Embedding resilience in infrastructure planning and design

Ali Shoaei

Chapter 6 in The Elgar Companion to Transport Infrastructure Projects, 2026, pp 95-111 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Infrastructure planning is increasingly confronted with challenges such as climate change, systemic risks, and long-term uncertainty, requiring a shift toward approaches that prioritize resilience as a fundamental objective. Resilience understood as the capacity of infrastructure systems to absorb, recover from, and adapt to disruptions is essential to ensure the long-term functionality, sustainability, and reliability of critical assets. Conventional decision-support tools, though widely applied in infrastructure evaluation, often struggle to reflect the complex, dynamic, and multidimensional nature of resilience. This chapter explores how more integrated and adaptive approaches to evaluation can embed resilience directly into planning and design processes. It examines key conceptual foundations, assesses the strengths and limitations of current decision-support practices, and introduces composite tools, which have emerged as practical solutions to bridge economic, technical, environmental, and social considerations. Embedding resilience in infrastructure planning is not merely a technical refinement; it represents a strategic evolution in how public value, long-term risk, and system performance are defined and governed.

Keywords: Resilience; Project evaluation; Cost-benefit analysis; Multi-criteria analysis; Hybrid evaluation models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781800374874
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