Territorialising Resilience Through Planning. Some Preliminary Insights

Coming back to the centre of the European Union (EU) policy discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic, resilience has re-emerged as a widespread concept in the European lexicon to deal with rapid and slow on- setting events that increase the vulnerability of cities and their populations. In the context of emergent global crises, such as geopolitical shocks and energy instability, the fragility of supply chains in specific economic sectors, the growing of inequalities, and the overarching challenge of climate change and biodiversity collapse - one of the key policy messages we constantly hear is the need for systemic transition and long-term transformations heading to resilience and beyond GPD.Despite this increased interest in enhancing resilience in scientific research and policy discussion, there remains to be a shared understanding of what it means. The first round of understanding the resilience concept at the EU scale follows the 2011 economic crisis. It interprets resilience in a “bounce back” perspective, framing the capacity of European regions to return to pre-shock growth levels. However, a more complex understating of resilience is now emerging, asking European regions to withstand and adapt to the interplaying environmental, social and economic crises that Europe faces and “bounce forward” to the transition towards renewed sustainable systems. Following this knowledge, territorial resilience can displace current policy paradigms and induce a lasting shift in institutional innovation, cultural norms and community values, namely supporting planning for adaptive capacity. On this path, the 2020 Strategic Foresight Report puts forward resilience as a “new compass for EU policies”, clarifying that achieving resilience is becoming an increasingly important part of European policy, besides competitiveness and territorial cohesion. At the same time, some recent works have highlighted that the costs of this transition will be unevenly spread and will likely leave left-behind regions further behind, potentially resulting in severe social/political resistance to climate policies.In this scenario, there is still a mismatch between the conceptual definition of territorial resilience and how to practically operationalise it within territorial governance praxis to face some forward- looking trends a􏰀ecting the EU’s capacity to manage climate change and other environmental challenges, technological transformations, pressure on democracy, as well as shifts in demography.Starting from this broad framework, the contribution aims to present the first results of the ongoing project ESPON TERRES “Territorialising Resilience: Transforming Europe for an Age of Crisis”, which focuses on the largely unexplored nexus between the conceptual understanding of resilience and the role that the concept can assume in allowing European regions to strengthen absorptive, adaptive and transformational governance capacities in the context of long-term multi-crisis trajectories. More specifically, the contribution concentrates on avoiding framing resilience as an “empty signifier” but as a transformative framework to stimulate the capacities of territories to cope with and prepare for permanent current and future crises. In a broader sense, it is about how resilience can provide a valuable lens for guiding the EU Policy Framework and Agenda, supporting the radical shifts in planning cultures, rationalities, and norms, including a prospective reprioritisation of socioecological values and institutional capacities.