Keynote Speech
Keynote Speaker
Prof. Marco Verweij
Resilience in a Polyrational World: Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions
Resilience is often understood as the capacity to recover after disruption – to restore lives, institutions, infrastructures and communities once a shock has passed. For many disturbances this bounce-back ideal is indispensable. But for some of the disruptions that define our age, it is not enough. Climate change, technological acceleration, democratic strain and social fragmentation are not simply shocks wit20h a status quo ante to return to: they are ongoing, transformative and unsettling of the very categories by which problems are defined, responsibilities allocated and solutions judged.
This keynote returns to C. S. Holling's original understanding of resilience – not the speed of return to a prior equilibrium (engineering resilience), but the capacity of complex systems to absorb surprise while retaining their power to reorganise and renew (ecological resilience). Building on work developed with the late Michael Thompson, I argue that challenges of this kind are 'wicked problems', which resist solutions that impose one definition of the problem and silence the others. In such a polyrational world, resilient governance calls for 'clumsy solutions' – arrangements that hold rival voices (hierarchical, egalitarian, individualist and fatalist) in productive tension rather than silencing any inconvenient ones. Resilient societies, in the end, are not those that eliminate disagreement, but those that learn to organise it well.
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Keynote Speaker
Prof. Stephen B. Page
Practicing Resilience in Precarious Times
Our current moment feels precarious. Climate change, wars, geopolitical tensions, polarization and threats to democracy, and the spread of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, create risks that reach across international borders and sectoral boundaries. Individuals and communities are increasingly isolated and fragmented from each other. Established institutions in the public, private, and social sectors, however, seem incapable or unwilling to address or mitigate these risks with reliable, trustworthy, timely strategies that match the scale and scope of the challenges.
“Resilience” is therefore the aspiration of the hour. It encompasses both the capacity to maintain and rebuild what matters during disruptions or crises and the capacity to adapt through learning and innovation as conditions change (Li, Tang, and Wen 2026). But resilience is not a destination or a status we achieve once and for all. It is a horizon we can pursue together. That pursuit raises difficult questions: What should we preserve? What must we change? Who gets to decide? How can we know what works?
To enable our pursuit of resilience, we need policies and institutions capable of meeting urgent challenges, from climate adaptation to the governance of emerging technologies. Yet even well-designed arrangements can become brittle or obsolete. If we cannot know exactly what the future requires, how will we keep our communities, organizations, and democracies able to learn and respond?
In this talk I argue that resilience requires perseverance and creativity – complex work that may be unfamiliar or even uncomfortable at times. Drawing on research on organizational resilience (Quick and Feldman 2014; Berthod et al. 2017; Page 2026), I explore practices such as recognizing and making sense of emerging problems before they become crises, building relationships across differences, and making room to experiment, learn, and revise course. I consider how these practices can help us respond to disruptions without treating the restoration of every existing arrangement as success. I conclude with an invitation to experiment – to test and refine the practices in your communities, workplaces, and research projects.
Keynote Speaker
Prof. Cherng-Tay Hsueh
Willfulness vs. Resilience: 70 Years of Demographic Change in Taiwan 任性 vs. 韌性 – 論台灣70年的人口變遷
Taiwan’s fertility decline began more than 70 years ago. In 1951, the total fertility rate (TFR) stood as high as 7 births per woman, but it subsequently began a sustained decline, reaching the population replacement level of 2.1 by 1984. This initial phase largely reflected Taiwan’s transformation from an agricultural society through modernization, urbanization, and industrialization.
By 2000, Taiwan’s fertility rate still ranked relatively high among industrialized countries. Over the following 25 years, however, two waves of rapid decline attracted growing international attention. In 2025, Taiwan’s fertility rate fell to a new global low of 0.7, accompanied by a 20% year-on-year decrease in the number of births.
Drawing on decades of observation of Taiwan’s demographic transformation, this talk moves beyond conventional explanations centered primarily on economic pressures and the costs of childrearing. Instead, it explores the interplay between “willfulness” and “resilience” across different periods, using this perspective to interpret the major trends and transformations that have shaped Taiwan’s population over the past 70 years.