Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

When we volunteered to collect international experiences of responding to COVID-19 in March 2020, we aimed to support local authorities in the UK during their response to the pandemic. We never expected that COVID-19 would evolve into an international crisis of this scale and duration. A few months after the start of the UK response, our systems and societies were stretched and various vulnerabilities were uncovered. The RRR team (and our engagement) grew in response and we identified new theoretical and practical insights on response, recovery, and renewal which were formed into The Manchester Briefing. Concurrently, our engagement with local authorities and international organisations flourished and the RRR project in its complex form was born.

Despite the overwhelming engagement with the response to the pandemic, the need for transformational change to rebuild more resilient systems remained in focus. Two lessons stood out as crucial for resilience and renewal. The first is the need for a holistic approach when building resilience. The pandemic showed the interinfluence and interdependency of all components of societies i.e. individuals, communities, businesses, organisations, and others. For example, we shared case studies from Asia which showed that small but ignored vulnerable areas in the society could cascade into a larger problem for the COVID-19 response, government, and society. The lesson learned was that sustainable and feasible renewal programmes should be inclusive, fair, and holistic. The second lesson was the need to think beyond the existing systemic limitations when designing and managing our resilient systems. From the traditional management and economical perspective, building resilient societies may be ambitious or unrealistic. However, alternative paradigms exist which can facilitate creating a shared and feasible vision of our resilient society, provide innovative solutions to manage the complex endeavour, and make it happen.

This lesson is part of a collection of team reflections from the Recovery, Renewal, Resilience team, shared in the final Manchester Briefing under their ESRC-funded project. The collection of 10 reflections can be found in Issue 51 of The Manchester Briefing, accessible via the link below:

Across research that considers the socio-political circumstances that underpin global events, disasters are often described as revelatory. Their occurrence exposes structures that organise collective social life but have become so normalised as to be taken for granted. Over the last two and half years, there’s been different ways that COVID-19 has played this revelatory role. The initial spread and disastrous impact of the virus, particularly in those countries worst affected such as USA, Brazil and UK, reinforced how detrimental cutbacks in public spending and the cultivation of mistrust in expertise for political gain has been for disaster preparedness. No doubt owing in part to these factors that shaped it’s unfolding, the pandemic also showed the need for emergencies to be governed in a way that is sensitive to local needs and developed in dialogue with communities whilst also being supported by a strong central government response.

By default, this need concurrently means abandoning ‘models’, ‘disaster management cycles’ and ‘holistic systems’ for practice that promise general applicability but are abstracted from reality. This emphasises the importance of how disasters are labelled, how such labelling effects public conscience of disasters and what effects these levels of consciousness might have for the future of the disaster in question. Despite the decision to end restrictions in the UK and reduce such restrictions in other parts of the world, the pandemic still rages on causing death and illness to thousands every day. This tells us that disasters do not have clear ‘start’ and ‘end’ dates and so we need to plan to mitigate their ongoing effects and develop better anticipatory measures for their future occurrence.

This lesson is part of a collection of team reflections from the Recovery, Renewal, Resilience team, shared in the final Manchester Briefing under their ESRC-funded project. The collection of 10 reflections can be found in Issue 51 of The Manchester Briefing, accessible via the link below:

Working with the National Preparedness Commission and partners of NCSR+, we collected case study data on how fifteen community initiatives delivered value to their local communities during COVID-19. Each initiative was unique in design and uncovered rich insights as to how societal resilience was supported by the agility and innovation of local community groups. A distinct finding across the case studies is that intrapreneurial leadership (the leadership of entrepreneurial activity inside of an organisation), emerged as a key enabler of their COVID-19 work.

A particular benefit was that intrapreneurial leadership from within local government enhanced trust in partnership working across different societal systems. The need to build trust with partners to co-produce activities was prioritised – both giving trust to the partner, and receiving trust from the partner. Some examples of how intrapreneurial leadership was characterised in practice and the resulting benefits include:

This lesson is part of a collection of team reflections from the Recovery, Renewal, Resilience team, shared in the final Manchester Briefing under their ESRC-funded project. The collection of 10 reflections can be found in Issue 51 of The Manchester Briefing, accessible via the link below:

One of the key learning points emerging from the pandemic concerns how it has forced a reappraisal of what recovery encompasses, who it is for, and how it can be effectively planned for and implemented. For example, considering recovery and business continuity planning it was clear from many of the early interviews with recovery experts that however well-prepared organizations felt they were, the scale, scope, uneven impacts, and prolonged duration of COVID-19 were not adequately anticipated. Enhancing preparedness and wider societal resiliency for the complex and "unruly" challenges ahead requires improved capabilities to assess the landscape of systemic risks, develop foresight, and scenario planning with communities.

Our work has further emphasized the multi-dimensional and long-term nature of recovery. Specifically, we recognize the importance of recovery frameworks and how they are the foundation for the kind of local inclusive development and transformative renewal initiatives that the pandemic has underlined the imperative for. Such frameworks act to inform impact assessments, prioritize actions, and guide the monitoring and evaluation of recovery activities. However, the past two years has shown the inadequate focus in the past on incorporating public health concerns, and more especially pandemics, within recovery thinking. For example, the social determinants of health - e.g., where people are live, learn, work etc. - have been so central to COVID-19 risk factors and health outcomes that tackling these inequities through renewal initiatives are critical to enhancing community wellbeing and reducing vulnerabilities to future disasters.

This lesson is part of a collection of team reflections from the Recovery, Renewal, Resilience team, shared in the final Manchester Briefing under their ESRC-funded project. The collection of 10 reflections can be found in Issue 51 of The Manchester Briefing, accessible via the link below:

For two-years we have been examining the way that Recovery and Renewal was managed by the resilience community – through a combination of experiences, including: participating and contributing strategic advice in local government recovery coordination groups (RCG); researching global lessons on COVID-19 which we shared through 51 issues of TMB; interviewing global resilience and risk professionals to uncover their changing impression of Recovery and Renewal (summer 2020, spring 2021, winter 2021; gaining feedback from >80 workshops and presentations we delivered on Recovery, Renewal, Resilience). Unique insights are currently being collected from interviews with RCG Chairs – the strategic leads who chaired RCGs and were typically local government Chief Executives.

These RCG chair interviews are providing rich insight which, when combined with our participant observations over the two years of RCGs, has taught us a great deal, including:

• challenges of coordinating Recovery and Renewal at the national, sub-national and local levels – such as different impacts, prioritisations, and potential solutions
• the local ambitions for recovery, including the transactional activities that were implemented to address the impacts and disruptions of COVID-19
• the local appetite for renewal, including the transformational initiatives to exploit the enthusiasm for changing societies in the aftermath of COVID-19
• learning about the politics of COVID-19 (e.g. governance, scrutiny, accountability), the maturity of resilience arrangements and partnership working at all levels, the value of analysing the impacts of the pandemic

We have learned of the impact of specific constraints from the prolonged crisis, including;

• the challenges of repetitive waves of infections, reintroduction of control measures, parallel response coordination, information and data supply, emerging and acute impacts and needs, work/crisis/empathy fatigue
• preparedness of resilience arrangements (e.g. guidance, knowledge, reality checks) to deal with pandemics beyond the initial responses
• the limitations of current partnerships for integrated emergency management, such as what is the role of local resilience partnerships in a health-led crisis
• what the R in LRF actually means – questioning whether it reflects ‘Resilience’ as a strategic priority in its widest sense, or better characterises ‘Response’ to an event
• the need for new forms of active learning, support and research – including the role of government, centres of excellence and academics in supporting resilience partnerships

This lesson is part of a collection of team reflections from the Recovery, Renewal, Resilience team, shared in the final Manchester Briefing under their ESRC-funded project. The collection of 10 reflections can be found in Issue 51 of The Manchester Briefing, accessible via the link below:

One shining light in the darkness of COVID-19 was the community spirit that was volunteered by many who supported vulnerable people as they shielded in their homes. This continued into volunteering to support the NHS, staffing vaccine centres, donating essential items, self-organising communities to support those in need, among countless other activities. This has stimulated a new realization that, across the country, society will get involved to help others for prolonged periods. A recent exhibition of this has been the outpouring of welcoming via the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

The UK Government communicated its national ambition for harnessing this goodwill for resilience in various publications (see Community Resilience Development Framework (July 2019); National Resilience Standards (August 2020), but it was the Integrated Review of Security and Defence (March 2021) which established a new aspiration, whole-of-society resilience.

Through this ESRC-funded project, we have brought together local resilience partnerships and their sector partners by establishing (with Thames Valley LRF) the National Consortium for Societal Resilience [UK+] (NCSR+). NCSR+ aims to establish national consistency 'to enhance the UK[+] whole-of-society approach to resilience, so that individuals, community groups, businesses, and organisations can all play a meaningful part in building the resilience of our society' (see www.ambs.ac.uk/ncsr). 63 organisations (including 50 of the 53 resilience partnerships in UK and its Crown Dependencies) are now collaborating through NCSR+ on developing practical approaches for how to enhance societal resilience.

The learning we have realized from the project is that there is a significant will in NCSR+ partners to tackle this intractable challenge together to co-produce a local strategy for societal resilience. We will conduct research through NCSR+ to identify those foundations, develop the strategy, and produce these into a toolkit for how to create nationally-consistent, locally-translatable foundations on which to build good practices. This toolkit will be made freely available to support those who want to pursue improvement in societal resilience in a strategic manner. There will be further opportunities for NCSR+ to support the implementation of whole-of-society resilience by working closely with partnerships and learning how the strategy can make a difference to societal resilience in UK+.

This lesson is part of a collection of team reflections from the Recovery, Renewal, Resilience team, shared in the final Manchester Briefing under their ESRC-funded project. The collection of 10 reflections can be found in Issue 51 of The Manchester Briefing, accessible via the link below:

COVID-19, like other emergencies, challenged the surge capabilities of official response systems. Community response to COVID-19 demonstrated a collective will and ability of societal actors to play an active role in preparedness, response and recovery. For this to be galvanised, coordinated, and managed strategically through a ‘whole-of-society’ approach, clarity and consensus is needed on: who we mean by ‘whole-of’; what resilience means in this respect; and, who holds responsibility for its development. The term ‘whole-of-society resilience’ (WoSR) conveys a philosophy, is ambitious, and an aspiration of policy. But, as a concept of operations, questions remain on how it can be understood, communicated, developed, and operationalised locally.

Reflecting this, we conducted a literature review, a number of workshops with resilience professionals, and gathered feedback from partners in NCSR+ to develop a working definition of WoSR. This definition aims to guide the pursuit of WoSR and draws on our ongoing work with NCSR+ and wider partners. We define WoSR (TMB Issue 47) as:

capability created by local systems that help people and

places to adapt and advance in a changing environment

There is important detail within the words (italicised) used in this definition and we define these as:

This definition, by design, aims to capture the widest landscape that is of relevance for local resilience partnerships and sector partners in the NCSR+. But, a single definition will not satisfy all societal actors because different parties will want to accentuate the aspects that they prioritise and attenuate those that sit elsewhere. Also, the user/audience for the definition will change, meaning we need to change the language in the definition and the concepts to align to the context. For example, local community groups may not warm to the NCSR+ working definition because it does not speak in their language to their priorities. Recognising this, The University of Manchester created an intuitive, community-focused definition of WoSR which can be used when communicating with community groups and amplifies those aspects that community groups may have an interest in:

capabilities created before, during, and after a disruption that

involves everyone who wishes to support those who are in need

Two key aspects underpin this definition:

This lesson is part of a collection of team reflections from the Recovery, Renewal, Resilience team, shared in the final Manchester Briefing under their ESRC-funded project. The collection of 10 reflections can be found in Issue 51 of The Manchester Briefing, accessible via the link below:

As part of our ESRC funded project on Recovery, Renewal, Resilience (RRR) we committed to designing a self-evaluation methodology that enables reflection on recovery and renewal practices. This methodology is informed by lessons we gathered from working across the world – spending thousands of hours working on recovery/renewal and with multi-agency groups that coordinate recovery in the aftermath of COVID-19 (in the UK these are called Recovery Coordination Groups - RCGs). This selfevaluation methodology supports local government and other organisations (e.g. voluntary sector) to self-assess their recovery plans and renewal strategies. This self-assessment complements the international standard we wrote ISO/TS 22393 ‘Guidelines for planning Recovery and Renewal’ and its operational version ‘Operationalising ISO/TS 22393: Seven steps to plan recovery and renewal’.

This briefing outlines the self-reflection methodology and can be used in conjunction with ISO/TS 22393. The self-reflection is portioned into seven areas each with a set of questions to pose. Annex 1 provides a template for how those questions might be assessed using a Likert scale – and it is important to record the justification for assessments. The questions focus more on the principles of developing Recovery and Renewal activities – not the intricacies of the activities themselves.

Follow the source link below to read this briefing in full:

This month’s TMB details ‘Operationalising ISO 22393: Seven steps to plan recovery and renewal’, a new iteration of our project’s international standard - ‘ISO 22393 – Guidelines for planning Recovery and Renewal’ (see TMB Issue 39). This briefing simplifies ISO 22393 into an easy-to-use process to support the implementation of recovery activities and renewal initiatives.

To read the briefing in full, follow the source link below.

This month's TMB discusses 'whole-of-society resilience’ and presents a definition of it from the National Consortium for Societal Resilience [UK+]. We write how there may not be one single definition of whole-of-society resilience because different definitions will be needed to amplify the priorities of different audiences within society. The definition we provide is from the perspective of local resilience partnerships and sector partners. We link to Issue 44 where we wrote about ‘Understanding ‘whole-of-society’ resilience’.

Follow the source link below to read this briefing in full:

COVID-19 has had a disproportionate effect on the most vulnerable in our society as evidenced by impact and needs assessments. As a result, some local government recovery plans have sought to build fairness and equality into recovery and renewal. This case study explores some of the unequal impacts shared through the Health Foundation’s COVID-19 impact inquiry report ‘Unequal pandemic, fairer recovery: The COVID-19 impact inquiry report’ (July 2021)[1], and considers how equality can be placed at the centre of recovery and renewal efforts.

The report examines the impacts of the pandemic on our health and the implications of this for recovery. A comprehensive review of the unequal distribution of impacts on different population groups and places across the UK is offered. In addition, the report shows how strategies to respond to the pandemic have exacerbated and created new impacts, with immediate and long-term consequences for health and wellbeing. This case study presents the key findings from the report, and suggests key issues for consideration, based on the webinar: ‘A healthy recovery – Acting on findings from the COVID-19 impact inquiry’.

In just one month of the pandemic the UK saw “128,000 deaths, a 10% drop in GDP and 2 million children were facing food insecurity”. The report demonstrates how “health and wealth are inextricably connected…the poorest families are relying on savings and debt…the wealthiest are saving”. It goes on to highlight the opportunity to drive a sustainable recovery, one that creates a healthier, more inclusive, fairer and prosperous society; one that reduces the stark inequalities exposed by the pandemic. The findings of this inquiry and key issues for consideration include:

• The pandemic has exposed distinct differences in the health of the working age population – for example, people under 65 in the most deprived areas in England were “3.7 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those in the wealthiest areas”. Recovery and renewal requires:
  • A comprehensive understanding of the wider determinants of health, taking systemic inequalities (poverty, education, employment) into account. Identifying differential outcomes of the pandemic is key to building resilience to future shocks
  • Recognition of the inherent link between socioeconomic factors and underlying health conditions, e.g. people living in deprived areas have fewer opportunities for good health, as they predominantly work in sectors (e.g. industrial jobs) that place them at risk during crises such as COVID-19, and have poorer access to welfare protections such as sick pay
  • Targeted strategies that create opportunities for good health and wellbeing in historically underserved areas
• The groups that have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and the consequences of containment measures (mental health, education gaps, lost employment and financial insecurity) include: young people, persons with disabilities, ethnic minority communities, care home residents, prisoners, homeless people and those experiencing sexual exploitation. Recovery and renewal requires policies and initiatives that:
  • Address issues exacerbating the impacts of health emergencies such as COVID-19. For example, “education, employment and income are the longer-term risks to health” and strategies need to mitigate the greater loss among disadvantaged groups
  • Prioritise access to and the quality of jobs, as certain areas across the UK are still suffering striking unemployment rates. Equal distribution of work and opportunity is key to prevent leaving people and places behind
• Type and quality of work, housing conditions, and access to financial support have all affected exposure to the virus. Recovery should:
  • Identify and address the root causes of poor health and invest in communities – employment opportunities, housing, education, and community resilience

These issues of fairness and equality in recovery and renewal are not well served by the ‘Build Back Better’ vision which has been much criticised for often reproducing past inequalities and challenges. Instead, given the diversity and deep-rooted impacts of the pandemic, a more appropriate vision for recovery and renewal would be to ‘Build Forward Fairer’. This puts the much-needed priority of equality at the heart of renewal and transformation in the aftermath of crises.

[1] Suleman M, Sonthalia S, Webb C, Tinson A, Kane M, Bunbury S, Finch D, Bibby J. Unequal pandemic, fairer recovery: The COVID-19 impact inquiry report. The Health Foundation; 2021 (https://doi.org/10.37829/HF-2021-HL12)

This briefing details our Recovery and Renewal Framework, we explore updates to the framework, its development since April 2020, and how the framework might be applied in practice. The Recovery and Renewal Framework underpins ISO/TS 22393, The Manchester Briefing, and our new database of international lessons. 

To read the briefing in full, follow the source link below (p.3-6).

This briefing presents examples of how FinTech and Digital Government have been used in countries as a policy delivery tool to help individuals and companies cope with the disruption created by the pandemic. We present some examples of how governments can include FinTech and Digital Government in their recovery and renewal strategies. Read this briefing in full by following the source link below to The Manchester Briefing Issue 41 (p.3-5)