Chapter 1

An Emergent Means to Assurgent Ends: Societal Resilience for Safety and Sustainability

Per Becker, Marcus Abrahamsson and Henrik Tehler

Societal safety and sustainability are key challenges in our complex and dynamic world, causing growth in interest of applying the concept of resilience in broader societal contexts. This chapter presents a concept of societal resilience that builds on established theory of Resilience Engineering and operationalises the concept by presenting its purpose, required functions and a way to identify and analyse the complex network of actual forms that together achieve these functions in society. The framework for analysing societal resilience is then tested in practice with interesting results. Although the framework has challenges and limitations, the Resilience Engineering approach to societal resilience seems to be both a conceptually and pragmatically fruitful path to follow.

Introduction

Contemporary society seems preoccupied with the notion of risk and recent examples of calamity have given rise to growing public discontent with the performance of present risk management institutions (Renn, 2008, p. 1). The safety and sustainability of society is thus increasingly becoming the centre of attention of policymakers from various administrative levels and countries around the world (for example, OECD, 2003; Raco, 2007). Advancing safety and sustainability is challenging in this context, as there are multiple stakeholders to involve (Haimes, 1998, p. 104; Renn, 2008, pp. 8–9), values to consider (Belton and Stewart, 2002), and stresses to include (Kates et al., 2001, p. 641). On top of this lies the multitude of factors and processes contributing to the susceptibility of what stakeholders’ value to be the impact of each stress (Wisner et al., 2004, pp. 49–84; Coppola, 2007, pp. 146–61).

The real challenge of societal safety and sustainability is however not the number of elements to include, but the complexity and non-linearity of relations between these elements (Yates, 1978, p. R201), separating cause and effect in both space and time (Senge, 2006, p. 71). Unfortunately, in efforts to promote safety and sustainable development, stakeholders often reduce problems into parts that fit functional sectors, organisational mandates and academic disciplines (Fordham, 2007). This is likely to be a major weakness as it clouds the bigger picture of risk (Hale and Heijer, 2006, p. 139) and is further complicated by various processes of change increasing the dynamic nature of our world, for example, globalisation (Beck, 1999), demographic and socio-economic processes (Wisner et al., 2004), environmental degradation (Geist and Lambin, 2004), the increasing complexity of modern society (Perrow, 1999b) and climate change (Elsner et al., 2008). It is in this context that Resilience Engineering may offer a conceptual framework to build on for meeting the challenges of societal safety and sustainability in the 21st century and beyond.

The purpose of this chapter is to present a framework for addressing challenges to the safety and sustainability of societies, by defining and operationalising a concept of societal resilience. The chapter also presents examples from applications of the framework in different contexts.

A Concept of Societal Resilience

Resilience Engineering has been paramount in demonstrating that the main challenge for safety is to recognise dynamic complexity and non-linear interdependencies in the system in question (for example, Hollnagel, 2006, pp. 14–17). Similarly, Sustainability Science has been equally paramount in demonstrating the same challenge for sustainability (for example, Kates et al., 2001). While Resilience Engineering appears to have generally been focusing on socio-technical systems (for example, Cook and Nemeth, 2006, p. 206; Leveson et al., 2006, p. 96), Sustainability Science has often approached our world as a complex human-environment system (for example, Turner et al., 2003; Haque and Etkin, 2007). Regardless of type of system, destructive courses of events that threaten safety and sustainability are, in both views, not results of linear chains of events, like dominos falling on each other (Hollnagel, 2006, pp. 10–12), but are instead non-linear phenomena that emerge within the complex systems themselves (Perrow 1999a; Hollnagel, 2006, p. 12). Such destructive courses of events are thus not discrete, unfortunate and detached from ordinary societal processes, but intrinsic products of everyday human-environment relations over time (Hewitt, 1983, p. 25; Oliver-Smith, 1999), and rooted in the same complex system that supplies human beings with opportunities (Haque and Etkin, 2007).

The concept of resilience has a wide range of definitions, developed in scientific disciplines spanning from engineering to psychology. Many of these definitions describe resilience as ability to ‘bounce back’ to a single equilibrium (for example, Cohen et al., 2011), as a measure of robustness or buffering capacity before a disturbance forces a system from one stable equilibrium to another (Berkes and Folke, 1998) or as ability to adapt in reaction to a disturbance (Pendall et al., 2010). Although many of these definitions are useful for their intended purposes, human-environment systems are adaptive and entail human beings with the ability not only to react to disturbances but also to anticipate and learn from them. For instance, a bicycle lane with a curb crossing would not be considered a particularly resilient system, even if it involved a qualified nurse and bike repairman ready to aid the unfortunate passerby to get back into the saddle again. It would be more resilient if the curb is removed, either before the foreseeable accident happens (anticipation), or after the first incident (learning).

To advance societal safety and sustainability, it is crucial to approach society as a complex human-environment system, and its level of safety and sustainability is determined by internal attributes. Societal resilience is in this sense an emergent property of such a system in the same way as Pariès’ (2006) organisational resilience of complex organisations. To better grasp this emergent property, Rasmussen (1985) suggests to structure systems in a functional hierarchy from purpose, through increasingly concrete levels of function, to the observable physical forms of the system contributing in the real world to fulfil the functions and meet its purpose. However, it is important to note that resilience is not a linear outcome of these functions, but an emergent property of the system that is connected in complex ways to the ability of the system to perform.

In the context of societal resilience, the overarching purpose of the human-environment system under study is to protect what human beings value, now and in the future. Hollnagel’s (2009) four cornerstones of resilience form a comprehensive foundation for the functions fulfilling that purpose. Although his framework is compelling, with its focus on anticipation, monitoring, responding and learning (Ibid.), it needs some minor alterations to suit the broader societal context. More specifically, to increase the usefulness of it in practice we suggest the introduction of a set of general functions on a lower level of abstraction (see Rasmussen, 1985) that will facilitate the assessment of societal resilience. It is important to note that although Hollnagel’s four pillars, and the associated abstract functions in our approach, are complete, the more concrete generalised functions used in this chapter are not. There may in other words be other generalised functions that are useful in other contexts, and the ones presented may be divided in other ways.

Moreover, we also suggest that these generalised functions could be divided into proactive and reactive ones. A function is here defined as proactive if it has an ex ante focus, that is, it focuses on something that has not yet happened. A reactive function, on the other hand, has an ex post focus, that is, it focuses on an actual event that has already taken place. This division into groups of reactive and proactive functions is useful in the present context since it emphasises that societal resilience is not only about ‘bouncing back’ from a disturbance, but also about adapting the system beforehand and learning from previous events. Furthermore, the division into two sets of functions also allows us to study the interaction between the two types, for example between the preparedness and response functions (see below), and it allows us to specifically address the different contextual factors that influence the performance of the proactive functions compared to the reactive ones. Examples of contextual factors that usually exist to a greater extent for reactive functions than proactive ones include high time pressure, large stakes and rapidly changing conditions.

Starting with the first cornerstone of Hollnagel’s framework, the function of anticipation, we suggest that a more concrete generalised function in a societal context is the function of Risk assessment. We agree with Hollnagel when stating that methods for risk assessment that focus on linear combinations of discrete events may fail to sufficiently represent risk as they fail to take into account the complexity of our world (Ibid., pp. 125–7). However, this is not a general attribute of risk assessment per se, and there are methods that to a greater extent incorporate such complexity (Haimes, 2004; Petersen and Johansson, 2008). There is obviously no such thing as a perfect method for risk assessment, but, as Hollnagel admits, ‘a truly resilient organization realizes the need at least to do something’ (Hollnagel, 2009, p. 127). A related but perhaps less contentious way of anticipation is Forecasting, for example, weather forecasts, river flow as a result of potential rainfall, ocean waves if a storm grows stronger and so on. Both Risk Assessment and Forecasting are proactive functions.

The second cornerstone emphasises the need to monitor specific predefined indicators of potential problems (Ibid., pp. 124–5), for example actual river flow, number of cholera cases in the area and so on. Hollnagel’s concept of monitoring covers in other words what ‘is or could be a threat in the near term’ (Ibid., p. 120), but not functions that are vital when the system is already in a specific disastrous event. In such a situation the system needs a function to recognise what impact that event has on the system. It is thus suggested that the second cornerstone of resilience is modified and called recognising, covering the generalised functions of Monitoring and Impact assessment. The latter clearly being reactive, while the former being potentially both proactive and reactive depending on how the set value for the indicator that is being monitored is defined in relation to what constitutes a real crisis (Figure 1.1). Impact assessment is in other words not an abstract function corresponding to Hollnagel’s cornerstones in itself, but an addition to his framework. The name of the associated abstract function in our approach is thus changed from Monitoring to Recognising to indicate that.

The third cornerstone accentuates the importance to be able to adapt the system in different ways based on what is anticipated to have a potential to become a problem in the future, what is recognised as critical or soon to be critical in the current situation or what is learnt to be a problem from experience. Hollnagel (2009) calls this responding, but includes adaptations to respond to and recover from specific events, as well as different ways to prevent/mitigate or prepare for an adverse event. As responding in the broader societal context connotes only the reactive response to a disaster situation, the name of the cornerstone is altered to Adapting. Generalised functions in a societal context corresponding to Adapting are Prevention and mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery, where the two former are proactive and the two latter are reactive functions.

Hollnagel’s fourth cornerstone is Learning, as he clearly states that a ‘resilient system must be able to learn from experience’ (Ibid., p. 127). What failed in a specific disastrous event, as well as who is to blame for it, is not the focus here. Learning should instead be a continuous planned process focused on how the system functions, links between causes and effects, its interdependencies and so on (Ibid., pp. 129–30). In a societal context, learning from disturbances is often associated with evaluations of what happened and how various actors responded to the event in question. We call the generalised function Evaluation, which can be both proactive and reactive as it is not only possible to learn from what has happened in reality but also from counterfactual scenarios (Abrahamsson et al., 2010). It should however be noted that the actual learning in a system is very much dependent on the feedback loops from Evaluation to the other generalised functions (Figure 1.1), requiring that changes are made based on this input. There are many other aspects of learning that are not captured by the generalised function of Evaluation, but, as stated earlier, the generalised functions presented in this chapter are a selection for a specific societal context.

We argue that societal resilience is an emergent property determined by society’s ability to anticipate, recognise, adapt to and learn from variations, changes, disturbances, disruptions and disasters that may cause harm to what human beings value. Above, we have suggested how these four abstract functions can be transformed into generalised functions that are more concrete and provides more guidance on how to identify them in a societal context.

Figure 1.1    The abstract and generalised functions of societal resilience

Operationalising Societal Resilience

To meet the stated purpose of societal resilience, the system under study must have sufficient capacities for the abstract functions of anticipation, recognising, adapting and learning, which can be further specified by the generalised functions of risk assessment, forecasting, monitoring, impact assessment, prevention/mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery and evaluation (Figure 1.1). It is important to note that just as there may be many ways to describe any system (Ulrich, 2000, pp. 251–3), there may be different ways of concretising the four overall abstract functions for societal resilience. However, it is also important to note that there are dependencies between these functions making the functioning of one dependent on the output of the functioning of others, for example, for the public to be able to undertake the preparedness measure to take shelter for a coming cyclone necessitates warning information from forecasting or monitoring the weather (Figure 1.1).

To analyse societal resilience in a particular context, it is not enough to establish what functions that are needed to meet the purpose of protecting what human beings value. For that we need to focus on what Rasmussen (1985) calls form, on the observable aspects of the real world that together constitute the required functions of the system. These forms include: (A) legal and institutional frameworks; (B) systems of organisations; (C) organisations; and (D) human and material resources, but may be presented under other headings (for example, Schulz et al., 2005, pp. 32–50; CADRI, 2011). Analysing societal resilience is, in other words, about identifying and analysing the aspects, on these multiple levels, that together determine the performance of the functions of societal resilience.

To be able to identify and analyse vital aspects for the societal resilience of a particular system, a set of 22 guiding questions have been developed that need to be answered for each of the nine generalised functions. The questions extend over all four levels (A–D), and are presented in Table 1.1 Useful approaches to finding answers to these guiding questions include conducting focus groups with relevant stakeholders on various administrative levels, interviews with key informants and document studies.

These ideas have been applied with interesting results in capacity assessments of the system for disaster risk management and climate change adaptation in Botswana and Tanzania. The studies were done for MSB, a Swedish governmental humanitarian and development cooperation agency, and together with the Botswana National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) and the Tanzania Disaster Management Department (DMD) respectively.

The purpose of the studies was to generate input to the formulation of capacity development projects towards strengthened resilience in the two countries. In some sense as a contrast to traditional capacity development projects in the field of disaster risk management, which often focuses on some specific aspect of disaster risk management capacity, the intention here was to produce a comprehensive and holistic overview of disaster risk management capacities at national, district and local level in the two countries. This was to able to design a set of capacity development interventions targeting the most important functions for societal resilience in the two contexts, and to do this at the most suitable level while considering the vast interdependencies between the different functions. The broad scope described above made the framework presented in this chapter suitable as the methodological underpinning of the studies.

To exemplify the potential means for finding the answers to the guiding questions in Table 1.1, in the Botswana case the research team conducted focus groups with stakeholders involved in disaster risk management on national, district and local level, as well as interviews with a number of key stakeholders. All in all, 36 stakeholders were involved in the process, spanning from the Botswana Defence Force to a Village Development Committee, and from a Deputy Paramount Chief to the Department of Water Affairs. The research team also studied legislation and policy documents relevant for disaster risk management in Botswana. Similarly, in the case of Tanzania, the research team conducted focus groups and interviews with stakeholders involved in disaster risk management on national, regional, district and local levels. This time, 55 stakeholders were involved in the process, spanning from UN agencies to Village Committees, and from the Ministry of Education & Vocational Training to a District Social Welfare Department. Again, the research team also studied legislation and policy documents relevant for disaster risk management in Tanzania.

Table 1.1    Examples of guiding questions for capacity assessment of systems for disaster risk management and climate change adaptation

The scope of this chapter does not allow for presenting the result of the studies per se, but focuses instead on presenting some brief reflections on the utility of the proposed framework. Firstly, feedback from the studies indicates that the use of the framework facilitates increased awareness among the participating stakeholders regarding dependencies and couplings between different functions as well as between different actors, sectors and administrative levels. This is of great importance, especially in a resource-scarce environment, since such awareness may for instance lessen the tendency to work in ‘silos’, which is not only resource inefficient but also makes it likely to miss important aspects of resilience that are related to the interdependencies in the system. In this sense, the assessments using the concept of societal resilience presented in this chapter worked as a capacity development intervention in itself.

Secondly, the comprehensive assessment of the capacities to perform the nine functions, on the basis of the four levels (A–D) of observable aspects or form, proved to be of great value as it provided important input on how and where to target other capacity development activities to increase societal resilience. It achieved this because it provided the stakeholders with a good understanding of the most important challenges to the system for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in Botswana and Tanzania respectively. To exemplify, in the Botswana case the assessment was followed by a project proposal with activities targeting basically all functions (proactive and reactive) and levels as well as the dependencies. The interventions comprise advocacy activities at the policy level to influence the legislative system, the construction of risk databases and information management systems, targeted trainings and so on. This project is currently running and at the time of writing it is still too early to establish its actual impact on the societal resilience in Botswana. In the Tanzania case, the project proposal is still to be developed at the time of writing.

In summary, the framework for assessing the capacities of the systems for disaster risk management and climate change adaptation described above proved to be of great value in the programming phase of capacity development initiatives to strengthen societal resilience. Its main challenges are however to balance the need for detail in the analysis with the need for grasping the system as a whole, as well as to manage and present the rapidly growing amount of data that is generated when utilising the framework in practice.

Conclusion

The concept of societal resilience presented in this chapter builds on established theory of Resilience Engineering and operationalises the concept by presenting its purpose, required functions and a way to identify and analyse the complex network of actual forms that together achieve these functions in society. Although this framework for analysing societal resilience has challenges and limitations, the Resilience Engineering approach to societal resilience seems to be both a conceptually and pragmatically fruitful path to follow. The framework itself is also still in the making and more applications of it are on their way and are necessary to develop it further. In short, to meet the rising focus on societal safety and sustainability in a time of increasing complexity and dynamic change in our world, Resilience Engineering approaches to societal resilience constitute a way forward. Societal resilience is in other words an emergent means to reach assurgent ends.

Commentary

Starting from the key issues of societal safety and sustainability, this first chapter introduced a concept of societal resilience. The concepts of resilience engineering provide a systematic framework that can be used to make sense of concrete cases. Indeed, a consistent frame of reference is the necessary foundation for any attempts to improve or to become better. Understanding how a system works, rather than understanding how it is structured, is necessary for resilience. This line of thinking is echoed by many of the chapters in this book. The following chapter illustrates this by looking specifically at how one can move from descriptions to prescriptions.