Overview
The term “resilience” has many different connotations, resulting in the use of the term without a clear, standardized approach or objective. The goal of this project is to gain insight from diverse areas of research including ecology, psychology, engineering, and risk assessment in order to identify which concepts of C.S. Holling’s Adaptive Cycle can apply to social networks in Austria, then to assess the resilience of the Austrian social system exposed to system shocks using network and impact analyses.
Key insights include defining systemic goals based on trajectory in complement to structure and function, shifting perspectives from managing for redundancy toward cultivating diversity, and investigating how cross-scale interactions (both temporal and spatial) impact resilience.
IIASA Research
IIASA will help develop a framework for an ongoing Austrian Security Research Project to assess resilience in regard to six specific scenarios:
We will work in collaboration with an international consulting firm, FAS.research, making use of their extensive database of key actors in Austria to conduct a series of stakeholder workshops that elucidate systemic resilience. We combine a top-down and bottom-up approach to assess stakeholders’ understanding of resilience concepts and their preparation for inevitable systemic disturbances to critical systems. The results of the workshops will be analyzed using social network software specifically designed for this project. Our aim is to develop a framework that is scalable and a metric that is relative in order to inform policy makers on strengths, weaknesses and areas of opportunity related to social cohesion and resilience.
2013 - 2015
Project funder
RESEARCH PARTNERS
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313