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Engineering meets institutions: an interdisciplinary approach to the management of resilience

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Abstract

Resilience management stretches across the decoupled domains of community, corporate, and public governance. As a result, fostering resilience needs a governance structure that supports collective actions and integrates fragmented fields with different institutional frameworks. In this study, we carry out a review of three different perspectives on resilience -engineering, social, and organizational- in order to explore resilience management in the context of governance of infrastructure systems. We discuss the common practices to address resilience of engineering systems, the need and current trend for integration of institutions into these practices through formal (e.g., policies and regulations) as well as informal mechanisms (e.g., trust, norms, and shared cognitive structures). To illustrate our theorizing, we provide three illustrative case studies. The cases highlight the barriers and enablers across the three perspectives and highlight the inter-organizational context of management of resilience. We uncovered organizational dynamics such as the necessity of establishing critical functionality through organizational capacity for stakeholder engagement, the need for diverse organizations to address institutional complexity in management of resilience, and the importance of decoupling in aligning the outcomes of resilience management practices with policies. We suggest an agenda for future research on managing practices associated with management of resilience.

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Acknowledgements

This research is based in part upon work supported by the Resilience Shift whose focus is to do work, and support others to do work, that will shift the worldwide approach to resilience in practice. The authors also acknowledge the suggestions by Ms. Margaret Kurth. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Resilience Shift initiative.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Property, Construction, and Project Management, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University), Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia

    Nader Naderpajouh

  2. Lyles School of Civil Engineering and Department of Political Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907-2051, USA

    David J. Yu

  3. Department of Political Science, Northeastern University, 215K Renaissance Park, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Daniel P. Aldrich

  4. Carnegie Melon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Igor Linkov

  5. Risk and Decision Science Focus Area Lead, Environmental Laboratory, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, MS, USA

    Igor Linkov

  6. School of Science, Aalto University, Maarintie 8, 02150, Espoo, Finland

    Juri Matinheikki

  7. School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

    Juri Matinheikki

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  1. Nader Naderpajouh
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Correspondence to Nader Naderpajouh.

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Naderpajouh, N., Yu, D.J., Aldrich, D.P. et al. Engineering meets institutions: an interdisciplinary approach to the management of resilience. Environ Syst Decis 38, 306–317 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-018-9704-7

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