The Resilient Society: Lessons from the Pandemic for Recovering from the Next Major Shock

Whereas robustness is the ability to resist, resilience is the ability to react, rebound, or “mean-revert” after a shock. The ability to change and adapt is critical to building resilience. And resilience is vital for societal sustainability. The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the hidden challenges of our societies. Resilience is then a new mandatory objective, the new imperative, for designing our post-pandemic communities, for ensuring that individuals, institutions, and nations can successfully face a globalized world filled with unknown risks. Lacking resilience, societies, families, and individuals can reach tipping points from which they cannot recover any longer. How can we then develop communities that are resilient to adverse shocks? Safety buffers, redundancies, protected areas, personal development, societal healing from inequality and discrimination, flexible institutions, improved interplay of governments, markets, social norms, and a global view are the necessary steps ahead.