Societal resilience: Contextualising cohesion in an age of disruption

New Zealand needs a framework to prepare for a world of new emerging shocks and interconnected disruptions that are placing increasing strain on our social contract, according to a new Koi Tū Centre for Informed Futures paper.

Societal resilience: contextualising cohesion in an age of disruption argues that conventional policy approaches built around siloed systems and linear problem-solving do not align with the reality of today’s systemic and interconnected risks.

Read the paper

Authors Dr Annalise Higgins and Georgia Lala advance societal resilience as a broader, systems-level framework to prepare societies for sustained disruption and uncertainty.

Societal resilience can be understood as society’s collective capacity to absorb, recover and adapt to both short-term shocks and long-term stressors.

Koi Tū conceptualises societal resilience as emerging from the interactions between seven domains: environmental, economic, technological, institutional, social, informational, and geopolitical.

This framework situates social cohesion (comprised of its institutional and social domains) as a valuable asset of a resilient society, but not the only one. Societal resilience emerges not from any single domain alone, but from the interactions between them.

For policymakers, societal resilience supports several ongoing shifts: from efficiency-first thinking to resilience-by-design; from siloed risk management to strategic foresight; and from reactive to proactive policymaking.

Koi Tū will continue to contribute to this emerging field through future work on societal resilience measurement and systems-level policy thinking.