Keynote Speech
Keynote Speech 1
Resilience in a Polyrational World: Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions
Prof. Marco Verweij
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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TBD
Keynote Speech 2
Keynote Speech 3
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
Prof. Cherng-Tay (James) Hsueh
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.