Societal resilience is an emerging paradigm. It refers to responses and strategies at the level of individuals, groups, organizations, and societies that are dealing with complex societal problems. At the same time, these responses contribute to innovative solutions that make society more resilient to current and future challenges. Societal resilience is, however, conceptually relatively undefined. This ambiguity is generally seen as problematic for scholarly work. In this chapter, the authors show that societal resilience is an important social concept because of its openness. To study resilience requires research methodologies that engage many actual stakeholders. Collaborating with societal stakeholders allows not only for co-generating knowledge of local relevance, but also stimulating a comprehensive and critical research approach. Therefore, the current openness of societal resilience does not constitute an undesirable theory gap. It enables the possibility of having plural perspectives based on the complex realities on the ground.
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In this policy brief we recommend that in order to face numerous societal challenges such as migration and climate change, regional governments should create a culture of innovation by opening up themselves and stimulate active citizenship by supporting so called Public Sector Innovation (PSI) labs. These labs bring together different types of stakeholders that will explore new solutions for societalchallenges and come up with new policies to tackle them. This method has been developed and tested in a large EU funded research project.
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Since the early work on defining and analyzing resilience in domains such as engineering, ecology and psychology, the concept has gained significant traction in many fields of research and practice. It has also become a very powerful justification for various policy goals in the water sector, evident in terms like flood resilience, river resilience, and water resilience. At the same time, a substantial body of literature has developed that questions the resilience concept's systems ontology, natural science roots and alleged conservatism, and criticizes resilience thinking for not addressing power issues. In this study, we review these critiques with the aim to develop a framework for power-sensitive resilience analysis. We build on the three faces of power to conceptualize the power to define resilience. We structure our discussion of the relevant literature into five questions that need to be reflected upon when applying the resilience concept to social–hydrological systems. These questions address: (a) resilience of what, (b) resilience at what scale, (c) resilience to what, (d) resilience for what purpose, and (e) resilience for whom; and the implications of the political choices involved in defining these parameters for resilience building or analysis. Explicitly considering these questions enables making political choices explicit in order to support negotiation or contestation on how resilience is defined and used.
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The focus of this project is on improving the resilience of hospitality Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) by enabling them to take advantage of digitalization tools and data analytics in particular. Hospitality SMEs play an important role in their local community but are vulnerable to shifts in demand. Due to a lack of resources (time, finance, and sometimes knowledge), they do not have sufficient access to data analytics tools that are typically available to larger organizations. The purpose of this project is therefore to develop a prototype infrastructure or ecosystem showcasing how Dutch hospitality SMEs can develop their data analytic capability in such a way that they increase their resilience to shifts in demand. The one year exploration period will be used to assess the feasibility of such an infrastructure and will address technological aspects (e.g. kind of technological platform), process aspects (e.g. prerequisites for collaboration such as confidentiality and safety of data), knowledge aspects (e.g. what knowledge of data analytics do SMEs need and through what medium), and organizational aspects (what kind of cooperation form is necessary and how should it be financed).Societal issueIn the Netherlands, hospitality SMEs such as hotels play an important role in local communities, providing employment opportunities, supporting financially or otherwise local social activities and sports teams (Panteia, 2023). Nevertheless, due to their high fixed cost / low variable business model, hospitality SMEs are vulnerable to shifts in consumer demand (Kokkinou, Mitas, et al., 2023; Koninklijke Horeca Nederland, 2023). This risk could be partially mitigated by using data analytics, to gain visibility over demand, and make data-driven decisions regarding allocation of marketing resources, pricing, procurement, etc…. However, this requires investments in technology, processes, and training that are oftentimes (financially) inaccessible to these small SMEs.Benefit for societyThe proposed study touches upon several key enabling technologies First, key enabling technology participation and co-creation lies at the center of this proposal. The premise is that regional hospitality SMEs can achieve more by combining their knowledge and resources. The proposed project therefore aims to give diverse stakeholders the means and opportunity to collaborate, learn from each other, and work together on a prototype collaboration. The proposed study thereby also contributes to developing knowledge with and for entrepreneurs and to digitalization of the tourism and hospitality sector.Collaborative partnersHZ University of Applied Sciences, Hotel Hulst, Hotel/Restaurant de Belgische Loodsensociëteit, Hotel Zilt, DM Hotels, Hotel Charley's, Juyo Analytics, Impuls Zeeland.
The Dutch main water systems face pressing environmental, economic and societal challenges due to climatic changes and increased human pressure. There is a growing awareness that nature-based solutions (NBS) provide cost-effective solutions that simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help building resilience. In spite of being carefully designed and tested, many projects tend to fail along the way or never get implemented in the first place, wasting resources and undermining trust and confidence of practitioners in NBS. Why do so many projects lose momentum even after a proof of concept is delivered? Usually, failure can be attributed to a combination of eroding political will, societal opposition and economic uncertainties. While ecological and geological processes are often well understood, there is almost no understanding around societal and economic processes related to NBS. Therefore, there is an urgent need to carefully evaluate the societal, economic, and ecological impacts and to identify design principles fostering societal support and economic viability of NBS. We address these critical knowledge gaps in this research proposal, using the largest river restoration project of the Netherlands, the Border Meuse (Grensmaas), as a Living Lab. With a transdisciplinary consortium, stakeholders have a key role a recipient and provider of information, where the broader public is involved through citizen science. Our research is scientifically innovative by using mixed methods, combining novel qualitative methods (e.g. continuous participatory narrative inquiry) and quantitative methods (e.g. economic choice experiments to elicit tradeoffs and risk preferences, agent-based modeling). The ultimate aim is to create an integral learning environment (workbench) as a decision support tool for NBS. The workbench gathers data, prepares and verifies data sets, to help stakeholders (companies, government agencies, NGOs) to quantify impacts and visualize tradeoffs of decisions regarding NBS.
Gender barriers are a complex problem, as they are created and maintained by multiple dimensions of our societal system; governments, the corporate world, and by society itself. Within the hospitality industry, one of the most people-oriented sectors there is, gender barriers are especially a problem. Although there is equality amongst the entire Dutch hospitality sector in general (48.2% women, (CBS, 2022)), only 17% of top-management positions within the 5 largest hotel-chains in the country are occupied by women (Hampshire Hotel Group, 2022; Accor Group, 2022; van der Valk International, 2022; NH Hotels, 2022; NIBC, 2022). With the hospitality industry revolving around people and experiences, it is of utmost importance that it represents the actual world-population and society. In order to address the current challenges the industry is facing, it is time to face the elephant in the room; why don’t women get included in top and senior management within the hospitality industry as much as men do? This trajectory aims to identify where gender barriers occur within the Dutch hospitality industry and accordingly develop, and test interventions (enablers) together with two of the largest hotel-chains in the Netherlands, in order to improve women career advancement. The first phases of the trajectory will focus on the entire Dutch hotel sector, while the intervention phase will only be executed in collaboration with NH Hotels and IHG. The final phase of the trajectory will explore the implications of the findings from the industry to hospitality management education. By enabling more women to advance their hospitality careers, this will have a large impact on the industry’s sustainability and resilience, and again positively impact wider society.
