Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Roundtable: Measuring Resilience in Recent Federal Environment Emergency Program Initiatives

(Natural Resource Security, Energy and Environmental Policy)

This roundtable will address the latest challenge for federal environmental and emergency management programs: the measurement of regional or city-level "resilience." Often used to describe a wide-range of activities, federal funding sources, and expected outcomes, the term has come to involve three overlapping policy areas: 1) improvements in responses to shocks, typically physical ones like natural disasters or environmental crises; 2) improvements in the underlying social and economic conditions that inhibit those responses, such as spatial segregation or income inequality; and 3) changes in governance structures and public planning and procurement processes that enable both of these. In short, “resilience” intervention is often a catch-all for comprehensive change. This roundtable assembles four different stakeholders working in the areas of community resilience building as they are defined by national programs in the U.S., including: the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rebuild by Design and National Disaster Resilience Competition; the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Community Resilience Program; and the National Academy of Science’s Resilient America Roundtable. Each speaker is involved in measurement exercises related to her/his particular resilience intervention, as well either implementing or evaluating resilience-related programs. The goals of the roundtable are to: 1) present and compare current efforts to measure resilience in national programs; and 2) discuss the role of place-based resilience-building efforts as a matter of national public policy.