Abstract
Building on critical scholarship on multiple resiliencies, this article takes temporalities seriously as the basis for its analysis. While disasters are usually described by resilience scholars as moments of temporal rupture, the article engages with different notions of temporalities with respect to long-term repertoires and plural lived experiences of resilient practices in Côte d’Ivoire. It involves looking beyond the immediate object or subject of resilience, drawing on a combination of ethnographic, historical and constructivist methodologies to identify alternative and subaltern forms of resilience. It shows how the everyday and emergency blur and become indistinct, revealing the outcome of long processes of slow violence. These are the outcome of racial colonial governance and post-colonial state neglect. Vernacular resilience takes the form of the distrust of the racial and the institutional other and is about cultural resistance. The ecological crisis should not underscore the importance and wealth of water and a way of living. However, the cultures and practices of débrouillardise clearly show the tension between human and ecological time, leading to a breach in the collective governance of resources. Finally, vernacular resilience also takes the form of an imaginary, a hope in the future.
Introduction
The consideration of time as a social construct has attracted significant attention within the social sciences (Adam, 1990; Edensor, 2010; Lefebvre, 2004; Massey, 1992; Nowotny, 1994), and especially around nature, space and human interactions (Adam, 1998; Edensor et al., 2019; Nixon, 2011). While time is normally associated with a form of objectivity, it is also socially constructed through the condition of temporality, namely the state of existing within or having some relationship with time. Adam (1995) for instance describes the rhythmic, cyclical and interconnected environment of time and how these different temporalities overlap with various human interactions. Recently, temporality has gained renewed significance in the geographical and environmental sciences (Davies, 2018; Macia et al, 2023), largely building on Nixon's (2011) idea of slow violence. This article situates itself in this body of work by analysing various forms of vernacular resilience, as in resistance, resignation, débrouillardise, and hope, that are needed in the face of conflicting temporalities around coastal erosion. While the article uncovers how everyday and emergency forms of temporalities become blurred and indistinct, there remains a tension between human and ecological times. This tension shows how cultural resistance and ways of living are altered by the ecological crisis affecting the collective governance of resources. However, vernacular resilience also takes the form of an imaginary, a hope in the future.
This article explores the intergenerational practices of resilience in the villages of Lahou Pkanda and Brafedon in Côte d’Ivoire, moving away from linear understanding of time that are still very predominant in policy responses. Semi-structured interviews, focus groups and life stories on the notion of resilience were used during our fieldwork visits between 2019 and 2021. Preliminary contacts, and an appeal through local radio stations encouraged the participation of communities in identifying issues around resilience. The concept of resilience was approached in two ways. Firstly, it was about creating a reaction from the local community in identifying their situation as the one similarly described by the research project when discussed in the radio programmes. Secondly, it was translated in semi-structured interviews, focus groups and life stories as local responses to the multiple crisis they were facing. As the empirics of this article will testify, residents of sea-level rise in these villages not only live in a vulnerable region but experience and interpret the environmental violence of their changing landscape in different time-focused ways.
In terms of structure, this paper is divided into two main parts. The first part introduces the key debates regarding the ontological, political and epistemological dimensions of resilience, and suggest how the idea of conflicting temporalities helps to further address ideas around alternative and subaltern practices of resilience. In the second part, we will illustrate how this idea is applied to study coastal vernacular resilience in Côte d’Ivoire.
Revisiting vernacular resilience through conflicting temporalities
The concept of resilience was originally introduced in the social sciences to help understand ecosystems from a socio-ecological system perspective (Folke et al., 2010). While the initial scholarship around resilience revolved around the notion of ‘bouncing back’, current thinking on resilience is linked to adaptive capacity and transformation (Carpenter and Folke, 2006; Pelling, 2011). Walker et al. defined resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks” (2004: 4).
Temporality is discreetly articulated in theories around ecological resilience. Holling (1973), the original thinker behind the idea of ecological resilience, challenged the linear understanding of change and causality in mechanistic understandings of ecosystems. The same embedded ideas about temporality are present in concepts such as the adaptive cycle or panarchy and social learning (Folke, 2006). In this sense, temporality involves activating the diversity of ‘non-scientific’ past experiences and knowledges that can contribute to understand and manage change in terms of adaptive governance.
My approach takes a different angle from conventional theories around ecological resilience. In line with Grove (2018), I consider that resilience cannot neither be dismissed to a buzzword, nor to a mere ideological cover for continued neoliberalization of social and ecological relations (Chandler, 2012; Chandler, 2013; Richmond, 2012). Grove (2018) considers the diagrammatic characteristics of resilience as follows. Human–environment relations and spatial relations are complex, interconnected, and emergent. Any claim to truth is partial and limited, and thus the production of knowledge about complex phenomena should be a collaborative process. In this respect, resilience is a “resonance machine” (Chandler, 2014), a site where multiple historical trajectories are superimposed on one another in ways that can amplify certain tendencies. As a resonance machine, resilience can take on different meanings in various contexts, highlighting “different geographies and temporalities, diverse effects and different kinds of political implications” (Simon and Randalls, 2016: 4). Like Anderson (2015), we can talk about multiple resiliences – resiliencies. This article aims to use the concept of resilience in a way that enables to discuss alternative and subaltern practices of resilience, what I have termed as vernacular resilience (Wandji et al., 2021).
Vernacular resilience means that the idea of the political becomes more important and the overlap between resilience and resistance, especially as theorised from the bottom-up by Scott (1985), becomes clearer. In this sense, conventional resilience seems to be conceived as a depoliticised form of resistance: a concept that conceals (or ignores) the political dimension of the crisis. In her study of Sumud as a resilient practice of Palestinian political resistance (2015), Ryan (2015) in many ways echoes the ideas of Scott's study of peasants in Malaysia by exploring the possibility of resilience as resistance or resilient resistance. Ryan (2015) posits resilience as a means to an end, based on the agency and objectives of the communities engaging in their own resilience-building as part of a larger political resistance movement.
This article aims to foreground these vernacular practices around the idea of temporality. Conventional resilience scholars use temporality to abstract subjugated knowledge and render it amenable to functional synthesis with other forms of knowledge, often in other contexts, in the name of enhancing adaptive capacity and designing sustainability into social and ecological systems (Grove, 2018: 134–35). The current framing and approach to temporality in ecological resilience thinking is problematic in that conflict is just perceived as an issue to be solved rather than an expression of underlying power relations.
This is why the work of critical geographers and their discussions of time and temporalities (Ho, 2021; Schwanen and Kwan, 2012) is so important to link with the idea of vernacular resilience. The recent work on temporalities, both around postcoloniality and indigenous ecologies, are very relevant to this article. Debates on post-coloniality and decoloniality refer to the ‘stretched notion of time’ and the ‘vital conjunctures [that] emerge from and connect with longer-term histories such as colonialism or postcolonial politics’ (Holloway et al. 2019: 468). Anderson et al. (2020) emphasizes the significance of racializing emergencies, highlighting how claims of emergency arise from and perpetuate a racially unequal distribution of time within contemporary societies. The (white) liberal individual, who envisions a future characterized by growth, transformation, and progress, is shaped by processes of racialization that simultaneously create (black and Indigenous) individuals trapped in a prolonged state of decline, stagnation, and decay. In terms of ecology, Nixon's (2011) idea of slow violence argues that the recent exponential upsurge in indigenous resource rebellions worldwide has resulted largely from a clash of temporal perspectives between the short-termers who arrive with their official landscape maps to extract, despoil, and depart and the long-termers who must live inside the ecological aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in time's scales. This contrast with conventional resilience thinking around temporalities, as disasters should not be understood as sudden events, but rather the outcome of long processes of slow and structural violence (Carrigan, 2015; Davies, 2018; Kwate and Threadcraft, 2017; Nixon, 2011). The intersection of geographies and critical race theory (Baldwin, 2012; Mbembe, 2003; Smith and Vasudevan, 2017) challenges the relationship between liberal biopolitics and anticipatory temporalities. The notion of slow emergency highlights life forms that are both uncertain and whose potential for growth and development is restricted, obstructed, or terminated. Consequently, the distinction between the everyday and the emergency becomes blurred and indistinguishable. It is however essential to weigh these structural conditions against the understanding that a declaration of a crisis holds the delicate assurance that an alternative future may be attainable. Fitz-Henry (2020) discusses the concept of ‘slow violence’ perpetrated by environmental governance entities that prioritize linear projections of the future. She illustrates how activists and indigenous communities utilize temporal strategies to challenge the rapid pace and unwavering future-focused nature of conventional environmental policy. Bonilla (2020) uses the notion of disaster capitalism, as the outcome of long processes of slow violence and argues that a new ideology in which the state is imagined as incapable of eliminating political and environmental threats or addressing their causes. She explains how time has passed but nothing has changed. Instead, communities and individuals must bear the brunt of adapting and mitigating rising threats of violence. Bonilla (2020) explains nonetheless how there is still hope among the population; that this period of extended waiting, this arrested postcolonial present, is a period of gestation towards a state of emergence.
Building on this literature, the idea of conflicting temporalities is central. Mapping the resilience of coastal communities helps focus critical attention on the tensions between multiple and overlapping temporalities. Secondly, temporalities is an idea that allows to expand time with longer term colonial histories and link the crisis to these structural issues. This expansion of different temporal frames make them more visible to resilience debates. Thirdly, this structural and slow violence brings to blur the emergency from the everyday and hence the ecological crisis has a different temporal meaning for the local population. Fourthly, institutional anticipatory politics does not integrate vernacular perspective around resilience. This is because the choice of specific temporal frames, namely when it begins and when it ends, reflect a specific discourse and power dynamics. The deconstruction of temporal frames helps us to understand how these are not given but chosen. The temporal framework we impose determines what we can and do see. Finally, the literature also shows how resilience practices are nonetheless shaped by the future and the politics of hope.
Case study: Resilience and conflicting temporalities in Lahou Pkanda and Brafedon, Côte d’Ivoire
Known as the “city of three waters” because the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Bandama River, and the Tagba Lagoon converge at its location, Grand Lahou is the main town of the department. Originally situated on the coast where Lahou Kpanda (the old colonial town) is today, the new city of Grand-Lahou was created in the 1970's when the transfer of administrative services to the new site took effect on 28 July 1975. The reason for the move to this new site was erosion of the coastline by the sea – the strip between the Atlantic Ocean and the lagoons of Noumouzo and Lahou is growing narrower each year. The region is dominated by dense forests, and the landscape characterized by large extents of low-lying land and marshland. The native population of Grand-Lahou belongs to the Avikam ethno-cultural group. It has a tradition of fishing and navigation. Today, due to migration, there is a mixed population of non-native peoples (Baoulé, Agni, etc.) and foreigners (from Ghana, Togo, Mali and Burkina Faso) who have settled in Grand-Lahou looking for fertile lands and fishing.
The village of Lahou Pkanda was created, according to those interviewed, in the seventeenth century before the arrival of the colonisers. It is composed of two sub-ethnic groups, the Boby and the Gningin. The village is surrounded by the sea, the Bandama river and the lagoon. The other village, the village of Brafedon is on the other side of the lagoon. While those in Lahou Pkanda moved their villages from a few hundred meters, the village of Brafedon was moved to its former site called “bazrébé” behind the water between Jacqueville and the village Toukouzou on the coastal strip, to find itself on the current site called Brafè between 1951 and 1952. It is composed of three sub-ethnic groups, the Sawa, the Brafè, and the Afè.
The colonial history of the region, and particularly the role of Grand Lahou (which was known as Cap Lahou) is not well documented. While it is known that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to have initial contacts with coastal populations in Côte d’Ivoire towards the end of the fifteenth century (Schwartz and Ancey, 1993), it is unclear when the slave trade started in the region, although recent research points out Cap Lahou was the main trading slave port in the area (Gnanih, 2023), where the British, Dutch, French, and Spanish were competing for slaves, malagueta pepper and ivory (Schwartz and Ancey, 1993). The French became more present in the mid nineteenth century, with different fortified trading posts, in Assinie, Grand-Bassam and Dabou with Cap Lahou becoming less important (Atger, 1960; Wondji, 1963).
The environmental consequences of coastal erosion threatens all the coastal villages (Brafedon, Lahou Pkanda, Groguida, Nimousou, N'guessandon Toukouzou and Diattèquai). Maritime erosion is clearly the most important one with devastating effects on the lagoon ecosystem as the mouth to the sea is so shallow that less fish come to replenish and reproduce in the lagoon from the sea, and vice versa. The quantity of fish has dropped drastically, and this directly affects the activities of women who support their families in the processing of fish and taking care of the families’ food needs. The other important crisis has been the lethal yellowing (LY)-type disease of coconut that has emerged in the 1990s, but it was not until 2013 that the Côte d’Ivoire Lethal Yellowing (CILY) was associated with a phytoplasma, decimating over 400 ha of coconut plantations (Arocha-Rosete et al., 2014).
Conflicting temporalities and cultural resistance
The construction of a narrative on the vulnerability of the communities takes two different temporal frames. Multilateral organizations tend to associate the risk of coastal erosion with climate change. This is the case of the West Africa Coastal Areas (WACA) programme, a programme managed by the World Bank. Part of the World Bank programme finances investments in Grand Lahou, in particular the stabilization of the Tiagba lagoon banks through reforestation and the rehabilitation of mangroves, in particular the Azagny and Ehotilé Islands national parks, both Ramsar sites. Feasibility studies and modelling will make it possible to determine what type of coastal infrastructure to build along the Grand-Lahou sandbar to better manage the movement of the river mouth and prevent frontal coastal erosion along the shoreline (Lombardo, 2017).
Coastal erosion for the local communities is perceived from a different temporal frame. The construction of their social imaginary mobilizes the myth of a woman. According to this social imagination, a woman with a daba (a form of hoe blade) and her baby embarked after the field work in a canoe to cross the river and reach the village. Arrived not far from the village, her canoe began to capsize. Seeing that she was drowning, she decided to call for help. There were a few villagers who were sitting at the edge of the bank. The latter pretended not to hear the cries of the woman and refused to come to help her. The latter ended up drowning with her child (oral history interview with elders, December 29, 2020). The legend says that it was in retaliation for the refusal of the villagers to come to her aid that this woman decided to punish the whole village by casting a spell on it. So, according to this legend, whenever the spirit of the woman is disturbed, she stirs the sea and through her daba digs the edge of the shore and creates coastal erosion. The inhabitants of the village of Brafedon also use this myth to explain the crises of flooding, high winds and coastal erosion. “We believe that it is the same woman who is at the root of the floods and violent winds. When she is angry she changes strategies. If through her daba, she does not dig by the seashore, she blows the wind or blocks the mouth to create floods” (native of the village of Brafedon, December 29, 2020) If the water takes this strip, it cannot kill us because we will always be near the water. You see, with us a leader is not chosen like that; he must have several criteria, know how to read and write, interpret the voices of nature, know how to speak with water, know all these mysteries. The sea and the water have so much power that it is the secret of the water that the avicam use a lot (natives of Lahou Pkanda, December 20, 2020). “You know, nobody can fight against the sea, it swallowed up everything the settlers did, our concern is to pray to the good god so that he knows that the land he gave us, we don't can't leave her. (…) “The children of Israel whom God loves; he settled them near the sea. We are like the people of Israel. It is God who installed us here and if unfortunately the water is ravaging us, it is because God himself willed it and as God loves us, he will always find solutions to help us. » (…) “When we cry out to the State, we also cry out to God and God answered our cries, he heard our prayers because the sea which came to hit our houses, which entered our courtyards has stopped doing so. In addition, he brings us messengers or prophets carrying messages for the village of Lahou Pkanda to come and tell the people to stay put. The prophet Zoungrana came to tell us to stay in our place.”
The temporal frame of resilience is essentially structured around a distrust in public authorities in the light of the historical context of spiritual attachment to the land. This anchoring is seen in the meaning of Grand Lahou “the white man, if you go, you must die and never come back” (oral history interview with elders, December 29, 2020). The historical fact of colonization becomes an important point in understanding this deployment of resilience, which is ultimately the product of resistance against the most conflicting relationships materialized by the looting of natural and human resources (spices, elephants, slavery, etc.) orchestrated by the white man against the Avicam ethnic group residing in this place during colonization (Augé, 2018).
This collective form of memory (Nora, 1984) was an important form of resilience, as it was only recently that that transatlantic slavery and the role of Cap Lahou was recognized with the inauguration of a stele in July 2017 (Gnanih, 2023). There are indeed many more studies now documenting how the intersection of trauma, memory, and identity act as a form of resilience (see for instance Selvanathan et al., 2023; Beukian and Graff-McRae, 2018).
It is this same historical paradigm that structures resilience/resistance in the form of rejection of the State's proposal to relocate them. These accounts were situating resilience within a framework of social resistance and distrust of the Ivorian state. This distrust of the state is in part fuelled by the fact that coastal erosion, particularly at Grand Lahou, has been exacerbated by the presence of the Kossou hydroelectric dam, built in the early 1970s some 250 kilometres to the north (Adopo et al., 2014). This has deprived the Bandama river of some of its power and its ability to resist the ocean. The Koussou dam is a political choice in the development of the Ivorian territory. The vulnerability of the coast, in this case Grand Lahou, was therefore built in relation to this dam. The dam reflects the modernist vision of President Houphouët Boigny (Allouche et al., 2024), who also favored his native region and the development of the town of Yamoussoukro.
Furthermore, the creation of the Azagny National Reserve in the 1960s, which later became a park in the 1984s, also had important consequences for the villagers of Brafedon. Some families who lived in this area have been displaced by the state, and the villagers no longer have access to the park reserves, particularly in terms of hunting (native of the village of Brafedon, August 19, 2021). In the 1970s, through tacit agreements based on compromise and negotiation between the State, regional officials and local people, the State allocated land belonging to the Avikam people to the PALMINDUSTRIE company for oil palm cultivation. At the end of the 30 years of exploitation agreed in this protocol, the same land will be conceded to Société Ivoirienne de Coco Râpé (SICOR) for coconut cultivation, to the great dismay of the people, who were hoping to recover their land. In Lahou Pkanda, this social resistance and distrust of the Ivorian state expressed itself as resistance to relocation as the solution. “The state wants to relocate us while we are here with our little bamboo houses. You're going to go there, it's to tell you, you must build solid houses, we're not used to that, we won't be comfortable. Maybe it's an extension they're going to do, otherwise we're not ready to leave here.” (village chief, Lahou Pkanda, December 20, 2020) “The whites when they felt that the city was threatened, they thought it was good to leave, they abandoned Grand Lahou, they even left the old colonial houses and left. Lahou Pkanda had to be relocated to the city, that is at that time that the leader Usher kindly made us move to go to the current site of Grand Lahou and the populations did not follow him because the natives here said that they could not move because they live from fishing, there is no water there, if they go there, how do they do it, and they have not left” (resident of Lahou Pkanda, August 17, 2021)
More fundamentally, water resources are constructed here in the social imagination as social wealth rather than a threat. The fact of being on an island surrounded at the same time by the sea, the lagoon and the river is a wealth of nature that must be protected and not fled, as was discussed below in a focus group in the village of Lahou Pkanda on December 20, 2020: “We produce cassava which is used to make attiéké and we eat attiéké with the fish, so we stay here, that's what we eat” “Water is a great wealth for us, it's gold, we can't leave such wealth to go elsewhere” “We are a people located between two waters, on an island; but it is a wealth sought by everyone”
This resistance against the state takes other forms. The youth mobilized against the state company SICOR because of the non-respect of the memorandum of understanding signed between the operator at the time and the village communities. This community mobilization led to the retrocession of more than half of the land annexed by the State to the local populations.
The government's inaction with respect to coastal erosion beyond earlier relocation plan as discussed before is another factor in this resilience/resistance relationship. In order to shout their dissatisfaction in the face of the continuing crisis of the mouth, the village populations proceeded with the activation of social resistance as a strategy of interpellation of public authorities. A popular march was organized in 2008 in the city of Grand Lahou (A youth leader in the city of Grand Lahou, August 18, 2021).
This march should not only be seen as a strategy of interpellation, but also as a structured practice in terms of the social construction of their identity. During these marches, the natives wore traditional warrior outfits to show their displeasure. The customary authorities, the heads of families from the various Bobi and Yingin tribes as well as their members, the resident youth of the village and the student youth in collaboration with certain executives were involved in this local community mobilization. A contribution was levied for 10,000 FCFA for executives and heads of families and 5000 FCFA for young people and students from the village residing in Abidjan or elsewhere. This financial contribution was intended to build housing for the teacher and nurse in the village in response to the transfer of teachers and nursing staff by the State to the new site. Faced with the insufficiency of the funds collected, non-native fishermen, in particular Ghanaians of the Fanti ethnic group, were invited by the chieftaincy to take fishing tickets which at the time amounted to between 300 FCFA and 500 FCFA in order to contribute to collective effort. This march resulted in the blockade of the south-west corridor, preventing the passage of products such as cocoa, rubber, oil palm and all forms of traffic from San Pedro to Abidjan.
The local authorities (canton chief, traditional chief, youth leader) have turned to the central government and relevant ministries with the help of letters of information and requests for aid. “It is the state that has the solution to this problem by dredging to put dikes” (A youth leader in the city of Grand Lahou, August 18, 2021). “The state understood our struggle, they said we were right, and they gave us back some of the land. But unfortunately, the lands that we have received, there is a complication in the way of managing. Everyone knows their land, but there is always a problem because people (private operators, sicor, etc.) have taken everything, I have my land there, but can I know my real ones today? limits, there is a problem, perhaps the tree which served as a landmark is no longer there, the palm tree which was there in the time of the grandfather and which served as a limit is no longer there, but there is my land over there, how can we go to delimit so that there is no problem there, it is this palaver that exists until now”. (Resident of Lahou Pkanda, August 17, 2021)
This section has shown various conflicting temporalities around disaster management and coastal erosion. While there is a crisis around coastal erosion, local communities also construct water resources in their social imagination as social wealth rather than a threat. Furthermore, the temporal frame of subaltern forms of resilience is essentially structured around a distrust in public authorities in the light of the historical context of spiritual attachment to the land. It is the outcome of long processes of slow and structural violence and this ‘stretched notion of time’. These outcomes are the product of racial colonial governance and post-colonial state neglect and takes the form of the distrust of the racial and the institutional other. This vernacular form of resilience is as much as a form of resistance as a way of living.
The tension between human and ecological time and the limits of resistance
Resilient resistance is constrained with the dilemma between the limits of what would qualify as human adaptive capacities and ecological change and temporalities.
Villagers collectively mobilized to desilt the mouth using shovels, pickaxes, dabas - a kind of pickaxe used to work the land, and other makeshift materials. This method was used until the 1970s as the various attempts all led to failure with the mouth closing very soon after the collective manual work had ended. Rather than adaptation, vernacular resilience was here a form of débrouillardise. 1
Resilience as débrouillardise also entailed social reconversion and livelihood diversification. From a livelihood perspective, the silting up of the mouth of the estuary had a severe impact on fishing as main source of income. The main consequence was that most of the community members shifted to agriculture, planting casava or leasing land in terms of planting sharing (one-third for the owner of the land and two-thirds for the applicant after production).
This is important as the feeling of abandonment in the face of these ecological problems led to the mobilization of ancestry as a base of (inequitable) resilience. According to some patriarchs interviewed, the historic process of installing the Avicam people on the edge of the coast took place with the help of certain symbolic actors, called geniuses. The latter lived in the forests near the waters. According to them, the Avicam people are made up of 6 tribes: the afè, the brafè, the sawa, the lipkilassié, the apkli and the pkanda. Each tribe representing the great families has its genius. These genies were worshiped with goats, using leaves and crabs placed under a basin. In fact, some tribes or families, in their installation process, have forged alliances with the spirits who were already installed in these spaces by offering them gold. This is the case of the Boby tribe who were made owners of land in Lahou Pkanda because their ancestor would have given gold to the genius of Tabou. Suddenly in case of crises or environmental disasters, fate or other illnesses, these geniuses are consulted through the practices of libations mentioned above. Thus, a power is given to protect and monitor the family. “We believe a lot in geniuses, they exist in our sacred forests, genius means to us, something that we do not know but we love. So, we have recourse to prayers and the invocation of geniuses because some think that the crisis of maritime erosion is a curse” (native of the village of Brafedon, August 19, 2021) “If not to tell the truth, the Bobi have a large part of the lagoon and the Yingin have a large part of the forest and each tribe went to confiscate their wealth, so if you are Yingin you want to go fishing, you have to pay a quota, and everyone started prioritizing their wealth” individual interview, Lahou pkanda village youth president”(youth president, Lahou Pkanda, August 18, 2021)
Resilience as an imaginary: The politics of hope
In the two villages, resilience was about reimagining the lagoon and the sea as it was before coastal erosion started. This nostalgia was projected in the future, in relation to a key development project, the WACA program managed by the World Bank (Lombardo, 2017). The program finances investments in Grand Lahou, in particular the stabilization of the lagoon banks of Tiagba through reforestation and the rehabilitation of mangroves, in particular the national parks of Azagny and the Ehotilé islands, both Ramsar sites. The issue with mangrove is that it is used for firewood but at the same time is very important in the reproduction of fishery resources. To dissuade people from destroying mangroves, local authorities have decided that any person who violates the rules pays a fine of 100 000f XOF and may have his boat withdrawn. However, the dynamics behind the WACA project is also creating new opportunities. For instance, young people from the village of Brafedon have formed an association to reforest the mangroves under the impetus of the Ivorian Office of Parks and Reserves (OIPR). Overall, the populations of Grand Lahou are mobilizing behind the realization of the WACA project as a ray of hope in the definitive resolution of maritime erosion and the consequences that result from it. The interviews indicate that the entire population of Lahou Pkanda takes refuge behind the realization of the said project, including the idea of a fishing port (although this is not officially planned in the WACA project): “It is said that the area of Côte d'Ivoire is 322,462 km2, if Lahou Pkanda disappears, it is the country that loses area. So, the state must react. We set our sights on the WACA project as a way of finding a lasting solution for the desilting of the mouth through the creation of a fishing port” (secretary of the village chief of Lahou Pkanda, December 20, 2020) “With the creation of the fishing port, we will have a stabilization of the mouth which will favour the development of fishing, the sea fish will easily enter the lagoon because there will be a depth and thus we will have the stability of the village and we will live as before” (notable from the village of Lahou Pkanda, December 20, 2020)
Conclusion
Earlier critical work on resilience would have focused on the limits of resilience thinking in the WACA programme as a technical, engineer-led and apolitical solution. This article takes this angle further by building on the recent critical scholarship on multiple resiliences and conflicting temporalities. Looking at different temporalities allows us to reveal the wider structural inequalities and questions of politics and power relations. It shows a story of clashing temporal perspectives, where the colonial and post-colonial state, state-owned enterprises, and international organizations operate on a different logic around short term extractivism and quick fixes, in contrast to the local community which sees time on a longer scale. The relationship between resilience thinking, temporality, identity politics and community (un)building is interesting in many ways. This feeling of abandonment and distrust of the state from colonial times has had profound impact in the way resourcefulness has been constructed, from collective pooling of the various wealth towards the individual governance of these resources. However, despite the breaking down of collectivisms, social resistance and future imaginaries around the prospect of the region solidifies identity politics in a different way and constitute, in this time of abonnement, a prospect for hope (like Bonilla, 2020).
In this perspective, the understanding of resilience is defined around the anchoring of the Avicam people to their land and their sense of identity and allows to move the concept of resilience beyond a material and ecological sense to go towards identity and the search for a collective self. The Avicam people here use resourcefulness, resistance or the search for their identity to go from one crisis to another. It is neither the crisis that defines resilience, nor the type of practice, but the socio-cultural sources of these practices which show rather that these practices allow people to adapt. This approach is firmly grounded in a view of resilience as not just a description of a system or a person, but rather as a metaphorical quality that emerges through cultural memory and social practices deployed to tackle intersecting difficulties (Atallah, 2016; Kirmayer et al., 2009; Shapiro, 2013). At the end, vernacular resilience becomes a repertoire of practices, situating itself between resistance, resignation, débrouillardise and hope.
Highlights
By considering time as a social construct, this article examines resilience through conflicting temporalities.
Conventional approaches to resilience have overlooked how locally embedded forms of resilience are socially historically constructed.
This article analyses various forms of vernacular resilience, as in resistance, resignation, débrouillardise, and hope, that are needed in the face of conflicting temporalities around coastal erosion.
Vernacular resilience is defined around the anchoring of the Avicam people to their land, their sense of identity and the search for a collective self.
Vernacular resilience is a metaphorical quality that emerges through cultural memory and social practices deployed to tackle intersecting difficulties.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the many people whose insights, contributions and feedback have contributed to the production of this article, and in particular Dr Sylvestre Tchan Bi Bouhi & Dr Kando Soumahoro Amédée from the LAASSE, l'institut d'Ethno-Sociologie (IES), Université Félix Houphouët Boigny, Côte d’Ivoire
Funding
This article has been written as part of the “Islands of innovation in protracted crises: a new approach to building equitable resilience from below” project (ES/T003367/1) funded under the Global Challenge Research Programme (GCRF).
Data availability statement
There is no data associated with the article.