Research

INTRODUCTION

Wicked, chronic, and worsening socio-environmental crises are interlinked and now form a polycrisis that requires swift public action (Morin and Kern 1999, Swilling 2013, Homer-Dixon et al. 2021, Tooze 2022). Unfortunately, these crises are creeping, which means that they evolve over extended time and space and—despite posing a threat to life‐sustaining systems—are subject to varying degrees of societal inattention and are insufficiently addressed by authorities (Boin et al. 2020). The inexorably intensifying climate catastrophe, with its connections to other socio-environmental crises, is illustrative of such crises (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2022, Pörtner et al. 2023). The crises vary in type and severity in different localities (Tierney 2019). Although some discrete manifestations, like bouts of predictably extreme weather, can be routinely and effectively managed, the implications of complexity extend into unknown exceptionalities and remain difficult to predict. Indeed, the future of interconnected social-ecological systems cannot be known without significant uncertainties (Holling 2001, Soininen et al. 2024).

To study the requisite means to deal with somewhat anticipated but not exactly known future crises, we engage here in a wide-ranging discussion across a variety of disciplines on resilience as a predominant logic of governing and managing social-ecological systems (e.g., Holling 1973, Adger et al. 2005, Folke 2006, Brand and Jax 2007, Folke et al. 2010, Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2015, Soininen et al. 2024). In short, resilience refers to the capacity to maintain the central functions of systems following a disruption by absorbing or recovering from it (Holling 1973, Folke 2006). Resilience can come to mean a host of practices that aim to prevent, mitigate, withstand, anticipate, adapt to, or even fully transform to survive and recover from disturbances (Folke et al. 2010, Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2015, Simon and Randalls 2016, Soininen et al. 2024).

In this article, we study how public organizations in Finland build resilience to socio-environmental crises. To locate our purposing of resilience in the vast terrain of scholarly usage, we make two key distinctions. First, Holling’s (1973) original definition of systems’ “ability to absorb change and disturbance” pertains only to describing ecological systems and their quantifiable and measurable characteristics (see also Brand and Jax 2007). Since then, the concept has covered much more ground, however, most notably to include social systems into the ecological realm and thus forming hybrids whose abilities to maintain their essential features are interlinked (Adger et al. 2005, Folke 2006). In contemporary analytical understanding, resilience is treated more broadly as a logic, a way of thinking, or a policy discourse that describes a characteristic of a system (Folke 2016) and that is deployed in a variety of contexts, such as security (Aradau 2014, Folkers 2018) or urban governance (Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2015). Such approaches share considerable affinities with scholarship on preparedness for and anticipation of crisis-prone futures (e.g., Collier 2008, Roe and Schulman 2015, Lakoff 2017, Deville and Guggenheim 2018, Aykut et al. 2019, Samimian-Darash and Rotem 2019, Keck 2020, Folkers 2021). Given this proliferation, the multiplicity of ways to deploy resilience cannot be only seen to obfuscate its scientific accuracy, or to function solely as a boundary object fostering communication across disciplinary divides (Brand and Jax 2007). Rather, it is of great analytical interest—indeed, ours as well in this paper—to take the ”resilience multiple” (Simon and Randalls 2016) and its enactments to task.

Consequently, and second, our focus is thus not on the factors required for resilience building (Folke et al. 2003). The concept of building resilience has often been used in the context of system components (for example, institutions, livelihoods, or city structures) and their change. Social-ecological resilience as well as building it have been originally and typically studied within community- or resource-based social-ecological systems (Olsson et al. 2004, le Polain de Waroux et al. 2024). Research on practices that build resilience have commonly focused on specific types of disruptions, crises, and disasters (Adger et al. 2005, Wolbers et al. 2021, O’Neill et al. 2022); a plethora of approaches to assess and advice on generating resilience practices exist (Quinlan et al. 2016, Enfors-Kautsky et al. 2021). Our research interest is to map how public organizations build resilience in their various efforts to meet the challenges of complex and creeping socio-environmental crises.

To build resilience, public organizations engage in various anticipatory, future-oriented practices, such as maintaining skills and materials, gathering knowledge, strategizing, and rehearsing a variety of situations in different sectors and levels of governance. Finland offers a case to take a holistic look at these efforts. Finland’s national cooperation model of “comprehensive security” aims to create practices in all spheres of society for both everyday disruptions and exceptional circumstances (Finnish Government 2017, 2023, Räisänen et al. 2021). The model distributes appropriate responsibilities among multiple actors and organizations: ministries, regions and municipalities, fire and rescue departments, the defense forces, business operators, environmental administrations, non-governmental organizations, civil society, and, ultimately, households that are advised to be prepared to survive independently for three days in the event of a disturbance. This model of comprehensive security encompasses all kinds of disruptions. All of these established governing procedures notwithstanding, chronic and complex socio-environmental crises easily slip through the cracks between organizational practices, temporal rhythms, formal sectoral divides, and levels of authority (Cash et al. 2006, Munck af Rosenschöld et al. 2014, Pot et al. 2022, Virtanen et al. 2022, Reinekoski et al. 2023). Because organizations tend to rely on knowledge of past socio-environmental disruptions and how they moved past them when planning and rehearsing future actions, adjusting to the uncertainties of crises with divergent temporal rhythms becomes a paramount challenge (Hughes 1987, North 2005, Heino and Huotari 2022). Herein lies the risky precondition of building resilience: well-established practices that seek to enhance readiness, crisis management, and harm mitigation can end up undermining themselves.

With Finnish public organizations as our empirical focus, we set out to analyze and categorize their efforts to build resilience and the challenges in taking on socio-environmental crises. In the results section, we present three distinguishable modes of building resilience: operational action and readiness, prevention and planning, and exploring and sketching the unknown. By looking into the interactions between these three modes, we explore novel terrain and diagnose how and why the modes appear disjointed. It is through the disconnects between organizational practices striving for resilience, we argue, that worsening socio-environmental crises manage to creep in.

METHODS

Interview data collection

During 2018 and 2019, project teams conducted 48 interviews with a total of 58 experts in public organizations in different sectors and fields in Finland. The data set was compiled with the intention of producing an overview of how these organizations build resilience in their operations and whether there were gaps within and between these practices. The thematically coherent but openly structured interviews were conducted by four research teams within a large research consortium. Apart from five group interviews, the experts were interviewed individually. The participants belonged to five occupational groups: futurologists and researchers (15 interviews), security and safety officials and experts (11), climate change experts from different administrative bodies (11), damage minimization experts and operational actors (10), and politicians and policy officials (5). The group-specific numbers do not add up to the total number of interviews because the categories occasionally overlap. All experts worked at organizations that relate to resilience and provide public services either with municipalities or at the national if not international level.

The overall approach and themes of interviews were the same across teams, although details and emphases varied: all interviews enquired about threats and vulnerabilities, preparedness for and responses to those threats, and factors advancing or inhibiting resilience. Most interviews explicitly addressed climate change, and nearly all discussed interviewees’ professional backgrounds and daily work practices. Other central themes included preparedness in municipalities, sustainability transition, economics, politics, anticipation of societal development trajectories, and the Baltic Sea and marine traffic.

Analysis

We used a data-driven approach to qualitatively analyze the interviews. First, we closely read the material, guided by questions about subject area, problematization, action and practices, knowledge and data acquisition, and the actors and their relationships. Sentences with independent ideas were coded with inductive codes. The coding pertained also to themes that were shortened to summaries and further merged to codes used for individual sentences. Next, the most salient codes were further grouped into general themes that were then triangulated with the entire corpus of interviews, producing three main thematic groupings. As the thematic groupings cut across the interview material, our initial interpretation was that they satisfactorily captured the variety of practices of anticipating and preparing for socio-environmental crises.

After this first phase of analysis, we further refined and interpreted the three thematic groupings. They all were found to deal with how organizations anticipate disruptive events and build capacities that enable societal actors to remain capable of carrying out their operations. Consequently, the themes yielded in the analysis were interpreted to display three distinct but overlapping modes of building resilience. In the following rounds, we sought to describe and pin down the distinctive features of each mode. We concluded that the three modes are distinguishable as follows: (1) by type and severity of threat, (2) by temporal scale of operation, (3) by degree of uncertainty, (4) by actionability of resilience measures, (5) by attribution of responsibilities, and (6) by ways of knowing the future. In addition, we described the difficulties interviewees faced in their efforts to build resilience. The three modes deal with operational action and readiness, prevention and planning, and exploring and sketching the unknown.

The results section provides examples indicating how each mode appears in the efforts to build resilience. With the three-mode categorization in place, we went back to find out whether and how the professions and tasks of the interviewees mapped onto the modes. Mode 1 was primarily derived from discussions with people in charge of practical maintenance tasks, whereas managers and planners mostly addressed Mode 2 themes. Mode 3 was typically taken up by actors who either oversee or work with large entities, such as regional governance bodies and national-level planning organizations, or conduct research on or with them. Importantly, the organizational positions and fields of expertise of the interviewees do not, however, exhaust the categorization of the modes. As we show below, the modes are not fixed to specific occupational tasks or responsibilities but indicate abstractions whose descriptive power is demonstrated in the rest of the article.

RESULTS

Three modes of building resilience to socio-environmental crises

Table 1 summarizes the main features of the three modes: Mode 1, operational action and readiness; Mode 2, prevention and planning; and Mode 3, exploring and sketching the unknown. These modes address disruptions of differing severity, temporal scale, uncertainty, actionability, responsibilities, and ways of knowing the future of socio-environmental crises.

Mode 1: operational action and readiness

The first mode involves responding to socio-environmental disruptions considered to be part of the normal order of things—the disruptions are immediate and spatially limited and therefore not especially alarming or likely to propagate crises. The appropriate operations include, for example, maintenance and repair of electric grid networks or provision of water for households. An example is provided by experts responsible for maintaining regional electricity networks. They know that harmful weather events, such as powerful storms, will occur with some frequency:

Approximately once a year, we face extensive disturbances, either storms or problems with snow burden on trees. We have very carefully thought through the processes for such cases; we ourselves have very clear roles, and the same applies to our partners. (Power grid company CEO)

In Mode 1, interviewees typically described readiness. Their organizations have long track records of dealing with these types of disruptions and have learned to adapt to them and be ready when needed. Action in Mode 1 is both cognitively and corporally different from what takes place in the other modes: the responsible individuals and teams are trained for specific physical maintenance tasks; they rely on experience, and the skills required to take care of threats are embodied. The interviewees see actual emergencies as valuable sources of experience and expertise. Those in managerial positions in particular think they have had much to learn about the vicissitudes of crisis situations, whether during real disturbances or simulated rehearsals.

Although action in Mode 1 is deeply ingrained in public organizations’ well-rehearsed responses to everyday problems, the interviewees frequently addressed the limits of their resources and the scope of the issues that they find challenging. There are, for example, chronic shortages of personnel and equipment. Further, without enough hands-on experience in real or simulated disruptions, the required expertise to effectively meet the demands of their jobs may be lacking in Mode 1. The limits of Mode 1 are also reached in more elusive terms, as became evident when interviewees talked about unpredictable major disasters that simply cannot be addressed with the means available. Such threats cause actors to realize that there are clear limits to what they can prepare for. The manager of a city’s technical center provided an example of this concern when recalling that a tornado once wiped out an island, and speculated about the damage a similar phenomenon could cause to the city center:

I don’t even dare to think about what would happen then. It’s fully possible that something like that happens, and there’s nothing you can do to prepare for it. [...] You should actually be prepared for everything somehow, but usually when disasters happen, it’s in ways that you couldn’t have anticipated. (Manager of a city’s technical center)

Mode 2: prevention and planning

Mode 2 is distinguished from Mode 1 by a greater distance from threats, both temporally and practically, in terms of knowing the future and the related actionability of resilience measures, which in this mode focus on planning. The purpose is to gain knowledge of the regularity and characteristics of disruptions, the effects of which need to be managed and mitigated, and to plan preparedness for and adaptation to them. This entails not only laying out practical objectives for work found in Mode 1 but also considering rarer and more severe threats that are not especially likely but have a probability of occurrence that can still be estimated. Thus, action in Mode 2 is not only about gathering knowledge gained by analyzing past occurrences for purposes of planning but also about using modeling results to enact future events. The activities of experts do not often take place while disruptions are underway but are carried out beforehand as anticipatory actions and afterward in the form of analyses and lessons learned.

Experts in several fields of public governance prepare for disruptions that deviate from the everyday normal or are known to become increasingly likely. For example, resilience aspirations in sectors such as land use and the built environment are also often planned, precautionary, and preventive. A zoning manager explained that zoning takes a preventive approach to possible disruptions like flooding or chemical spills; it is “fundamental that we don’t let people build in areas prone to flooding, and that we don’t construct infrastructure there either.”

Another example of Mode 2 is found in the efforts of climate experts and environmental protection authorities to elucidate the implications of threats in order to inform and influence actors in other sectors. Awareness of likely disruptions makes it possible to mediate and transmit knowledge to sectors and places where more practical Mode 1 actions are conducted:

We ourselves don’t directly do it, but our task is to keep up with what’s going on and understand what can happen and that way influence, for example, the [city’s] water utility company when it produces its own preparedness plans for exceptional situations. So, we convey information and exert influence that way. (City environmental protection manager)

Although this kind of planning is by no means a new feature of Finnish public governance, its importance has recently increased, and it has become more professionalized. Climate change–related planning in particular has grown in significance and intensity. The work of the experts interviewed involves planning preventive and mitigating actions for climate threats, such as setting targets for emission reductions, managing indicators for their organizations’ climate work, and advocating for mitigation measures across other governance sectors. In other words, such actions ideally inform other Mode 2 functions within their organizations and guide the work done in Mode 1, such as enforcing and detailing the practical requirements of energy efficiency in new construction projects.

As in Mode 1, interviewees talked about practical challenges in Mode 2, including a lack of budget resources, personnel, and time. Project funding and economic prioritization steer what can be done and when. Climate work in municipal governance reveals these concerns: even though it has gained a formal status within city organizations, it still struggles to find an equal footing with core sectors that, according to an environmental expert interviewee, include fields such as strategic development, budgetary planning, and human resources management.

Even if experts acknowledge the potential importance of truly surprising events in Mode 2, they do not think that they or their organizations need to prepare for unpredictable, major disruptions. Instead, their work is to guide action and examine related uncertainties only insofar as the future seems manageable. Thus, they end up drawing a practically defined limit to the extent of resilience work in Mode 2: it concerns threats for which the probability can be estimated.

An example of reaching the limits of what can be done in Mode 2 involves economists and their efforts to include information about different kinds of risks in their forecasts. When asked whether the economic models they use incorporate societal changes brought on by socio-environmental crises, they see that notion as running counter to their expertise, to what economic modeling can and should do, and what is expected of them. One interviewee explicitly demarcated the realm of normality:

We have trimmed our house to work within what you can call the normal world, and then everything that’s a bit different—or at least this is the way it seems to me when I observe how things work with us: our task is to see that normal business runs, and we produce information about the normal world. (Economist, Ministry of Finance)

This means that climate risks are excluded from calculations because they involve the kinds of uncertainties that cannot be reliably controlled with the models. The economists not only readily admit that there are things beyond their reach but they also, and more importantly for that very reason, leave them unattended. Here we see the limits of Mode 2, and how they hinge on issues and timespans that are beyond the grasp of existing planning and forecasting efforts.

Mode 3: exploring and sketching the unknown

The unpredictable threats beyond the reach of Modes 1 and 2 are addressed in Mode 3 through techniques of probing the future. The issues handled in this mode appear as system-wide crises that exceed the realm of foreseeable, normal disruptions; their complexity is discussed in terms of chain reactions, cascades, and interdependent effects. No tried-and-true strategies exist to govern such complex and extensive problems. Resilience building in Mode 3 is not primarily grounded in past experiences of unusual, severe, and overarching crises but rather in imagination and advanced speculation, with the capability and willingness to address the kind of harm that is unknown and thus paradoxically to know the unknown while knowing that it cannot be known.

The first two modes of building resilience are relatively straightforward to locate in Finnish public organizations, but nailing down Mode 3 activities is a more slippery task. The views of who is responsible for achieving resilience are abstract and ambiguous. In interviews, Mode 3 emerged in two ways. First, it took shape when people whose duties relate to Modes 1 and 2 began to discuss the limits of their own and their organizations’ competence and the uncertainties that remain. Although experts in Modes 1 and 2 do not in principle need to be concerned about the potential insufficiencies of their existing procedures and the level of preparedness their organizations exhibit, they do in fact care about such things. Indeed, for Modes 1 and 2 operations to remain functional and useful, Mode 3 issues and considerations must often be actively bracketed, as in the case of the economists and their forecasts noted in section on Mode 2.

Second, Mode 3 surfaced in descriptions by a highly heterogenous group of interviewees, including researchers, policy analysts, and senior managers in different sectors of governance. These individuals emphasized different techniques of foresight and systemic thinking as the primary way to build resilience for uncertain and unknown threats. However, they often felt that there were no institutional conduits for addressing these kinds of threats and for making their expertise useful. The rationale of an emergency service expert on civic preparedness illustrates the dilemma. They called for “comprehensive thinking” to foster resilience in the face of unpredictable crises; that is, an effort to dig deep into the structures of society and diagnose the vulnerabilities within them. But when giving examples of how to implement such inquiries, the expert reverted to the skills and resources of citizens to withstand crises rather than continuing to talk about “structures.” The expert referred to the national strategy of comprehensive security—the model by which the vital systems of society should be handled jointly by authorities, businesses, NGOs, and citizens—and acknowledged that it often remains disconnected from actual practices and those who are supposed to apply them.

Mode 3 indeed appears contradictory in discussions of diagnoses of societal trends and the practical measures that can address them. An official working in the Finnish Parliament described the world as becoming more and more difficult to predict and the strain faced by organizations to connect the resulting uncertainty to what they should do in concrete terms. Initially, the official emphasized the growth of overall unpredictability: “simplicity has disappeared; [...] the world is overdetermined, the sum of so many causes and effects that [...] there are no single answers anymore.” However, when asked about the ability to anticipate crises and maintain resilience in such a world, the same official considered the state of preparedness in Finland to be unproblematic, describing it as “ludicrously good [...] a surefire medal if resilience were an Olympic sport.”

The interviewees knew that things will remain uncertain and even unknown and suggested ways to think about the unknown and measures to prepare better for it, including increasing social trust, expanding collaboration across sectors, self-organization, decreasing overreliance on existing knowledge of past events, and conducting scenario planning. Ultimately, however, shifting the focus from grand diagnostic statements about the world growing increasingly unpredictable to implementing the necessary plans proves to require a major leap of faith. Our descriptions of the three modes thus far indicate that there are both interactions and disconnects between them. It is this interplay to which we now turn.

Interplay between modes

Interactions involving all three modes

Even though we have presented the modes as analytically distinct, they support one another and are often all present simultaneously in the practices of individual actors and organizations. For example, to minimize harm from accidents, oil and chemical spill prevention experts must investigate new threats from, say, novel chemicals and the possible but as-yet unknown reactions between them (Mode 3), plan the means to prevent spills (Mode 2), and maintain readiness through exercises (Mode 1). Anticipation and speculation (Mode 3) are based on prior knowledge from within their own organizations or elsewhere (Modes 1 and 2).

A common feature in all three modes is the importance of practical exercises, during which the modes also intertwine. In the course of a single exercise, continuous readiness is developed and maintained to keep expertise up to date in areas such as electric network repair and water quality monitoring (Mode 1). The same exercise can also serve as a method to collect information for prevention and planning, as new knowledge renders visible what may have been lacking in previous practices (Mode 2). Still, the orientation in maintaining capabilities to function in crisis situations remains directed toward past events and the lessons learned from them. What could, for interviewees, foster resilience to Mode 3 uncertainties is improving readiness and updating the skills of operational units, which would enable agile self-organization in the face of unprecedented circumstances.

In the subsections below, we look at three kinds of interplay between the modes, one pair at a time. We seek to show that none of the modes exists in isolation and that they shape one another. The relations between them range from smooth and supporting to fraught and disjointed, which brings us to the question of how and why the disjointedness in the interactions between the three modes of building resilience might undermine and even actively hinder the capabilities of Finnish public service providers to meet the challenges of worsening socio-environmental crises.

Interactions between Mode 2 and Mode 1 go both ways

Modes 1 and 2 are highly interdependent because readiness (Mode 1) does not emerge prefabricated; even rehearsing is not enough to ensure readiness. In interviewees’ descriptions of emergency situations, existing plans guide actions and define, for example, central partners and responsibilities. Hence, plans (Mode 2) link normal disruptions to wider crises, but the action takes place in the immediate operational environment of Mode 1.

Information gathering and planning (Mode 2) are required to make Mode 1 a legitimate part of an organization’s operations. For example, cost-benefit analyses are used to identify the practices in which to invest. This kind of connection is evident from two vantage points of two individuals responsible for winter maintenance of urban infrastructure. For a manager of a city’s technical center, resilience to socio-environmental threats means readiness to plow snow from the streets (Mode 1), whereas an environmental manager sees this as coming down to a question of how the city should allocate its money to best care for its infrastructure after a snowfall (Mode 2). It is Mode 2 activities that structure which Mode 1 readiness activities are conducted and how they play out. However, interaction between modes does not always run smoothly. An energy and climate expert described the constraints faced in enforcing climate roadmaps in a municipal organization. There is no connection between what the expert is told to consider as the purpose of their work and what the actions to be implemented should be: “It’s not enough that we have these roadmaps and plans; these actions must happen. [...] Let’s say that the problem with these processes on all levels is that what comes from above is never concrete enough.”

Mode 3 is reduced to Mode 1

Interviewees struggled to find institutional conduits for their diagnoses and calls to action when describing Mode 3. We find a significant tension between how interviewees diagnosed socio-environmental crises as becoming ever more difficult to predict on the one hand and their concrete ideas of exactly how to build resilience on the other. This bifurcated outlook produced varied and often inconsistent conclusions from interviewees about how to become resilient to disruptions that are admittedly largely unknown. We find a pronounced gap between global complexity and change becoming more and more unpredictable and the requirements of on-the-ground resilience across sectors and walks of society. For example, interviewees regarded maintaining and building everyday competencies, trust, and the capacity to self-organize in times of unprecedented disruptions as key strategies to increase resilience (Mode 3), but those same strategies were also viewed as creating readiness to remain functional in a crisis (Mode 1).

The national model of comprehensive security is emblematic in this regard. It is intended to guide preparedness planning in regional and local governance bodies to secure resilience across society. Several interviewees interpreted it as implying the need to be in a state of constant readiness; as a border control manager put it, institutions should be alert to the idea that “anything” can happen and be ready “to bend but not break” in a crisis. The relation between Modes 3 and 1 is thus one of reduction: the solution to unknown and unpredictable crises is constant readiness everywhere. Little, however, is said about how that perpetual vigilance would be implemented in different governance sectors and organizational environments. What is bypassed by this jump from sweeping diagnostics to impositions on overall readiness is Mode 2.

Disjointedness of Modes 2 and 3

Establishing relations between Modes 2 and 3 appeared difficult for the interviewees. In addition to jumping over Mode 2 directly to Mode 1 when speculating about how to act on Mode 3 threats or when envisioning the required governance measures, articulations of the connections between Modes 2 and 3 were conspicuous by their absence. Mode 2 relies on knowledge of past events and risk estimates that have proven reliable and useful. Thus, considerations of events that are at best uncertain and often speculative must be ignored. This tendency was prominent, for example, in the economists’ exclusion of climate-related uncertainties from their models and projections worked to force “normalcy” onto what was admittedly exceptional and unknown.

When describing a request from national officials to begin preparing for all kinds of surprising events, a municipal zoning manager exemplified the striking absence of connection between Modes 2 and 3:

Sometimes we get the signal from the national level that we should prepare for the unexpected. When we ask what that might mean, there’s no answer. (...) And we can’t really just start making it up amongst ourselves what these exceptional situations could be. (Zoning manager)

In this case, a national-level actor has come to the conclusion that heightening the level of Finland’s resilience demands that municipalities update their contingency plans to accommodate new kinds of threats. However, as neither these exceptional threats nor the practices to be put in place to address them are specified, the zoning manager was at a loss regarding how to go about adjusting Mode 2 practices.

DISCUSSION

Building resilience in the three modes

Together, the three distinct but interrelated modes provide both an overview of and specificity to the ways in which public service providers build resilience to socio-environmental crises in Finland. Resilience in Mode 1 is defined by operational action and readiness, in Mode 2 by prevention and planning, and in Mode 3 by exploring and sketching the unknown. From Mode 1 to Mode 3, the type and severity of threats range from routine disruptions to potentially disastrous events, the temporal scale from immediate and repetitive to multiple and undefined, and the degree of uncertainty from low to high. Regarding the actionability of resilience measures, the attribution of responsibilities, and the ways of knowing uncertain futures, the three modes also display distinguishable characteristics.

Interviewees typically described the embodied knowledge and readiness measures for everyday disruptions in Mode 1 as laying the foundation for resilience to socio-environmental crises, whereas in Mode 2 experts use methods like contingency plans for addressing threats and estimating and modeling what will likely happen in the future. The resilience measures and forms and practices of knowing futures partly overlap in Mode 2, consisting largely of planning and gathering information. As our interviews show, action in Mode 2 relies on both what Collier (2008) calls archival-statistical knowledge (that is, knowledge gained by analyzing past events) and on modeling to enact possible future events. Responsibility in Mode 2 expertise is organized by sector, but boundaries are transcended by sharing information across divides.

Mode 3 measures are about coping with issues that remain inchoate, despite efforts to pin them down. Accordingly, attributing responsibility in Mode 3 is ambiguous and may involve all kinds of actors. The forms and practices of knowing futures in Mode 3 consist of detecting weak signals, imagination, and other ways exploring the unknown. Benefiting from these foresight methods is critical to prepare for interconnected, multifaceted, and complex problems that comprise chain reactions, cascades, and interdependent effects. Analogous methods of exploring uncertain and unknown futures have been identified (see, e.g., Mallard and Lakoff 2011, Andersson 2018, Hajer and Pelzer 2018, Collier and Lakoff 2021, Samimian-Darash 2022). The aim in Mode 3 is not to calculate probabilities and predict future events but rather to enable thinking about what is possible, plausible, and even unknown (cf. Janasik 2021). However, Mode 3 is hardly conducive to simple practical implementation. Although resilience practices in Mode 3 have been around for some time and have proliferated in recent decades, our interviewees often saw novelty in this mode. Our analysis indicates that the sense of novelty is due to Mode 3 practices concerning socio-environmental crises often not being well established organizationally or appropriately connected to the other two modes of building resilience.

With our focus on interactions between the three different modes of building resilience to socio-environmental crises we contribute a distinct take on a growing body of work in various streams of related research. Factors that are required for building resilience in social-ecological systems (learning to live with change and uncertainty, nurturing diversity for reorganization, combining different types of knowledge for learning, and creating opportunity for self-organization; Folke et al. 2003) were mainly discussed only in Mode 3 but similar features appear also when different modes come together. The limited discussion of these factors in interviewee accounts may be due to our focus on resilience actions in public organizations. We have focused on management and governance of social-ecological systems instead of direct analysis of the systems, and on the dynamics rather than the structure of the system (Quinlan et al. 2016). Notably, our focus has not been so much on the management of ecological aspects of the social-ecological system as on the management of socio-environmental crises. We have not focused on such issues as enhancing diversity in ecological systems and livelihoods or maintenance of ecosystem functions (Adger et al. 2005).

Compared to the research tradition in crisis and disaster research that often focuses on single events and crisis phases (see Wolbers et al. 2021), our approach enables an examination of the underlying patterns and processes that cut across building resilience in different domains and discrete crisis types. Our threefold categorization of efforts to build resilience shares considerable similarities with Tierney’s (2019) three classes of disasters: emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes, and the associated severity of impacts and types of response action (see also Quarantelli 2000). Whereas Tierney’s (2019) classification defines the spatial scale of response, the responding actors, the role of the public, the functioning of the response system after disruptions, and challenges in recovery, these are not the key features of our modes. Our contribution is to add the temporal scale of operations and the techniques of knowing the future. Similar threefold outlooks on action on disruptions have appeared in scholarship on preparedness (Anderson 2010, Heino and Huotari 2022), anticipation (Quay 2010), the variations of resilience across contextual scales (Healy and Mesman 2014), and security governance and management (Roe 2013, Samimian-Darash 2022). In addition, the command hierarchy of the emergency services of the United Kingdom lines up to a three-tier form of strategic, tactical, and operational action (Zebrowski 2019).

Hence, the three modes that we have empirically derived from the context of Finnish public organizations that work toward enhancing resilience are akin to what has previously been discussed in the literature, and the categorization of the modes confirms findings made in previous research. What our approach and results add to these analyses is, first, the analytical attention paid to the ways in which the three modes interact, and second, the disjointedness we identify between the interactions. We suggest that it is these institutional disconnects between modes that allow socio-environmental crises to creep in.

Finding connections between the modes of building resilience

When it comes to threats and hazards that can be easily known, the overall sentiment of resilience experts in Finland was one of self-assuredness, even complacency: what can reasonably be taken care of has already been addressed. Yet there were recurring inconsistencies and contradictions in how interviewees considered what can be done with existing means and what should be done when threats exceed these capacities. These are tensions partly inherent in the resilience to socio-environmental uncertainties that are, paradoxically, unknown yet expected or known but still capable of surprising.

Mode 1 forms the basis for resilience: maintaining a focus on the details makes one ready for everything. Nevertheless, people working in Mode 1 must set aside long-term concerns about whether and how socio-environmental crises might intensify. It is in Mode 2 that anticipation and planning for these evolving socio-environmental risks is done. In Finland, environmental administration is mandated “to detect, monitor and anticipate changes in the environment as well as society’s preparedness to adapt to them” (Finnish Government 2017:70). However, resilience specifically to socio-environmental crises is not yet a driving principle in Finland’s national strategic planning (Hakala et al. 2019, Räisänen et al. 2021). For example, it is not an unknown that climate change is intensifying but planning for its systemic and societal effects in particular sites remains disconnected from everyday operations in sectors like construction work, spatial planning, emergency services, and budgeting, where environmental problems are still not seen as core concerns (Pilli-Sihvola et al. 2018, Virtanen et al. 2022, Reinekoski et al. 2023). Although we have detected similar issues related to sectorally defined practices, especially regarding climate work, interactions between Modes 1 and 2 are well established, and the connections between them are repeatedly rehearsed and executed.

The threats speculated on in Mode 3 and for which measures should be implemented to foster resilience to unknown but worsening crises remain largely outside of the scope of what public organizations currently do. We see the disconnect between Modes 2 and 3 as the main reason for why Finnish public organizations find themselves incapable of building resilience. Mode 2 practitioners often acknowledge that there are issues beyond their realm, but they have no means to incorporate those issues into their work. Mode 3 may include ideas about how to engage with uncertain future threats, but these explorations fail to engage with the established planning efforts found in Mode 2. Harmful events with very low probabilities, or those deemed temporally distant and thus requiring long-term solutions (Mode 3), find little to no focus in established structures of public governance and practices of contingency and forward planning (Mode 2). The ambiguous demands created by Mode 3 practices (“prepare for the unexpected!”) result in a displaced version of Mode 1: an urgent sense of something needing to be done across the board, without much context or grounding. Instead, the reduction of Mode 3 to Mode 1 concerns reduction of action toward unknown catastrophes to a routine operational action without planning. This makes it difficult to accurately respond to unknown and especially worsening crises. A fitting analogue of this can be found in Zebrowski’s (2019) concept of “event suppression” where the efforts of ensuring security in a case of emergency seek to quickly limit the timespan of the disruption. The reduction of Mode 3 to Mode 1 concerns, however, not only a temporal curtailment but also bypassing the mode of planning in a demand for action.

Furthermore, operations in Modes 1 and 2 can be so institutionally locked in and viewed as tried-and-true crisis management actions (Hughes 1987, North 2005, Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2015) that they end up impeding sensitivity to worsening crises and their adaptive management. The problem is not only that directives in Mode 3 to prepare for the unexpected fail to specify the relevant Mode 2 work but also that the very institutionalization of Modes 1 and 2 can disconnect them from radical socio-environmental uncertainties and unknowns. This ensures that they remain largely unattended by and beyond the scope of responsible authorities, and undermine aspirations for resilience (Boin et al. 2020, Wolbers et al. 2021).

The Finnish national model of “comprehensive security” offers an example. Its ambition to maintain preparedness and security across different areas of governance, private sectors, and civil society promises a policy model that could deal with intertwined and creeping socio-environmental crises. Our study qualifies this promise. The model is referred to only in Mode 3, as a concern of how to be ready and maintain functionality in uncertain and unexpected circumstances. The invocations came with the demand of performing a national-scale goal to all walks of organizational action and everyday life. This predisposition for resilience proves problematic because of the missing connections between the modes, particularly because of established practices of planning in Mode 2 being bypassed (cf. Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2015). The way the model is deployed in the interviews thus works to nullify the prospect of socio-environmental crises becoming worse and more difficult to manage. This places few to no demands on facilitating resilience beyond maintaining routine readiness and its “flowering” into adaptive self-organization (cf. Simon and Randalls 2016).

We suggest that Finland’s well-established preparedness activities aiming at readiness and crisis prevention can in fact actively impede long-term resilience building and exploration of poorly understood creeping socio-environmental crises. As such, we have engaged with the somewhat problematic discourse that links resilience with the sense of a perpetual crisis that is only getting worse, and an implied promise of security in the face of it (Aradau 2014, Anderson 2015). However, it is important also to note that the comprehensive security approach contrasts with the tack taken in many other countries, where the focus of preparedness of institutions is fixed on exceptional natural disasters and catastrophes (Meriläinen et al. 2020). In such countries the connections between different modes can be even more scattered.

Inasmuch as Mode 3 speculations about the future should be made to matter, the connections of the modes must find a new grounding. Institutionalizing imagination is urgently needed (cf. Hill and Martínez-Díaz 2019). The importance of resilience to worsening crises recently became pronounced as the magnitude and severity of natural hazards during the summer of 2023 surprised even scientists deeply engaged with the field (Wolbers and Kuipers 2023). Astonishingly, institutionalizing socio-environmental Mode 3 issues still appears to be politically unattractive (cf. Boin et al. 2020). How, then, should organizations go about creating connections between established modes of building resilience (Modes 1 and 2) and exploring uncertain futures (Mode 3) in public organizations?

One attractive course of action is to organize activities combining scenario and simulation exercise techniques that enable public authorities from various sectors to transform speculative and exploratory Mode 3 thinking into planned actions. This kind of rehearsal differs from preparedness exercises that rely on risk assessments based on past knowledge and seek to reinforce existing operational procedures in Modes 2 and 1, respectively (cf. Samimian-Darash 2022). Climate change and other socio-environmental crises will profoundly impair the “normal” that is the baseline of current governance. Mode 3 thinking should not be carried out as a standalone effort, or worse, as something to be excluded because it confounds action in the normal world, but explicitly exercised as a task for public organizations across sectoral divides. This would entail tasking officials and policymakers with considering the long-term effects of urgent crisis actions and policies and making participants consider their choices of action vis-a-vis different scenario consequences (Hukkinen et al. 2022a, 2022b; see also Pot et al. 2022).

Exercises do not guarantee a change in institutionalized resilience-building efforts. Additional ways of strengthening consideration of socio-environmental crises in public governance and institutionalizing links between modes should be sought and found, but addressing today’s socio-environmental crises calls for attention to other priorities as well. Our focus in this article has been on the efforts of public organizations and service providers, which have sidelined vulnerable groups and civic and communal actors from our explicit scope (for an overview of research on climate change and human vulnerability, see, e.g., Räsänen et al. 2016, and for vulnerability assessments and exploring futures, Jurgilevich 2021). The issue of vulnerability of different social groups did not feature prominently in our material, possibly because public organizations tend to focus on techno-scientific knowledge and solutions (Aykut et al. 2019, Hulme et al. 2020). Civic actors were discussed only when trying to give practical blanket solutions to how citizens and communities should prepare for all kinds of unexpected disasters. Providing spaces for institutional experimentation can expand the scope of what public organizations can do, and what kinds of and whose resilience they must account for, so that foresight can be integrated into policy processes by design (Fuerth 2009, Quay 2010).

The contents of the three modes were derived from our empirical case and context, but they might be found in the resilience-building efforts of different fields and actors. We encourage scholars and practitioners to inquire into and identify similar disconnects that can turn aspirations for resilience in organizational practices against themselves, specifically but not exclusively in the context of socio-environmental crises only getting worse. This could not only elucidate different kinds of efforts to build resilience in and across governance domains, but also help identify whether established practices are able to incorporate uncertainties that can be conjectured but not known for certain.

CONCLUSION

Our aim was to map resilience-building efforts and we found that Finnish public organizations build resilience to worsening socio-environmental crises in three modes. We identified them as follows: Mode 1 is defined by operational action and readiness, Mode 2 by prevention and planning, and Mode 3 by exploring and sketching the unknown. The novelty that our approach and results contribute to research on resilience to socio-environmental crises, on social-ecological systems, on climate change adaptation and governance, and on disaster studies lies in the diagnosis of institutional disjointedness of the three modes. Although all three modes build resilience together, connections between Modes 1 and 2 are more established than those between them and Mode 3. In practice, Mode 3 becomes reduced to Mode 1, while Mode 2 and 3 are disjointed: the demands that exploration of future uncertainties (Mode 3) impose on planning (Mode 2) find little grounding in the latter.

LITERATURE CITED

Adger, N. W., T. P. Hughes, C. Folke, S. R. Carpenter, and J. Rockström. 2005. Social-ecological resilience to coastal disasters. Science 309(5737):1036-1039. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1112122

Anderson, B. 2010. Preemption, precaution, preparedness: anticipatory action and future geographies. Progress in Human Geography 34(6):777-798. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510362600

Anderson, B. 2015. What kind of thing is resilience? Politics 35(1):60-66. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9256.12079

Andersson, J. 2018. The future of the world: futurology, futurists, and the struggle for the post cold war imagination. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Aradau, C. 2014. The promise of security: resilience, surprise and epistemic politics. Resilience 2(2):73-87. https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2014.914765

Aykut, S., D. Demortain, and B. Benbouzid. 2019. The politics of anticipatory expertise: plurality and contestation of futures knowledge in governance—introduction to the special issue. Science & Technology Studies 32(4):2-12. https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.87369

Boin, A., M. Ekengren, and M. Rhinard. 2020. Hiding in plain sight: conceptualizing the creeping crisis. Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy 11(2):116-138. https://doi.org/10.1002/rhc3.12193

Brand, F. S., and K. Jax. 2007. Focusing the meaning(s) of resilience: resilience as a descriptive concept and a boundary object. Ecology and Society 12(1):23. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-02029-120123

Cash, D. W., W. N. Adger, F. Berkes, P. Garden, L. Lebel, P. Olsson, L. Pritchard, and O. Young. 2006. Scale and cross-scale dynamics: governance and information in a multilevel world. Ecology and Society 11(2):8. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-01759-110208

Collier, S. J. 2008. Enacting catastrophe: preparedness, insurance, budgetary rationalization. Economy and Society 37(2):224-250. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140801933280

Collier, S. J., and A. Lakoff. 2021. The government of emergency: vital systems, expertise, and the politics of security. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, USA. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691228884

Deville, J., and M. Guggenheim. 2018. From preparedness to risk: from the singular risk of nuclear war to the plurality of all hazards. British Journal of Sociology 69(3):799-824. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12291

Enfors-Kautsky, E., L. Järnberg, A. Quinlan, and P. Ryan. 2021. Wayfinder: a new generation of resilience practice. Ecology and Society 26(2):39. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12176-260239

Finnish Government. 2017. The security strategy for society. Government resolution 2 November 2017. https://turvallisuuskomitea.fi/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/YTS_2017_english.pdf

Finnish Government. 2023. National climate change adaptation plan 2030. Well-being, safety and security in a changing climate. Publications of the Finnish Government 2023:73. https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/handle/10024/165337

Folke, C. 2006. Resilience: the emergence of a perspective for social-ecological system analyses. Global Environmental Change 16(3):253-267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2006.04.002

Folke, C. 2016. Resilience (republished). Ecology and Society 21(4):44. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09088-210444

Folke, C., J. Colding, and F. Berkes. 2003. Synthesis: building resilience and adaptive capacity in social-ecological systems. Pages 352-387 in F. Berkes, J. Colding, and C. Folke, editors. Navigating social-ecological systems: building resilience for complexity and change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511541957.020

Folke, C., S. R. Carpenter, B. Walker, M. Scheffer, T. Chapin, and J. Rockström. 2010. Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability, and transformability. Ecology and Society 15(4):20. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-03610-150420

Folkers, A. 2018. Das Sicherheitsdispositiv der Resilienz. Katastrophische Risiken und die Biopolitik vitaler Systeme. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. https://doi.org/10.12907/978-3-593-43850-4

Folkers, A. 2021. Preventing the unpreparable: catastrophe thresholds from Covid to climate. Sociologica 15(3):85-106. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/13564

Fuerth, L. S. 2009. Foresight and anticipatory governance. Foresight 11:14-32. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680910982412

Hajer, M. A., and P. Pelzer. 2018. 2050—an energetic odyssey: understanding ‛techniques of futuring’ in the transition towards renewable energy. Energy Research & Social Science 44:222-231. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.01.013

Hakala, E., V. Lähde, A. Majava, T. Toivanen, T. Vadén, P. Järvensivu, and J. T. Eronen. 2019. A lot of talk, but little action: the blind spots of Nordic environmental security policy. Sustainability 11(8):2379. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11082379

Healy, S., and J. Mesman. 2014. Resilience: contingency, complexity, and practice. Pages 155-177 in A. Hommels, J. Mesman, and W. E. Bijker, editors. Vulnerability in technological cultures. New directions in research and governance. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9209.003.0011

Heino, O., and V. Huotari. 2022. How considering memory as an analogy to preparedness reveals its weaknesses. Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy 14(3):209-225. https://doi.org/10.1002/rhc3.12257

Hill, A. C., and L. Martinez-Diaz. 2019. Building a resilient tomorrow: how to prepare for the coming climate disruption. Oxford University Press, New York, New York, USA. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190909345.001.0001

Holling, C. S. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4:1-23. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.es.04.110173.000245

Holling, C. S. 2001. Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological, and social systems. Ecosystems 4:390-405. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-001-0101-5

Homer-Dixon, T., O. Renn, J. Rockström, J. F. Donges, S. Janzwood. 2022. A call for an international research program on the risk of a global polycrisis. Technical Paper 2022-3. Cascade Institute, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. https://cascadeinstitute.org/technical-paper/a-call-for-an-international-research-program-on-the-risk-of-a-global-polycrisis/

Hughes, T. P. 1987. The evolution of large technological systems. Pages 51-82 in W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, and T. J. Pinch, editors. The social construction of technological systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Hukkinen, J. I., J. T. Eronen, N. Janasik, P. Järvensivu, and R. O. Kaaronen. 2022a. Coping with policy errors in an era of chronic socio-environmental crises. Ecological Economics 199:107489. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107489

Hukkinen, J. I., J. T. Eronen, N. Janasik, S. Kuikka, A. Lehikoinen, P. D. Lund, H. Räisänen, and M. J. Virtanen. 2022b. The policy operations room: analyzing path-dependent decision-making in wicked socio-ecological disruptions. Safety Science 146:105567. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2021.105567

Hulme, M., R. Lidskog, J. M. White, and A. Standring. 2020. Social scientific knowledge in times of crisis: what climate change can learn from coronavirus (and vice versa). WIREs Climate Change 11(4):e656. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.656

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2022. Climate change 2022: impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. H.-O. Pörtner, D. C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E. S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama, editors. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009325844

Janasik, N. 2021. Plausibility designs, or a probabilistic and predictive take on scenario effectiveness. Futures 127:102670. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2020.102670

Jurgilevich, A. 2021. Governance modes and epistemologies of future-oriented vulnerability assessments: example of a mixed-methods approach. Futures 128:102717. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2021.102717

Keck, F. 2020. Avian reservoirs: virus hunters and birdwatchers in Chinese sentinel posts. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, USA. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478007555

Lakoff, A. 2017. Unprepared: global health in a time of emergency. University of California Press, Berkeley, California, USA. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520968417

le Polain de Waroux, Y., M.-C. Carignan, O. del Giorgio, L. Díaz, L. Enrico, P. Jaureguiberry, M. L. Lipoma, F. Mazzini, and S. Díaz. 2024. How do we study resilience? A systematic review. People and Nature 6(2):474-489. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10603

Mallard, G., and A. Lakoff. 2011. How claims to know the future are used to understand the present: techniques of prospection in the field of national security. Pages 339-378 in C. Camic, N. Gross, and L. Michele, editors. Social knowledge in the making. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Meriläinen, E., M. Nikkanen, A. Räsänen, and A. Silvast. 2020. Katastrofitutkimuksen käsitteistöä suomeksi ja Suomessa: kimmoisasti vaaroja kohti? Alue ja ympäristö 49(2):92-109. https://doi.org/10.30663/ay.95614

Morin, E., and A. B. Kern. 1999. Homeland earth: a manifesto for the new millennium. Hampton Press, New York, New York, USA.

Munck af Rosenschöld, J., J. G. Rozema, and L. A. Frye-Levine. 2014. Institutional inertia and climate change: a review of the new institutionalist literature. WIREs Climate Change 5(5):639-648. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.292

North, D. C. 2005. Understanding the process of economic change. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, USA. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400829484

Olsson, P., C. Folke, and F. Berkes. 2004. Adaptive comanagement for building resilience in social-ecological systems. Environmental Management 34:75-90. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-003-0101-7

O’Neill, B., M. van Aalst, Z. Zaiton Ibrahim, L. Berrang Ford, S. Bhadwal, H. Buhaug, D. Diaz, K. Frieler, M. Garschagen, A. Magnan, G. Midgley, A. Mirzabaev, A. Thomas, and R. Warren. 2022. Key risks across sectors and regions. Pages 2411-2538 in IPCC 2022. Climate change 2022: impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. H.-O. Pörtner, D. C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E. S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama, editors. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009325844.025

Pilli-Sihvola, K., A. Harjanne, and R. Haavisto. 2018. Adaptation by the least vulnerable: managing climate and disaster risks in Finland. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 31:1266-1275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2017.12.004

Pörtner, H.-O., R. J. Scholes, A. Arneth, D. K. A. Barnes, M. T. Burrows, S. E. Diamond, C. M. Duarte, W. Kiessling, P. Leadley, S. Managi, et al. 2023. Overcoming the coupled climate and biodiversity crises and their societal impacts. Science 380:eabl4881. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abl4881

Pot, W., J. Scherpenisse, and P. ’t Hart. 2022. Robust governance for the long term and the heat of the moment: temporal strategies for coping with dual crises. Public Administration 101(1):221-235. https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12872

Quarantelli, E. L. 2000. Emergencies, disasters and catastrophes are different phenomena. Preliminary Paper 304. Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, Delaware, USA.

Quay, R. 2010. Anticipatory governance: a tool for climate change adaptation. Journal of the American Planning Association 76(4):496-511. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2010.508428

Quinlan, A. E., M. Berbés-Blázquez, L. J. Haider, and G. D. Peterson. 2015. Measuring and assessing resilience: broadening understanding through multiple disciplinary perspectives. Journal of Applied Ecology 53(3):677-687. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.12550

Reinekoski, T., L. Lahikainen, M. J. Virtanen, T. Sorsa, and T.-K. Lehtonen. 2023. Frictional rhythms of climate work in city governance. Sociological Review 71(3):660-678. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221123186

Roe, E. 2013. Making the most of mess. Reliability and policy in today’s management challenges. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, USA. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478091615

Roe, E., and P. R. Schulman. 2015. Comparing emergency response infrastructure to other critical infrastructures in the California Bay-Delta of the United States: a research note on inter-infrastructural differences in reliability management. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 23(4):193-200. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5973.12083

Räisänen, H., E. Hakala, J. T. Eronen, J. I. Hukkinen, and M. J. Virtanen. 2021. Comprehensive security: the opportunities and challenges of incorporating environmental threats in security policy. Politics and Governance 9(4):91-101. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v9i4.4389

Räsänen, A., S. Juhola, A. Nygren, M. Käkönen, M. Kallio, A. M. Monge, and M. Kanninen. 2016. Climate change, multiple stressors and human vulnerability: a systematic review. Regional Environmental Change 16:2291-2302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-016-0974-7

Samimian-Darash, L. 2022. Uncertainty by design: preparing for the future with scenario technology. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, USA. https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501762451.001.0001

Samimian-Darash, L., and N. Rotem. 2019. From crisis to emergency: the shifting logic of preparedness. Ethnos 84(5):910-926. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2018.1551239

Simon, S., and S. Randalls. 2016. Geography, ontological politics and the resilient future. Dialogues in Human Geography 6(1):3-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820615624047

Soininen, N., S. Juhola, H. Kahiluoto, K. Korhonen-Kurki, and A. Salomaa. 2024. Theories of change in sustainability sciences. Pages 121-164 in T. Halonen, K. Korhonen-Kurki, J. Niemelä, and J. Pietikäinen, editors. The avenues to sustainability - key lessons from sustainability science. Gaudeamus, Helsinki, Finland.

Swilling, M. 2013. Economic crisis, long waves and the sustainability transition: an African perspective. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 6:96-115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2012.11.001

Tierney, K. 2019. Disasters: a sociological approach. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.

Tooze, A. 2022. Welcome to the world of the polycrisis. 28 October. Financial Times.

Virtanen, M. J., T. Reinekoski, L. Lahikainen, and T.-K. Lehtonen. 2022. Travels and trials of climate knowledge in Finnish municipalities. Science & Technology Studies 35(1):2-20. https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.97519

Wagenaar, H., and C. Wilkinson. 2015. Enacting resilience: a performative account of governing for urban resilience. Urban Studies 52(7):1265-1284. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013505655

Wolbers, J., and S. Kuipers. 2023. A renewed awareness: reinvigorating preparedness research for crisis and disaster management. Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy 14(3):184-187. https://doi.org/10.1002/rhc3.12277

Wolbers, J., S. Kuipers, and A. Boin. 2021. A systematic review of 20 years of crisis and disaster research: trends and progress. Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy 12(4):374-392. https://doi.org/10.1002/rhc3.12244

Zebrowski, C. 2019. Emergent emergency response: speed, event suppression and the chronopolitics of resilience. Security Dialogue 50(2):148-164. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010618817422