ABSTRACT
Introduction: why resilience? Traditional approaches to risk management in public administration have tended to focus on likely future negative events, resulting in complex “blame avoidance strategies” through which public agencies attempt to minimise damage to themselves and deect blame for failure. This leads naturally to an emphasis on risk avoidance, so that these negative events are rarer. However, this comes with a cost – it loses sight of the trade-o whereby risk reduction normally also entails outcome reduction. A radically dierent approach is to accept the inevitability of some failures and to seek to embed resilience in the way in which the overall service system works, and in each of its components. In this way, the negative consequences of failure can be minimised. More importantly, the transformative potential of a responsible risk culture, based on proportionate rather than over-cautious responses to risk, can be realised.
