Uncertainty, systemic resilience and intersectionality – developing a research agenda

Resilience is a generally desirable attribute for people and systems, but conventional approaches to strengthen resilience increasingly struggle with both identifying and promoting resilience for the extraordinary uncertainty and variety of shocks and stresses communities face today.  A significant limitation of most approaches is their narrow event focus, as increasingly events and stresses run into each other, trigger cascading problems or occur simultaneously – leaving little “downtime” for recovery and building resilience. Many risks are now seen as systemic and the social and political context is increasingly referred to as the “polycrisis” or “permacrisis”. For many people and communities these identified risks and crises come on top of increasing livelihood, housing and health insecurity. While there is general consensus that mechanisms, methods and strategies for resilience should support those who are most in need, many standard resilience assessments fall short of this aim.  Intersectionality gives a more explicit focus on justice and equity, and should help to ensure that the development of systemic resilience does not bypass the most vulnerable.

Interestingly, we observe increasing systemic risks and polycrises in both the global South and the global North, for example when people recovering from severe floods are also impacted by livelihood disruption (eg from the collapse of tourism or loss of crops), extreme heat , aftershocks of the COVID pandemic, and the social and economic fallout from geo-politics.

Methods and approaches are urgently needed that can manage resilience for these continuous and complex states of crisis as conventional resilience is not enough. Systemic resilience is one such approach. It focuses on connections and “system” dynamics, where having connections across networks, systems, sectors and geographies, increases the robustness of the resulting resilience. We first develop criteria for community systemic resilience and identify barriers and facilitating  factors. We outline different dimensions of the polycrises and different dimensions of losses and damages that occur  within cascades of shocks and crises. We argue that there is a need to avoid administrative and political traps which can constrain the development of flexibility in resilience. Warnings, information sharing, and supporting the development  of processes that increase flexibility and adaptability are key. They should avoid path dependence and siloed approaches as they and resistance to learning are major issues. However, it might not necessarily be about transformation as often suggested.  There are also questions about the types of data appropriate in circumstances that evolve rapidly in surprising ways.