Alex Evans, Bruce Jones, David Steven: From Risk to Resilience
"From Risk to Resilience" is the third chapter in a report by Alex Evans, Bruce Jones, and David Steven, "Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization: Risk, Resilience and International Order" (pdf), published by Brookings and the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. They write:
A resilience perspective has five main advantages:
First, it encourages policymakers to take the idea of failure seriously, puncturing the polite fiction that serious reversals are highly unlikely, if not impossible. ...
Second, resilience focuses attention on the functions delivered by the international system, rather than its form. Most debates about the future of the international system tend to revolve around changes to the configuration of organizations or the balance of representation for different countries, and to generate more heat than light. ...
Third, resilience pushes us to adopt a broader understanding of the term ‘institution’. Through habit, policymakers tend to think of a handful of existing organizations when they think about international institutions – a perspective that inevitably shrinks horizons. In Douglass North’s famous definition, by contrast, “institutions are the rules of the game in a society, or more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.” ...
The goal of creating resilience, fourth, is sufficiently challenging that it demands increased levels of innovation. At present, globalization fosters some kinds of innovation (mostly technological), but not others (social, institutional, regulatory, etc.). ...
Above all, resilience prompts policymakers to recognize the collective nature of both the problems they face, and the solutions to them. ...
A society must be resilient in two ways, then: it needs to deliver lasting benefits from cooperation (functional resilience), but it must also stimulate the will to cooperate, thus ensuring its own structural integrity and durability (formal resilience). Cooperation evolves through institutions that lock in habits of reciprocity, while building a web of interconnected relationships that strengthen over time.
From the executive summary:
Foundations for Cooperation:
Bandwidth – increasing the number, nature and content of the relationships between the constituent parts of the international system.
Aggregation – organizing a broader system into cohesive subgroups, reducing complexity by clarifying areas of agreement and disagreement.
Foresight – making explicit the bets that states are taking on the future, while increasing the shadow that the future casts on the present.
Signaling – cutting through complexity in ambiguous environments, while establishing high-level principles which provide a framework on which cooperation can be built.
Fairness – bringing competing visions of what is fair to the surface, rather than obscuring them with technocratic agreements, or tolerating cheating and corruption.
Penalties – graduated sanctions that establish boundaries that are sufficiently robust to repel free riders.
