined a collective vision of resilience wherein achieving a meaningful, stable and good life and coping with threats is much more about human relationships than the private accumulation of things or opportunities. he went on at some length:
A good life: a fraternal life … For me, i can say, that to have a good life, it’s not a question of money, it’s not a question of production, it’s not a question of things. Rather, it is a question of one’s self, of an internal change … i notice here in San Juan, everyone wants to have everything. To have their tractors, to have their quinoa cleaning machines, they want to have their car, they want to have – i don’t know – everything they can.
emilio suggests that all these material possessions are meaningless unless they contribute to ‘a greater good’, unless they contribute to building a sense of solidarity and human asso-ciation. he declared:
There isn’t any solidarity anymore … [There has to be solidarity] for everything! For everything! living well depends not on things, but on people. Always in this sense, thinking of others, working cooperatively … without doing harm to others … sharing, organizing themselves to share, or doing work together.
At the core of this vision is the understanding that collective action is the key to building resilience to the challenges and threats that come. ‘One never finds solutions alone’, emilio insisted, and undermining the abilities and opportunities of others in order to accumulate resources of one’s own does little to build resilience capacities in the long run. Responding to new challenges and building resilience capacity is best done collectively; ‘We should organize ourselves’, emilio told me.
These two divergent points of view – the young woman and her family who seek to accumulate resources and create as many options for withstanding threats or shocks, and the older man who is more concerned with equity and everyone helping each other build resilience – reflect this tension between the individual and the collective in building resil-ience. Paying attention to this relationship is important to resilience since the changes and challenges that the residents of San Juan are facing bring collective risks, not simply indi-vidual ones.
As the conflicts over unequal land allocation become more common and apparent, the community has begun a conversation about how collectively held land should be allocated and regulated and village leaders have started to prioritise this issue. Because the village is still run through existing customary law, such decisions are made publicly and communally
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through extensive discussion and engagement. While changing circumstances mean that local institutions need to adapt, the ability to determine resource management locally has provided an opportunity for San Juan to pursue collective action in response to this collec-tive vision of resilience.
Conclusions
Paying attention to the subjective framings of resilience in San Juan reveals tensions between individual and collective interests and priorities. As is repeatedly identified in the literature, much of resilience-oriented development practices turn on the epistemic and practical for-mation of the resilience subjectivity of individual innovation, enterprise, responsibility and flexibility. Resilience-thinking, in this way, encourages new techniques of self-discipline and precludes collective action. But by examining how different people within the village of San Juan understand and frame resilience an alternative to this focus becomes apparent: resilience framed as a collective problem and priority. With this conceptualisation, building resilience will necessarily require collective action.
This article points to what i argue is a fundamental tension in resilience-oriented practice: the tension between collective and individual interests. i demonstrate that pursuit of both individual gain in the short run and individual resilience formation in the long run can be detrimental to the resilience possibilities of other individuals or of larger groups. This work highlights how the definition and scale of resilience-building focus is necessarily a political rather than technical issue. in San Juan, the unprecedented opportunity of the quinoa boom reveals an underlying conflict or tension between individual gain and collective interests. in such indigenous communities, where commonly held property and resources are governed through customary rules and collective institutions, the collective interests are elevated in ways that are not considered under liberal and neoliberal paradigms. When framed as a col-lective issue, the transformative potential of collective, public and political action becomes much more central to resilience-building efforts.
Note
1. With some notable exceptions: one family built a salt hotel, which continued to attract tourists regularly, for example. however, these instances were rare, indicating an abandonment of the general focus on tourism i observed during field research in San Juan in 2000–2002.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Sara Keene who provided helpful comments on an early manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
Funding for the research presented here came from the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and the Cornell University-Oxfam America Rural Resilience Collaboration.
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Notes on contributor
Marygold Walsh-Dilley is an assistant professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the honors College at the University of New Mexico. her research focuses on agrarian transitions, rural development, food systems and indigenous politics, primarily in Andean Bolivia. her work has been published in Agriculture and human Values, the Journal of Peasant Studies, and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.
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