Institutional enablers and barriers towards social resilience

Solutions to contemporary urban challenges are increasingly the outcome of the complex interactions between formal and informal actors that take part in a variety of networks. Resilience-thinking has become a global popular perspective for the governance of urban systems, concerning the ability of communities to deal with urban challenges, that requires the development of the self-organizing capacity of informal actors such as residents.

This study aims to determine how the extent to which formal and informal actors are resilient in interaction with one another can be determined. Therefore, a literature study was conducted that led to the development of the Institutional Resilience Analysis and Development (IRAD) framework, that is a modification of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework that is complemented with variables influencing decision-making processes that are extracted from the literature on social resilience and adaptive governance.

The IRAD framework is applied to an exploratory case study with the Resilient Bospolder Tussendijken 2028 programme in the neighbourhood Bospolder-Tussendijken in Rotterdam as the research context. Hereby, desk research and semi-structured interviews were held with formal and informal actors to study interactions resulting from a conflict concerning the management of societal real estate in the neighborhood.

The application of the developed IRAD framework thereby identified both enablers and barriers for resilient interactions between formal and informal actors. Access to social networks has been identified as an enabler for resilient actions, whereas the lack of trust of residents in the municipality, lack of communication between formal and informal actors and a lack of a political base for new insights have been identified as barriers to resilient actions.