Many challenges that we face in the world today have left public authorities facing a range of emergencies and crises unprecedented in their speed, scope and scale.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a good example of this - something that started small in a matter of weeks became a worldwide issue, cascading across interconnected societies, economies and cultures in a way that forced authorities to adopt urgent measures to address and contain the threat to public health. Because of this, a biological hazard quickly became far more, having wide-ranging implications across all domains of modern life.
This emergency, and its aftermath, will continue to have an impact on social, economic and institutional structures for years to come, and revealed deeply harmful flaws in the way we organise ourselves to anticipate and prepare for emerging issues and risks on the horizon, and respond to, recover from and positively adapt once they’re here and unfolding as emergency and possibly disaster scenarios.
Plans and preparations for significant disruptive change, which in this case came through a global pandemic, were severely lacking, poorly distributed and disconnected, leaving governments and citizens exposed and vulnerable in a moment when they needed them most.
This idea of preparing for and being able to weather disruption is known as resilience. Specifically, it is the ability of people, things and systems to prepare for, recover from, and adapt in the face of stress, trauma or tragedy inflicted by risks and hazards. It’s the crucial quality that empowers and enables all systems and structures, including humans, individuals, households and communities, to navigate through disruptive change, emerge stronger, more adaptable, more integrated, and more capable of facing future adversity.
Today, risks are becoming more complex, interconnected, uncertain, volatile, and have more disruptive potential than ever before. This means that resilience is far more than just a buzzword on the lips of governments and organisations around the world, but a vital framework and imperative needed for our survival, adaptability, security and long-term prosperity.
Although resilience is a relatively new solution being considered by political decision-makers, it does have a long and detailed history of discussion in ecological, engineering and security circles.
In these, resilience is recognised as a complex and multidimensional concept whose definition varies depending on the focus of study and the domain of application or activity.
In engineering, resilience is mainly concerned with the ability of a piece of technology, architecture or infrastructure to withstand shocks and disruption, something known as robustness. Generally, the aim here is to preserve the ability of the thing to function in the way that it did before the disruption happened.
In ecology and environmental studies, resilience is a characteristic through which ecosystems maintain themselves in the face of disturbance. Given that these ecosystems are complex networks of interconnected biological parts and elements that adapt and self-organise in response to change, resilience is also considered a process that is strengthened over time, and both a process and outcome.
From a social perspective, resilience has been thought of as the ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political, economic and environmental change. In this, there is usually a focus on the factors and things that would enable people to cope and adapt in response to disruptive change and actively become more resilient through building relationships and capabilities.
In socio-economic studies, the most attention has been given to the policy-driven ability of an economic system to recover from and absorb the negative impacts of adverse external shocks.
Across these varied interpretations of resilience, we can pull out four things which generally enable and enhance the ability of something to be resilient.
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It’s capacity to absorb the force of disruption. This is usually determined by the robustness of something (ability to withstand) and the quality and diversity of its redundancies (the back-ups that come into play once something stops working properly).
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It’s ability to adapt, self-organise and be resourceful in disruptive events.
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It’s speed and effectiveness in restoring itself to its pre-disruption state, or beyond it, after disruption.
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Whether it is able to evolve after (or in anticipation of) disruption, so that it is better able to absorb, adapt and restore itself in future disruptions.
If these four are done well, whatever the something is - an ecosystem, infrastructural network, rural community or individual living in a dense city - there are some clear advantages. It can :
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Effectively embrace and navigate the uncertainty and adversity of change, avoiding harm and exploiting opportunities in different contexts.
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Proactively prepare for and mitigate the impact of risks, reducing the likelihood of significant disruption and identifying early opportunities for intervention, innovation and improvement.
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Harness its potential to transform and adapt to disruption in a way that improves its state over time and achieves a secure basis for the future. This is not just ‘bouncing back’, but ‘bouncing forward’.
Given these, there is little doubt that enabling individuals, households and communities to develop resilience is a positive thing, and would be useful not just when disaster strikes, but both before and after in the preparation and recovery stages.
However, in terms of governing and organising this resilience building, there are another couple of important questions that need to be asked.