Resilience and robustness in policy design: a critical appraisal

Giliberto Capano () and Jun Jie Woo ()
Additional contact information
Giliberto Capano: Scuola Normale Superiore
Jun Jie Woo: Nanyang Technological University

Policy Sciences, 2017, vol. 50, issue 3, No 5, 399-426

Abstract: Abstract Resilience and robustness are exciting concepts for policy researchers. Their broad use in other disciplines has motivated social scientists and policy researchers to adopt them in analyses. In the present paper, we review definitions of these concepts and the primary theoretical and empirical challenges presented by resilience and robustness as lenses for improving the understanding of policy process and policy design. The results reveal that the two concepts differ in their potential value for public policy analysis. Despite its diffusion and ‘charme’, resilience does not appear to be useful and may be misleading, whereas robustness exhibits great potential with respect to both analysis and design.

Keywords: Robustness; Resilience; Policy-making; Policy design; Policy change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11077-016-9273-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:policy:v:50:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s11077-016-9273-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11077/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11077-016-9273-x

Access Statistics for this article

Policy Sciences is currently edited by Michael Howlett

More articles in Policy Sciences from Springer, Society of Policy Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().