Project description
From bouncing back to building back better after the COVID-19 pandemic
Resilience is a critical skill for materials. In the past two years, it has become more than that and now has a transcendent meaning in politics and everyday life. Resilience is about bouncing back after a crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the EU to review its capacities to do so. To address this challenge, the EU-funded ROBUST project aims to set in motion a paradigm shift from ‘resilience’ to ‘robustness’, which is about building back better as the central principle of future crisis governance. The project will analyse the responses by EU institutions and eight European countries to the financial, refugee and COVID-19 crises in the search for best practices. The ROBUST data set will identify key factors for robustness in crisis governance.
Objective
The focus of European post-pandemic politics is currently on enhancing system capacities for ‘bouncing back’ from crisis to normalcy. These efforts draw on resilience research, which has become the dominant paradigm in crisis management. However, there are broad governance challenges that the resilience approach fails to consider. Centrally, how can European societies harness flexible adaptation and proactive innovation to deliver effective crisis responses in situations, where going back to the way things were is neither possible nor desirable? And how can democratic institutions uphold core values such as democracy, the rule of law, and fundamental rights in the face of crisis-induced turbulence?
To address these challenges, the ROBUST project aims to set in motion a paradigm shift from ‘resilience’ (‘bouncing back’) to ‘robustness’ (‘building back better’) as the central principle of future crisis governance. The project breaks new ground by operationalizing the concept of robust crisis governance and investigating such responses empirically. We combine historical and comparative analysis at EU, national and local levels to gather a multi-dimensional data set out of which we identify the configurations of factors that drive (or block) robustness in crisis governance. The project studies responses by EU institutions and eight European countries to three recent crises (the financial, refugee and COVID-19 crises) to understand general patterns in system-level crises response, while we also conduct in-depth studies of localized COVID-19 responses ‘on the streets’ of 16 European localities to understand how EU, national and local crisis responses interact and are experienced by citizens.
On this basis, the project delivers the elements of a new mindset along with policy recommendations for enabling the robust crisis governance of the future, all anchored in a learning hub that will serve as the social engine of the paradigm shift envisioned by the project.
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HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
4000 Roskilde
Denmark