Resilience policy. What it means, how do we build it, what tools can we use to understand it

Abstract

Governments all over the world have been searching for ways to build resilience to a myriad of risks, which seem to intensify in frequency and potential impact – from the Covid-19 pandemic to climate change, from AI running loose to economic crises that defy our expectations and understanding. Many have embraced concepts and ideas from resilience thinking, and applied them to particular shocks and stressors, or even as a holistic framework for city resilience in face of multiple shocks and stressors. Thus, a new policy domain emerged – resilience policy. However, unlike other policy domains, such as environmental policy or health policy, it lacks a clear definition of goals, methods of analysis, and trade-offs. This is the gap this dissertation
starts to bridge.