Operationalizing urban resilience: insights from the science-policy interface in the European Union

By examining three policy-oriented research projects funded by the European Union (RAMSES, RESIN, SMR) the paper critically discusses operationalization efforts of urban resilience as they are designed and produced at the interface between science and policy. By analysing the documents and conducting interviews with the projects’ coordinators and participants, three main research questions were addressed concerning how urban resilience is defined across the projects and the actors involved, the role of the tools produced by them in their difficult task to reconcile wider applicability and local specificity and finally how stakeholder engagement and co-creation were framed and implemented. Based on the evidence collected, the authors argue that conceptualizations of urban resilience within operationalization efforts being produced at the science policy-interface are still quite plural and open, that such openness is largely confirmed by the flexibility of the tools produced by the projects and that while becoming increasingly relevant stakeholder engagement and co-creation strategy are yet to be fully framed and theorized. Finally, they present further research pathways aimed at strengthening our knowledge of operationalization efforts, the role of practitioners and of urban resilience implementation in discrete scientific and political environments.