Resilience in a Polyrational World: Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions

Dr. Marco Verweij

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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.

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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.​