Risk and Resilience in Society

Hilary Term 2011

Summary: This seminar series investigated how organisations are attempting to manage risk and search for resilience.  While resilience is often cited as an objective by government and CEOs, there remains much confusion about what this actually means and how it can be put into practice.  We explored the interface between catastrophic, emerging and systemic risk and resilience in academia, government and the private sector.

The series was being convened by Dr Angela Wilkinson and Dr Patrick McSharry.

1. Risk and Resilience: Lessons from Ecology and Banking Systems - Professor Lord May (Fellow of Merton College, University of Oxford)
2. How reinsurance organisations deal with NatCat risk and resilience - Dr Gero Michel (Managing Director, Willis Research Network, Willis re)
3. Resilience: A Social Science Approach - Dr Matt Qvortrup (Senior Lecturer, Resilience Centre, Cranfield University)
4. Multiple Meanings of Resilience: Policy Discourses and Narratives in International Development  - Professor Katrina Brown (Professor of Development Studies, University of East Anglia)
5. Striving for a risk resilient organisation – a focus on what FTSE companies are doing in practice - Richard Sykes (Partner, PwC)
6. Mainstreaming climate risk management: Lessons from emerging practice to achieve resilience in Africa - Dr Tom Downing (Director of the Global Climate Adaption Partnership)
7. Strategies for managing in environments with high uncertainty: Emerging principles and tools for resilience - Professor Patricia Longstaff (David Levidow Professor of Communication Law and Policy, Syracuse University and James Martin Senior Visiting Fellow, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford)
8. Societal resilience, in the context of counterterrorism - General Meir Elran (Institute for National Security Studies(INSS), Tel Aviv University)