Towards alternative resilience policy design: strategies to navigate changing community epistemologies

Abstract (English)

Multiple, overlapping, and interconnected crises—such as climate-related disasters, cybersecurity threats, and financial instability—are affecting diverse contexts in distinct ways, placing new demands on both scientific research and decision-making. These evolving circumstances are reshaping how risk and resilience are studied, pushing the field beyond traditional epistemologies toward more integrated, practice-based approaches.
This paper reflects on this shift by advancing action-research methodologies, leveraging local narratives, lived experiences, and power asymmetries to enhance the design of inclusive policy strategies. Thus, this paper looks at participatory foresight and design-based experimentation as approaches to support the integration of community knowledge into strategies for societal resilience.
Drawing on ten multistakeholder labs conducted within the Horizon Europe-funded FutuResilience project, the paper explores how local actors collaboratively framed, tested, and refined responses to diverse crises using anticipatory methods such as speculative design, crowdmapping, and narrative foresight. These labs served as experimental spaces for co-creation, allowing community participants to engage with uncertainty, explore future scenarios, and articulate locally grounded resilience strategies.
Results presented are based on cross-case content analysis and reflect both the opportunities and tensions involved in translating community insights into policy-relevant knowledge. Key questions addressed include: What roles do local knowledge and relationship capital play in shaping adaptive policy responses? How can participatory, anticipatory processes support robust and flexible responses across different crisis types? And how might future-thinking reshape our understandings of vulnerability and institutional readiness?
Positioned within practice-based, action-research perspective, the analysis reflects on co-creative processes that foster localised understandings of risk, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity. It outlines the relational and societal dimensions of resilience, which intersect with broader economic, political, and cultural factors. The paper highlights how diverse tools and methods can facilitate meaningful exchanges between communities and institutions, enabling more responsive and legitimate resilience-building strategies.