Building systemic resilience in a market-based society

Pär Malmberg

The phenomenon studied is societal resilience, a topic of great importance in these times of extreme change and disruption. The project’s purpose is to develop an empirically grounded, integrative model for building resilience in a market-based society with underlying RQs specifically targeting how markets help and hinder in this effort and how public and private sectors work together. In terms of theoretical framing, the project uses emergent thinking within resilience research combined with traditional concepts from planning, markets, and governance theories.

Empirically, the setting is the resilience-critical—deregulated and highly complex—Swedish transport sector and both primary and secondary data is used, including an expert interview-like approach to both types of sources.The analytical method used is abductive inference and systematic combining together with systems thinking and elements of Grounded Theory Method. Initial findings suggest specific importance of (1) setting the direction and objectives of resilience, (2) creating appropriate governance—both in terms of legislation and structure—and (3) in developing and nurturing effective forms of public-private collaboration.

The project is fully funded by the Swedish Transport Administration (grant number TRV 2021/52640).