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As urban resilience has become a public policy objective and has been increasingly present and at the forefront of the urban political agenda, local authorities are recognized as key actors in this implementation process. Urban civil servants responsible for resilience lack a clear and common objective to create an outcome, however they recognize that implementation requires moving from the stovepipe administration suited to predictable problems to collaborative networks focused on preparedness and the reduction of vulnerabilities. This comparative case study examines how urban resilience agenda setting and implementation processes intertwine in London and Montreal in the early stages of the development of their urban resilience policy. This paper identifies the challenges faced by urban civil servants working to achieve coordination and change in an uncertain context towards an ill-defined destination. Efforts, evident in both cities, to combine crisis management priorities with long-term planning to face issues such as climate change, appear as a trigger to incrementaly implement and transform governance mechanisms in order to combine mapping interdependent issues and weaving coordination.

One of the main challenges in crisis management is to assess, ahead of time, the resilience of a system before a crisis erupts (pandemic, computer bug with large-scale effects, cascade effects in critical infrastructure, etc.). In this article, we propose to reconcile the multiple and sometimes divergent definition of resilience by explaining the complementarity of stability and adaptability inherent to the concept. Also, we integrate a new dimension to the assessment of resilience by analysing the dynamics of negentropy (order, stability) and entropy (disorder, change) between factors. Until now, the evaluation of organizational and interorganizational resilience focused on analysing the presence or absence of resilience factors. With this new dimension, we show the complementarity and interdependence of resilience factors. Finally, we demonstrate how resilience is based on both favourable order and favourable disorder which create diversity and conformity in the system, while vulnerability relies on unfavourable order and unfavourable disorder.

Risk management is based on a network of actors, interdependent of each other where the decisions will impact the actions of the others. One danger is then loosely coupled governance where the lack of coordination, overlaps and discontinuities create vulnerabilities leading to crisis situations. The analysis of the train derailment in Lac-Megantic shows how the complexity of wicked problems led to the crisis. To analyse the complexity and interdependence of actors and issues three narratives are used: network governance, sensemaking and risk regulation regime. Finally, strategies are proposed to reflect on unlocking opportunities for action.