Translating resilience research to political practice – The case of the German Resilience Strategy

Abstract

There is a gap between research in disaster resilience and the implementation of resilience via political strategies. This paper uses three frameworks from resilience research to analyse the 2022 German Resilience Strategy as a case study. It answers two questions: Does the German Resilience Strategy reflect resilience understandings from research and what are its strengths and shortcomings? Are such resilience frameworks useful for analysing political documents and what are their strengths and shortcomings? The resilience frameworks are Bruneau et al.’s 4Rs of resilience, Hollnagel's four cornerstones of resilience, and Thoma et al.’s resilience cycle. The paper uses qualitative content analysis to interpret the 345 recommendations for measures of the Strategy. The results show that the Strategy lives up to a holistic definition of resilience. It implicitly also embraces a complexity-informed understanding of resilience, but risks losing sight on adaptive capacity due to its broadness. The Strategy focuses on natural hazards, although it officially follows the all-hazard approach. There is a lack of recommendations on individual and societal disaster recovery. The three resilience frameworks are applicable for analysing political strategies. The 4Rs of resilience framework has a blind spot with respect to unknown disruptions. The four cornerstones of resilience framework bases on an innovative resilience conception and could be useful for disaster studies if it was more thoroughly translated to the latter's specifics. The resilience cycle framework is limited due to its cyclical approach, and it entails prevention, which is not part of resilience.