Using Complexity Science to (Re)think Resilience in Public Administration: Keynote at Vaasa University Public Admin Conference 2025

I would like to thank Patrik Nordin, Ville-Pekka Niskanen, and the rest of my colleagues/friends at Vaasa University, Finland for the chance to provide the Keynote for this year’s Hallinnon ja kuntatutkimuksen tiedepäivät HKTP 2025 Vaasassa (Administration and Municipal Research Science Days HKTP 2025.

OVERVIEW OF MY KEYNOTE

Resilience has become a central concept in public administration, planning, and urban governance. Yet its popularity risks masking its conceptual ambiguity and methodological complexity. As argued in The Atlas of Social Complexity, resilience is not a stable property of systems, but a dynamic process shaped by coevolving social, institutional, and environmental constraints. It involves adaptation, transformation, and at times rupture.

 

The Helsinki-Uusimaa Climate Resilience Roadmap offers a powerful illustration. Rather than a top-down blueprint, the roadmap represents a distributed, multi-level strategy — integrating regional authorities, municipalities, civil society, and the private sector to address climate risk. Its emphasis on systemic interdependence, adaptive governance, and inclusive stakeholder engagement reflects a complexity-informed approach to planning. Such efforts reflect a broader shift that public administration and planning must embrace – moving beyond static models of control toward adaptive governance, polycentric coordination, and iterative planning.

 

From a social complexity perspective, resilience is not about returning to normal but enabling systems to reorganise meaningfully under stress. This requires new transdisciplinary methods and tools for tracing feedback loops, greater tolerance for uncertainty, and participatory approaches that draw on local knowledge. It demands what is called the social complexity imagination: the ability to see policy not as a linear solution but as part of a living system. Resilience, then, is less about stability and more about the capacity to evolve.

 

LINKS

Here is a link to the paperback version of The Atlas of Social Complexity

Here is a discount code until the end of 20255

The code is TASC15, and it offers a 15% discount.

Here is a link to my PowerPoint Presentation

Here is a link to the map of the complexity sciences

Here is a link to PRSM (Online Participatory Systems Mapping) Platform

Here is a link to Barbrook-Johnson and Penn’s Open-Access Systems Mapping Book

Here is a link to COMPLEX-IT, the online R-Studio platform allowing non-experts in computational modelling access to these tools, all through a social complexity framework.