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The language of resilience is increasingly used by International organizations that seek to respond to contemporary social, economic, and environmental crises. This paper focuses on the World Bank’s World Development Reports, and its uses of resilience. By deploying a quantitative critical discourse analysis, this paper shows how in the recent years resilience has gained traction within the Bank’s discourse. It further analyses the evolution of the genre, the style, and the ideational content of the Bank’s discourse related to resilience. Resilience is now depicted as something that can be built and not just observed. Furthermore, it is increasingly reified in these reports and ascribed to a whole gamut of entities. The ontological indistinction of resilience reinforces its fit with contemporary neoliberal governance.

This paper serves as an introduction to Risking Capitalism. To this end, I discuss the key questions, aims, and themes driving this collective project. Although the contributions differ in their use of political economy and political ecological with regard to housing, poverty, and climate change, they share a similar concern of interrogating the material, institutional, and discursive features of the production, representation, and governance of risk – a phenomenon that the World Bank views as loss and opportunity. In particular, they chart the relationship between risk, contemporary capitalism and its neoliberal modes of governance. After establishing the objectives of Risking Capitalism, I provide a general context from which to understand the significance and meaning of global risk management (GRM) with reference to the shared policy experiments of the World Economic Forum and World Bank. Mirroring the contributions in this volume, I start from the premise that risk is a social relation. This allows me to argue that GRM represents a new mode of neoliberal governance emergent from the structural violence produced by the expansion of credit-led capitalism. In the final section, I lay out the structure of the volume.

Conceptualizing development in terms of risk management has become a prominent feature of mainstream development discourse. This has led to a convergence between the rubrics of financial inclusion and risk management whereby improved access for poor households to private sector credit, insurance and savings products is represented as a necessary step toward building “resilience.” This convergence, however, is notable for a shallow understanding of the production and distribution of risks. By naturalizing risk as an inevitable product of complex systems, the approach fails to interrogate how risk is produced and displaced unevenly between social groups. Ignoring the structural and relational dimensions of risk production leads to an overly technical approach to risk management that is willfully blind to the intersection of risk and social power. A case study of the promotion of index-based livestock insurance in Mongolia – held as a model for innovative risk management via financial inclusion – is used to indicate the tensions and contradictions of this projected synthesis of development and risk management.