An ANZSOG Public Administration Explainer: the concept of resilience

Resilience is a concept that has become more prominent in thinking about the public sector since the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper, prepared by ANZSOG’s Dr Anneke Schmider, looks at contemporary concepts around resilience and the importance of governments taking a more strategic and active role in building resilience by design against future shocks. 

Context

The world is confronted with contemporary ‘grand challenges’ that will shape the future. These include the long-term impacts of climate change and the threat of disruptions from pandemics.  

In this era of ‘grand challenges’, the emerging literature points to a more strategic and active role for governments.¹ In this environment, a critical challenge for public sector leaders is working across multiple systems—including levels of government, as well as policy and transnational networks— to strengthen systemic resilience.²

Defining resilience  

‘Resilience’ is a concept that seeks to understand how systems respond to shocks at two levels. Firstly, how systems firstly anticipate, absorb, and recover from shocks in the short term. Secondly, how these systems continue to adapt, innovate, and transform beyond the shock for the long term. 

From a policy and public administration perspective, this definition places emphasis on understanding first, the interventions needed to respond to shocks, and second, what must be designed (in advance) to evolve beyond the initial shock.³

Creating resilience

The term resilience can be applied to actions by the state. At the theoretical level, state and society relations will demonstrate resilience when citizens’ expectations align with state capacity, leading to stability, and enabling the state to adjust to changing expectations, shifts in capacity, and to new external conditions.⁴ At the practical level, resilience is achieved when state systems adapt to dynamic and emergent situations and reduce vulnerability across and beyond the system.⁵

Into the future, the critical question for policymakers and practitioners is how to ensure that policies, programs and practices bolster resilience rather than create systemic weaknesses.⁶

To achieve resilient systems, leaders must deliver new framings of public policy and administration, focused on public expectations of impact and success across multiple policy domains.⁷

Approaches to resilience are strengthened when systems thinking has been used to understand the behaviour of complex systems, actors and socio-cultural dimensions—for example, the interplay between economic, social, and environmental systems—and design appropriate policy interventions.⁸ Anticipatory policy design is therefore important to achieving resilience.  

Resilience may be strengthened by focusing on not only the interventions needed during a shock, but on longer term initiatives that create resilience by design (diagram below).⁹

Policy and program design requires the analysis of cross-system influences and how policies must connect to respond, and then ‘bounce forward‘.¹⁰ In these situations, there may be a dynamic pathway created to build resilience through successive iterations: firstly, restoring confidence by addressing immediate priorities (‘getting the basics right’’); secondly addressing emerging risks and necessary transitions; and finally, transforming institutions to bolster future resilience.¹¹

What are the examples?

Australia’s long-term, coordinated, and responsive approach to disaster management demonstrates the ability of public agencies to be agile and adaptive over time. Because Australia is frequently tested by emergencies—fires, floods, cyclones—government services are structured to respond to the initial shock and then adapt to support post-shock activities, with emergency response crafted across levels of government, from local to state and national.¹²

There is also thematic literature focused on systemic resilience across social and health systems, as well as economic systems. For example, UNESCO and OECD have developed a body of work focused on resilience focused on climate change, health, social and economic contexts. 

Further Reading

Inclusive and Resilient Societies is a UNESCO Report with which Dr Schmider was involved,  that looks at how recovery and resilience policies can focus on equality, sustainability and efficiency. 

Leading in a crisis: Organisational resilience in mega-crises | ANZSOG was published by ANZSOG as part of series of papers on crisis leadership published in 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic 

Mission-oriented innovation policies: challenges and opportunities is an article by Mariana Mazzucato that looks at the benefits of mission-oriented policies 

The OECD has many publications and pages focused on Resilience, including Economic resilience | OECD, Resilience in agriculture and food systems | OECD, A Territorial Approach to Climate Action and Resilience | OECD and Health system resilience | OECD 

Footnotes:

1 Head, 2022; Mazzucato, 2018; Poole et al., 2021

2 Hynes et al., 2022; Stone and Moloney, 2019

3 Hynes et al., 2022; Resilience Commission, 2021; UNESCO, 2023

4 Brinkerhoff, 2019

5 Haldane et al., 2021; Hynes et al., 2020

6 UNESCO, 2023

7 Brik and Pal, 2021

8 Carmen et al., 2021; Hynes et al., 2020; Hynes et al., 2022; Koliou et al., 2020; Linkov et al., 2021; Walker, 2020

9 Resilience Commission, 2021

10 Hynes et al., 2020

11 Brinkerhoff, 2019

12 Downey & Myers, 2020; Filkov et al., 2020