12 December 2017

Dimitris Christopoulos visited IIASA

Dimitris Christopoulo from MODUL University, Vienna, Austria and Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK visited IIASA in the framework of the Systemic Risk and Network Dynamics project and gave a talk on "Robustness and Resilience in Governance Networks" on 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.


Dimitris Christopoulos is an associate professor (habil.) at MU-Vienna, where he is Dean of Executive Education. He is also Director of the Centre for Networks and Enterprise, of the Edinburgh Business School at Herriot-Watt University. Dr Christopoulos has delivered multiple graduate and PhD seminars and workshops on network analysis at the Universities of Bamberg, Bristol, Edinburgh, Essex, European U. Institute, Hamburg, Luxembourg, Malmo, Roskilde and Vienna among others. He has also been a member of the faculty at the Essex Summer School on Methods (2006-2011) and the ECPR Winter School in Methods (2012-2018). Dr Christopoulos research interests focus on exceptional agency as evident in entrepreneurship, leadership and brokerage. He has received funding from the UK-ESRC, EU ERC, EU JRC, the Luxembourg National Fund for Research and the Swiss National Fund for Research.


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Last edited: 10 January 2018

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