ROBUST Crisis Governance in Turbulent Times - Mindset, Evidence, Strategies

The focus of European post-pandemic politics is on enhancing system capacities for 'bouncing back' from crisis to normalcy. These efforts draw on resilience research, which has become the dominant paradigm in crisis management. However, there are broad governance challenges that the resilience approach fails to consider. Centrally, how can European societies harness flexible adaptation and proactive innovation to deliver effective crisis responses in situations, where going back to the way things were is neither possible nor desirable? How can democratic institutions uphold core values such as democracy, the rule of law, and fundamental rights in the face of crisis-induced turbulence? To address these challenges, the ROBUST project aims to set in motion a paradigm shift from 'resilience' ('bouncing back') to 'robustness'('building back better') as the central principle of future crisis governance. The project breaks new ground by operationalizing the concept of robust crisis governance and investigating such responses empirically. The project combines historical and comparative analysis at EU, national and local levels together with a multi-dimensional dataset out of which we identify the configurations of factors that drive (or block) robustness in crisis governance. The project studies responses by EU institutions and eight European countries to recent crises (with emphasis on COVID-19) to understand general patterns in system-level crises response. At the same time, we also conduct in-depth studies of localized COVID-19 responses in 16 European localities to understand how EU, national and local crisis responses interact and are experienced by citizens. On this basis, the project delivers the elements of a new mindset and a paradigm change along with policy recommendations for enabling the robust crisis governance of the future.