Improving societal resilience through bottom-up approaches and cross scale interactions - Resilient citizenship an initial discussion

Natural disasters, extreme weather and compound events are more frequent and more severe than before. Their impact not only threatens life and health but also impacts critical infrastructures and essential public services. An important lesson from these events is that the established, top-down plans, procedures and systems for crisis management quickly proves to be insufficient, struggles to answer the scale and urgency of these disasters. Such events require broad mobilization, improvisation and coordination among various actors: central and local, public and private, formal and informal. This kind of crisis presents unique challenges, which demands actors to adapt and, if necessary, revise activities and reconfigure interactions creating resilient performance. The objective of the research project Resilient Citizenship (RECITE) is to strengthen capabilities and preserve adaptive capacity to produce resilient performance in handling extreme weather events from the bottom-up, where in reciprocal collaboration with Civil Societies Organisations (CSOs) and public authorities, citizens are central in improving societal resilience. RECITE combines transdisciplinary, participatory and action research through resilience laboratories that create and use scalable and context sensitive "foresight" scenarios. These scenarios are designed so that participants may experience, practice, and develop their own capabilities to synchronize, collaborate and manage trade-offs in the face of uncertainties, time pressure and overload in future crisis. This paper builds on the critical discussion about the combination of methods, challenges and opportunities when investigating how to build the potential of bottom-up resilient performance with cross-scale collaboration. It discusses how RECITE will integrate knowledge from diverse ongoing initiatives such as self-preparedness schemes, national projects, local experiences and European Commission projects. The expectation is to contribute theory and practice, by developing and operationalizing a set of practical methods and tools for citizen engagement, collaboration and training to facilitate a whole-of-society and whole-of-governance approach to emergency preparedness.

Keywords: Societal Resilience, Resilience Engineering, Crisis management, Preparedness, Governance.