Resilience in Practice for Strategic Planning at a Local Government

This thesis addresses two research gaps: the gap of how to operationalize resilience in an urban context, and the gap on empirical studies of the relationship between resilience and sustainable development. I have approached these gaps by entering the emerging field of interdisciplinary research linking planning and resilience in a study of the process of preparing a resilience assessment for the semi-urban municipality of Eskilstuna in Sweden (2012–13). In order to capture in-depth data, I have conducted participant observation of the resilience assessment process, semi-structured interviews with the organizers at the municipality, as well as key participants from other departments, a review of the official municipal documents and a survey to the workshop participants. My findings show that resilience thinking helped frame the previously overlooked threats of a future triple crises, and bridge the short-term crisis management and the longer-term planning for sustainable development at the municipality. The idea of complex adaptive systems introduced a new perspective for sustainable development in the municipality, which practitioners thought was useful for providing new arguments to hinder slowly degrading trends, as well as clarifying the picture of a sustainable society