Knowledge, Policy Making and Learning: An Evolutionary Approach to Achieve Policy Resilience in European Cities

How to build the local capacity to address grand societal challenges such as climate change, ageing and unemployment? While routine policy making is already challenging, addressing complex challenges also requires advanced knowledge, in terms of information on complex phenomena, models to interpret this information, and tools that can be implemented. However, cities have limited staff and few resources to carry out context-specific research to deal with complex issues. Focusing on the role of knowledge for policy making, this contribution aims to provide an innovative framework on how cities could manage and develop their cognitive resources to improve their capacity to cope with grand societal challenges and thereby develop strategies that will promote ‘policy resilience’ of European cities