Helping people and places to adapt and advance in a changing environment is key to enhancing societal resilience to disruptions such as flooding and power outages. With the UK Government Resilience Framework committing to a whole-of-society approach to resilience in which everyone can “make a contribution”, the nature of local resilience partnerships (e.g., Local Resilience Forums in England) are changing from response (i.e., short-term, reactive activities) to resilience (i.e., long-term, proactive activities). To achieve this national shift in ambition on societal resilience requires additional relationships and capabilities, for example, that connect the work of local resilience partnerships with complementary agendas such as climate adaptation, public health, and community development. With limited resources, how can local resilience partnerships enhance societal resilience?
Working collaboratively through the National Consortium for Societal Resilience [UK+] (NCSR+), our team at The University of Manchester have co-developed an approach for local resilience partnerships to deliver a Local Resilience Capability. This strategic capability can be activated by local resilience partnerships and is designed to prioritise providing support to vulnerable people, the services they rely on, and organisations that provide those services. By embracing community responses as a vital resource, emergency responders can focus on priority groups most in need when disruption occurs, including after an attack on digital and energy networks as outlined in the RBOC+ scenario. But this capability must be built and exercised in advance. The eight-step process central to the NCSR+ Strategy and Manual to create a Local Resilience Capability informs how this can be realised.
Further supporting our collective learning on how to enhance societal resilience is regularly convening via webinars, workshops, and our flagship in-person UK National Conference on Societal Resilience. The second national conference took place at The University of Manchester, 4-5 March 2024, and welcomed over 170 participants from local resilience partnerships, voluntary and community sector organisations, senior government representatives, and partners from policy-practice from the UK and internationally. Across two informative days of networking and discussion, we explored the following topics and more with a fantastic line-up of speakers, panellists, and session chairs:
- What it means to be a leader of societal resilience.
- Building societal resilience together as a strategic endeavour.
- How to better collaborate and partner with others.
- Future risks and partnership working in a changing context.
Key talking points arising from table discussions at the conference include:
Local leadership is crucial to enhancing societal resilience. Challenges to being a leader on societal resilience include divergence in language and culture among resilience partners; the persistence of short-term rather than strategic thinking; and resource limitations affecting statutory agencies and communities (e.g., cost of living), which causes both increased need within society and diminished official capacity to respond. To overcome these challenges requires connecting and building relationships with other partners and local-national agendas to integrate the whole system; facilitating communities’ participation to better understand their needs and capacities; and taking action to achieve some success and gather momentum rather doing nothing for want of perfection.
Societal resilience is a strategic endeavour that requires trusted relationships to enable collaboration and strategic coordination. Forging stronger strategic relationships is crucial before a
disruption so that partners are ready to activate in response and recovery. Progressing this agenda may require behaviour change among some resilience partners to help shift mindsets on the need to invest now in societal resilience. Also important are fostering the skills and capabilities required to deliver societal resilience and thinking through how best to measure improvements – it is recognised that not everything can be measured and co-designing key performance indicators with communities is important to achieve buy-in and ensure what is locally important is included and not just top-down measures.
Forming meaningful collaborations to enhance performance are central to the local delivery of the national ambition on societal resilience. Creating strong relationships before a disruption occurs means that essential community infrastructure and preparedness can be activated when needed - “don't parachute in and expect people to respond – need to [firstly] establish trust”. It is important that local resilience partnerships ask communities what they need rather than providing what they think communities need. Broadening the selection of representative voices within local
resilience partnerships (e.g., involving chambers of commerce with good links into business networks) can also help to pinpoint community needs.
Considering what the future looks like on risks and working to future proof societal resilience is critical to understanding the changing context. Encouraging communities to think about want they want the future to look like and their vision for it is one way to engage with future risks amid present difficulties such as the cost-of-living crisis. Focusing on how to develop adaptive capacities rather than over-emphasising risks is another way to productively engage communities. It is important to distinguish between chronic versus other forms of risk and the different audiences being engaged. Finally, conversations on the future proofing of societal resilience can usefully involve the creative industries to think imaginatively about the future and engage everyone in the process.
To read an expanded version of the key talking points introduced above emerging from the second UK National Conference on Societal Resilience, and to watch some of the highlights as articulated by conference participants, two hyperlinked resources are available:
- The National Briefing on Societal Resilience [UK+] – Issue 54
- Video highlights from National Conference on Societal Resilience – March 2024
Enhancing societal resilience to disruption is a continuous endeavour in which all should be enabled to play a meaningful part. The work of the NCSR+ speaks to the societal challenge areas that RBOC+ will contribute to addressing, especially how societal resilience activities can be mutually supportive of communities and local resilience partnerships as they prepare for, and respond to, threats. Our strategy and manual on how to create a Local Resilience Capability is being supplemented with several modules, including on Community Emergency Hubs and spontaneous volunteers. Watch out on this blog for updates and links to these new societal resilience resources as they emerge.
Dr Andrew McClelland is a research fellow working on societal resilience and part of the NCSR+ team in the Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester.