Resilience Misunderstood? Commenting on Germany’s National Security Strategy

Abstract

Resilience features prominently in the new German National Security Strategy. But the strategy does not give an explicit definition of the term. In this commentary, I analyze the use of resilience in the strategy and show the links to prominent findings from resilience research. I use a disaster resilience point of view and show that the unspecific usage of resilience in the strategy could lead to undesirable consequences when implementing the strategy. Thus, in the implementation process the German government and the relevant public administration bodies should follow three recommendations resulting from resilience research. First, they should understand resilience as adaptive capacity and not as resistance. Second, they need to address conflicting goals, like efficiency versus resilience, explicitly. Third, they should give greater attention to social aspects of resilience, because empowering people but also taking their vulnerabilities seriously is decisive for making a society more resilient.