Fostering resilience-oriented thinking in engineering practice

This paper reports on the round tables held in the UK, the USA and New Zealand discussing the resilience of critical infrastructure systems. The paper strives to advance the application of resilience thinking in engineering practice. It explores how industry best practice is evolving. Lack of strategic oversight to coordinate response to resilience is a core barrier to the coordination of resilience thinking across organisations, but there is strategic and operational value in convening people from different organisations and sectors to explore infrastructure resilience.

The findings emphasise that multi-agency coordination and collaboration is required to advance resilience thinking in professional practice and to move beyond traditional risk-based paradigms. Governance and policy interventions will help encourage cross-sector information sharing and enforce responsibility and transparency surrounding exposure to potential shocks and stresses. It is recommended that such interventions could expand on principles and practice in existing emergency management efforts, on the basis that such efforts are founded on coordinating various groups.