Resilience: The capacity of an individual, community or system to adapt in order to sustain an acceptable level of function, structure, and identity.

UPDATE (051208): The last project advisory group meeting was held on Tuesday. One of the key issues we had to agree was a working definition of 'Resilience'. This is for a number of reasons not least because the current definition of resilience 'to bounce back' - is too narrow, too reactive and doesn't take into account the social resilience cycle (mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

Background
In this interdependent world shocks, disruption and stresses flow across regions and cities and reverberate through systems and communities. Recent experiences in the UK, from flooding in Gloucestershire to foot and mouth disease in West Sussex; fuel protests in Scotland to power shortages on the transport network in London, highlight the vulnerability of our interconnected society.

At a national level the UK Government has responded to these events by creating specific legislation to manage civil contingencies and introduced new planning processes. The aim of this dual approach has been to harmonize new and existing approaches across society, and establish a web of local and regional bodies to help build resilience.

In reality such a framework remains a challenge to operate with authority and power focused on institutions. If we are to ensure that society becomes increasingly resilient to the types of threats and hazards we are likely to face we need to move beyond the traditional paradigm of central government management, legislation and formal emergency planning and develop a more sophisticated distributed model of governance where the public and the private sector are key actors within a framework for resilience.

This will be increasingly important as the Government's power and authority shifts across to the private and third sectors and down to regional and local government. A central lesson from previous events, such as the flooding in 2007, suggests natural disasters are likely to overwhelm local and regional capacity. This suggests we need to change the way we think about the state, how we develop and sustain relationships between actors by building trust, confidence, and mutual respect.

But modern society risks losing the ability to be resilient in the face of threats and hazards for a number of factors. Shifting populations, increasing urbanisation and just-in-time lifestyles based on instant gratification and immediate access have led to a brittleness in society. Incidents frequently cascade across systems causing tail backs on motorways, loss of mobile communication and power cuts.

And while previous under-investment in emergency management and the critical national infrastructure remains a concern  it is only part of the story. As senior officials have pointed out communities will place their actions within a framework of two expectations of the Government – that it will manage effectively its part of the response; and that it will be honest in providing the information needed to allow people to take the steps necessary to maximise their own safety.*

Over the course of ten months Resilient Nation will focus on the following research areas: mapping the geography of risk in the UK; identifying the capacity of local authorities to respond to risks; analysing the flow of information across actors via formal and informal relationships; describing bottom-up approaches to resilience and how they can be supported by central government; and lastly understanding the role of civic engagement and leadership in building resilience across communities.

If you would be interested in learning more about this project, or have an experience you think our researchers would be interested in or a useful case study we could use please contact Charlie Edwards

This project is kindly supported by ARUP


* Sir Richard Mottram in The New Protective State: Government, Intelligence and Terrorism, ed Peter Hennessy, Continuum