Walking the post-pandemic talk : how to incorporate resilience in better regulation systems

This STG Resilience Paper is part of the Commission Research Report and Interim Progress Report (June 2021) published by Reform for Resilience.• The pandemic revealed at once the lack of preparedness of many governments, and the inadequacy of existing scientific advice mechanisms in times of emergency. • Use of foresight techniques and meaningful scientific advice can help governments anticipate possible low-probability, high-impact events that could have a disruptive impact on the economy and society. However, these techniques should be fully embedded in the policy cycle. • Policies should be stress-tested regularly to ensure that they remain relevant and able to withstand unforeseen shocks. • The bottom-up nature of contemporary policy evaluation is, by design, incompatible with long-term objectives such as ensuring systemic resilience. • Rather than cost-benefit analysis, a more suitable decision-making criterion in policy appraisal would be the adoption of multi-criteria analysis, under the condition that criteria adopted for decision-making incorporate resilience alongside other policy goals, such as sustainability