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Purpose This paper aims to provide scholars with a deep understanding of the field through the identification of strengths and weaknesses in the literature and support decision-makers in the development of new practices in local risk management based on scientific data. The specific question in this review asks: what are the drivers and barriers to local risk management? Design/methodology/approach This paper provides an overview of the scientific literature produce over the past 20 years of the divers and barriers to local risk management. This paper presents a scoping review of peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2019 inclusively in the fields of public policy and public administration. Findings This paper makes three main observations regarding the state of the literature. First, this paper finds that scholars mainly focus on single risk and certain regions of the world. Second, there is multiple approached used by the literature to study risk management at the local level. Third, little attention is given to the political context in which local risk management takes place. Originality/value This paper is a complete literature review of more than 500 peer-reviewed articles published in academic journals regarding risk prevention policies over the past two decades. This paper analyzed the main findings of the current literature to provide a general view of the scholarship and improve the collective understanding of risk management at the local level by providing future research avenues.

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.

Resilience as a theoretical concept and policy proposition is constantly being redefined and clarified. But when it comes to implementation, public managers and bureaucrats have to take ownership of resilience and translate it into practical forms that make sense to them intellectually and operationally. In this chapter, we first explain how resilience is presented in the literature as, variously, a paradigm change, a governance model to better manage complex issues, and a destination to reach. Second, we analyse how public managers and bureaucrats responsible for implementation in London and Montreal have interpreted and used resilience. Finally, we discuss how paradigm change, governance transformation and goal attainment perspectives end up converging into a relatively similar meaning in both cities. What these cities are lacking to take the next step toward urban resilience is the strategic endorsement of political authorities to support this important transformation.

The literature on paradoxes and pluralism has grown over the last decade. Although both concepts refer to multiplicity in or around organizations, they have been explored in parallel and have rarely been juxtaposed. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the possible interrelations between these concepts and their implications for the study of paradox within organizations. The chapter further seeks to contrast current notions of paradox and pluralism, and expand understanding of these phenomena by looking at them through two alternate theoretical prisms, namely Critical Management Studies (CMS) and complexity theory. In so doing, new lines of inquiry are opened up around paradoxical situations in pluralistic organizations. These alternate prisms invite further exploration into the interface between paradoxes and pluralism, and highlight the potential of performativity without instrumentality to guide strategies for balancing and benefiting from these important dimensions of contemporary organizations.

Purpose Health systems are periodically confronted by crises – think of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, H1N1, and Ebola – during which they are called upon to manage exceptional situations without interrupting essential services to the population. The ability to accomplish this dual mandate is at the heart of resilience strategies, which in healthcare systems involve developing surge capacity to manage a sudden influx of patients. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This paper relates insights from resilience research to the four “S” of surge capacity (staff, stuff, structures and systems) and proposes a framework based on complexity theory to better understand and assess resilience factors that enable the development of surge capacity in complex health systems. Findings Detailed and dynamic complexities manifest in different challenges during a crisis. Resilience factors are classified according to these types of complexity and along their temporal dimensions: proactive factors that improve preparedness to confront both usual and exceptional requirements, and passive factors that enable response to unexpected demands as they arise during a crisis. The framework is completed by further categorizing resilience factors according to their stabilizing or destabilizing impact, drawing on feedback processes described in complexity theory. Favorable order resilience factors create consistency and act as stabilizing forces in systems, while favorable disorder factors such as diversity and complementarity act as destabilizing forces. Originality/value The framework suggests a balanced and innovative process to integrate these factors in a pragmatic approach built around the fours “S” of surge capacity to increase health system resilience.

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.