This content was originally published on The Resilience Shift website. The Resilience Shift, a 5-year programme supported by Lloyd’s Register Foundation and hosted by Arup, transitioned at the end of 2021 to become Resilience Rising. You can read more about The Resilience Shift’s journey and the transition to Resilience Rising here.
Significant investment is planned in infrastructure globally in the next two decades as we emerge from COVID-19 and work towards decarbonising our infrastructure systems. Poor governance is a key factor that has led to infrastructure projects failing to meet their resilience and societal objectives. Strengthening governance systems – the mechanisms that ensure that infrastructure is of high quality and is sustainable over the long-term – can lead to substantial increases in the efficiency and productivity of infrastructure.
Drawing on case studies and stakeholder engagement with infrastructure decisionmakers and practitioners around the globe, this whitepaper explores the current key challenges and barriers to implementing governance of infrastructure for resilience, and the opportunities available for positive change. Developing infrastructure that is resilient to climate change and natural hazards requires resilience thinking and resilience building decisions and actions by practitioners across the whole infrastructure lifecycle.
This white paper has highlighted the role that good governance can play in embedding resilience through seven key themes which include: whole systems approaches; adaptive capacity; prioritising infrastructure needs; infrastructure financing; regulation, codes and standards; capacity and resourcing and; data, information and technology. Additionally, the governance challenges and opportunities related to integration of Nature-based Solutions into traditional decision-making have been highlighted and explored through the lens of the themes developed in this white paper.
