title: Understanding and enhancing future infrastructure resiliency: a socio-ecological approach.
abstract: The resilience of any system, human or natural, centres on its capacity to adapt its structure, but not necessarily its function, to a new configuration in response to long-term socio-ecological change. In the long term, therefore, enhancing resilience involves more than simply improving a system's ability to resist an immediate threat or to recover to a stable past state. However, despite the prevalence of adaptive notions of resilience in academic discourse, it is apparent that infrastructure planners and policies largely continue to struggle to comprehend longer-term system adaptation in their understanding of resilience. Instead, a short-term, stable system (STSS) perspective on resilience is prevalent. This paper seeks to identify and problematise this perspective, presenting research based on the development of a heuristic 'scenario-episode' tool to address, and challenge, it in the context of United Kingdom infrastructure resilience. The aim is to help resilience practitioners to understand better the capacities of future infrastructure systems to respond to natural, malicious threats.
authors.affiliation: Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at the School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sage
authors.affiliation: Research Associate at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Indraneel
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Sircar
authors.affiliation: Professor in Construction Sociology at the School of Civil and Building Engineering, Loughborough University, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dainty
authors.affiliation: Professor in Sociology at the Department of Sociology, University of Essex, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Pete
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fussey
authors.affiliation: Senior Lecturer at the School of Civil and Building Engineering, Loughborough University, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Chris
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Goodier
mesh_terms: D004189:Disaster Planning / Q000379:methods* / Q000458:organization & administration*; D055669:Ecological and Environmental Phenomena; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D057766:Policy; D012931:Social Environment; D006113:United Kingdom
keywords: critical infrastructure protection; resilience; scenario methodologies