Whole-of-Society Resilience: Vision or Overreach?

When the concept of whole-of-society resilience first began to dominate policy debates across the UK and Europe, it was heralded as a transformative step. The idea was compelling: that resilience should not be the domain of government and emergency services alone, but a shared societal endeavour encompassing communities, businesses, voluntary groups, and individuals. In this framing, resilience becomes not just a measure of preparedness for disruption, but a defining characteristic of a healthy, equitable society.

Yet as the concept has evolved, a tension has emerged between vision and deliverability. The more the idea of whole-of-society resilience expands to encompass every dimension of social life; inequality, poverty, education, housing, cohesion, wellbeing, the more difficult it becomes to sustain its operational meaning. What began as a pragmatic framework for strengthening national preparedness risks becoming a moral philosophy, admirable in scope but unwieldy in practice.

From Framework to Philosophy

In recent years, resilience has been reframed not simply as an emergency management goal, but as an organising principle for governance. Documents such as the UK Government’s Resilience Framework (Cabinet Office, 2022) articulate an aspiration to integrate social justice, sustainability, and inclusivity into the resilience agenda. The academic literature has followed suit: scholars such as Davoudi (2012) argue for a more emancipatory conception of resilience, one that challenges existing power structures and addresses the root causes of vulnerability.

There is intellectual merit in this. Disasters are rarely “natural”; their impacts are socially patterned, reflecting underlying inequalities. As Wisner et al. (2004) showed in At Risk, vulnerability is a product of social systems, not merely environmental exposure. To ignore that truth would be to perpetuate the cycle of reactive disaster management.

However, by seeking to correct every structural injustice through the resilience agenda, we risk creating a framework so diffuse that it ceases to guide practical action. If resilience becomes synonymous with solving poverty, climate change, discrimination, and mental health all at once then its practitioners may find themselves paralysed by ambition.

The Challenge of Practicability

Emergency managers, local authorities, and resilience partnerships often operate under constrained resources, limited authority, and pressing timelines. Their mandate is to anticipate, plan, and respond to disruption tasks requiring prioritisation, coordination, and measurable outcomes. When the concept of resilience expands into the full spectrum of social transformation, the risk is that these operational imperatives are overshadowed by aspirational rhetoric.

Whole-of-society resilience, in its purest form, demands cross-sectoral integration on a scale few systems can achieve. It implies deep collaboration between public health, housing, education, welfare, environment, and security sectors governed by different budgets, accountability systems, and political cycles. Without clear delineation of scope and achievable milestones, the result can be institutional fatigue rather than transformation.

This is not to dismiss the ambition of holistic thinking. Rather, it is to argue that bounded ambition may sometimes be the more resilient posture. Resilience policy must avoid collapsing under the weight of its own expectations.

The Ideal Versus the Attainable

There is a growing discourse, particularly in academic circles, that resilience cannot be meaningful unless it addresses inequality, power imbalance, and historic marginalisation. This perspective draws strength from social-justice traditions, yet in practice, it risks conflating resilience with utopian social reform.

A whole-of-society approach that sets out to “fix society” may unintentionally drift from its core purpose: to enable societies to absorb, adapt, and recover from shocks. Addressing inequality and promoting social inclusion are unquestionably vital moral and policy goals but they may not be achievable through the mechanisms of resilience governance alone.

Indeed, the strength of the resilience paradigm has historically lain in its pragmatism. It bridges disciplines, links local to national, and translates complexity into actionable preparedness. If we stretch it to the point where every social issue falls within its remit, we risk eroding the conceptual clarity that made it powerful in the first place.

The Paradox of Integration

The paradox is that in seeking to make resilience everyone’s business, we may make it no one’s responsibility. When the framework becomes too all-encompassing, accountability becomes diffuse. The danger is a performative consensus: all stakeholders agree resilience is important, yet none are empowered or resourced to deliver it.

This dilution is already observable in some local resilience strategies, where terms such as community empowerment, wellbeing, fairness, and social capital are invoked without clear lines to measurable capability outcomes. These are worthy ideals, but they must be coupled to tangible levers of change: funding streams, performance metrics, governance mandates, and scenario planning.

Re-centring the Core Purpose

If resilience is to remain an effective organising principle, it must be both visionary and implementable. The core purpose of whole-of-society resilience should be to ensure that society can continue to function and recover in the face of crisis. Social equity, inclusion, and wellbeing are critical enablers of that outcome, but they cannot all be solved through resilience policy.

Perhaps what is needed is a recalibration: a return to first principles. Whole-of-society resilience should aim to create the conditions in which other social goals can flourish, not to directly deliver them. Its focus should remain on capability: the ability of institutions, systems, and communities to anticipate risk, coordinate response, and adapt to change.

This perspective echoes the pragmatic realism found in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR, 2015): ambitious in its scope, but anchored in achievable priorities such as understanding risk, strengthening governance, investing in reduction, and enhancing preparedness.

Conclusion: Vision Without Vagueness

Whole-of-society resilience is a powerful concept precisely because it reminds us that no single institution can manage risk alone. But it must remain a framework, not a manifesto. If resilience becomes a catch-all remedy for all societal ills, it risks achieving none of its objectives.

To deliver meaningful change, the resilience community must find a balance between the normative and the operational; between the visionary and the measurable. A grounded framework for whole-of-society resilience should inspire transformation, but also deliver tangible, auditable progress, however modest towards a safer, more adaptive society.

Perhaps, then, the ultimate test of resilience is not in its ambition to transform the world, but in its ability to make achievable improvements in the world we already inhabit.

References

• Cabinet Office (2022). The UK Government Resilience Framework.

• Davoudi, S. (2012). “Resilience: A Bridging Concept or a Dead End?” Planning Theory & Practice, 13(2), 299–307.

• UNDRR (2015). Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030.

• Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., & Davis, I. (2004). At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters. Routledge.