Similar to the aftermath of the global financial crisis between 2008 and 2014, the concept of ‘resilience’ has re-emerged in recent years has a high profile concept within European Union (EU) policy discourses, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic which exposed the fragility of supply chains and a lack of resilience in many economic sectors and territories; the geopolitical shock and energy instability as a consequence of the war in Ukraine; and, of course, the overarching challenge of climate change and biodiversity collapse.

However, despite the renewed centrality of the resilience concept in official policy discourses, there remains no common understanding as to what the term actually means. Likewise, the question of how to practically operationalise the concept within territorial governance praxis continues to remain largely unexplored.

With the multiple, interlocking environmental, social and economic polycrisis that Europe now faces, there is an increasing recognition in academic literature that a more radical evolutionary interpretation of resilience is required, which would allow regions, not only to ‘bounce back’ to withstand and adapt to volatile crises, but to use them as an opportunity to ‘bounce forward’ to the state of transition towards renewed sustainable systems. However, this transformative conception of resilience has heretofore not been the subject of pan-European research.

The aim of the ESPON TERRES is to address this research gap and develop a conceptual framework for ‘territorial resilience’ that can potentially help guide EU cohesion and other sectoral policies, particularly at subnational scale. 

Policy Questions

1. Can a territorial concept of resilience be defined which allows European regions to strengthen absorptive, adaptive and transformational governance capacities in the context of long-term multi-crisis trajectories?
2. What practical indicators can be used to index and map the absorptive, adaptive and transformational resilient governance capacities of European regions?
3. What are possible best-practice policy responses at regional territorial governance scale to ‘bounce forward’ to more resilient pathways and for coping with current and future crises so that societal well-being and territorial cohesion is preserved?

The main outputs of the service shall be: 

• A comprehensive concept of territorial resilience
• A core set of territorial resilience indicators at the subnational scale and recommendations for future data collection
• In-depth analysis from six case studies in various European regions and cities on their efforts to achieve territorial resilience
• A regional resilience dashboard and mapping and analysis of resilience trends at a pan-European scale and in selected case study regions
• Data and both interactive and static maps and charts 

Contractors

• HÉTFA Research Institute (HU) – Project leader
• Nordregio (SE)
• Politecnico di Torino (IT) (PoliTo - Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning / R3C – Responsible Risk Resilience Centre
• Arup (SP)
• Multicriteria Planning (SP)

Expert Team

1. Dénes Csala (Romania)
2. Adrian Healy (United Kingdom)
3. Eduardo Medeiros (Portugal)
4. Sara Meerow (US)
5. Nicola Tollin (Denmark)

Contact

Gavin Daly (Project Expert)