12 December 2017
Robustness and Resilience in Governance Networks
Systemic ability to weather political challenges can be understood as governance robustness, while flexibility in dealing with such challenges as governance resilience. In a majority of governance events process remains constant. But on occasion governance process is challenged. This could be due to the effects of agency (commonly associated with entrepreneurship, leadership etc); to an external shock; or to a change in the rules of interaction. The robustness and resilience of governance systems can be subject to a great variety of such challenges. We can distinguish between the ability of political systems to sustain key functions from:
a. predictable shocks often associated with regular governance change (i.e. a new party in government);
b. low probability shocks (i.e. Brexit); and
c. to withstand events that cannot be reasonably predicted, the ‘unknown-unknowns’ of political life (i.e. an assassination). We attempt to demonstrate the potential of field experiments in assessing the robustness and resilience of political systems as evident in the structure of their policy networks.
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
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