Exaptive Resilience: Reconceptualizing Resilience As a Catalyst for Transformative Social Change

This paper argues for a reconceptualization of resilience that emphasizes its transformative potential, grounded in the concept of exaptive resilience. Drawing on an extensive review of the literature, it challenges dominant critiques that frame resilience as a neoliberal governance strategy. Instead, the paper posits that a proper understanding of resilience, particularly through the lens of exaptive resilience, reveals its power as a catalyst for emancipatory social change.The concept of exaptive resilience, as developed by Kollár and Kollár (2020), refers to the creative repurposing of existing resources and capacities to generate novel, transformative responses to crises. In contrast to adaptive resilience, which focuses on incremental improvements to existing solutions, exaptive resilience involves a fundamental reconfiguration of the system towards new, more desirable equilibria.The paper illustrates how exaptive resilience emerges from the inherent capacities of communities to self-organize and innovate in the face of adversity. It demonstrates how local actors, drawing on their own knowledge, values, and resources, can creatively transform their circumstances. Building on these insights, the paper argues that nurturing exaptive resilience should be a central goal of international aid and development efforts. However, this requires a fundamental paradigm shift away from top-down, technocratic interventions aimed at engineering resilience from the outside. Instead, the focus should be on fostering the conditions for exaptive resilience to emerge organically from local contexts. Theoretically, the paper contributes to resilience studies by offering a more, transformative, and politically empowering conception of resilience, centered on the concept of exaptive resilience. In conclusion, the paper invites a reimagining of resilience as a powerful catalyst for transformative social change. By harnessing the exaptive potential of communities to creatively reinvent themselves and their worlds, resilience can serve as a pathway towards more just, sustainable, and flourishing futures.