Today more than ever there is the necessity to deal with the meaning of a word and, at the same time, a concept, “resilience”, which has gradually become the “key-concept of an era” due to its symbolic and evocative value, in a time when its most frequent interpretation has been connected to an other word: “crisis”.
2015 has been defined “the year of resilience” by the heads of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). Twenty years after the terrible Kobe earthquake, which led in 2005 (during the UN Conference at Hyogo in Japan) to the Definition of the Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the resilience of nations and communities to disasters, the international community wonders what lessons can be drawn from the new crises and catastrophes, and identifies the resilience as the key-concept in order to face these challenges. In fact, the resilience implies elasticity and the ability to adapt by the corpora, the passions, the entire siystems and territories. These qualities today more than ever are valuable to get out of the trap represented by a crisis, an epochal crisis which arose from the financialisation of the economy and the globalization of markets. Globalization has betrayed, in fact, our expectations of prosperity and economic stability. It has produced innumerable positive effects, but has also brought much fragility and vulnerability, aggravating the problem of the struggle for resources and survival, rather than solving it, as Keynes foresaw and hoped for his grandchildren.
Nowadays, “the grandchildren of Keynes” – or should we say his “great-grandchildren”, because since the first edition (1931) of the famous essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren have already elapsed more than eighty years – undoubtedly live in a bigger and more open world than the one in which their illustrious ancestor lived, but the only result which they have obtained is to make it much more dangerous, uncertain and unstable. It is enough to look around to realize it: the technological revolution overwhelms the economic and social systems; societies are increasingly complex and sophisticated, but also more unequal, more expulsive and more exposed to the meltdown; the economic crisis weakens the people and impoverishes countries; natural disasters, still rising, are often caused by the direct or indirect human action and produce devastating physical and economic damages; the progressive decrease in births and the aging population put a strain on the sustainability of welfare and health care systems in the rich and industrialized countries. The traditional political solutions, namely the creation of corporative and universalistic national welfare systems, have gradually become unsustainable because of the spending review. Moreover, the progressive evolution towards regional and liberal welfare systems undermines their redistributive and inclusive function, especially because of the progressive change in the composition of the population determined by migration.
The government of these processes is entrusted to a public sector in continuous evolution because of the reorganization of local government, which in the name of subsidiarity and adequacy is taking shape in some big European countries. It is necessary therefore a change, a new approach to the problems of the world, leading to a reversal or, alternatively, to a recovery of the original push, which could eventually lead to safety the “Keynes’s grandchildren”, outside the trap in which they remained imprisoned. However, to achieve this goal it is necessary that contemporary societies become aware of the ongoing changes and adapt to them quickly and consistently. The key to everything, the path to salvation, is now more than ever the resilience, and the ability to respond to the uncertainty and changes by implementing adaptive strategies and constantly creating new forms of equilibrium, other than that of departure. This is the only method which can help us to “tame the beast” and persuade it to change the trajectory, forcing it to do what we want, that is, to increase the welfare and improve the living conditions of the people inhabiting the world, especially of the poorest, without prejudice to democracy and social justice.
This paper focuses, in a socio-economic and multilevel perspective, on the applicability of a resilience approach to public policies
