LIST OF PANELS

We are inviting scholars who have employed contemporary theories of the policy process to guide their analysis of policies designed to enhance urban resilience - e.g. Institutional Development Analysis (IAD) framework, Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), Punctuated Equilibrium (PET), Multiple Streams, Policy Diffusion and Social Construction and Policy Design.   Papers should clearly outline the research design, address its usefulness to reliably describe the observed resilience building process, and highlight research gaps in a comprehensive and easily accessible way.

More than half of the world's population lives in cities. The number is expected to rise to 70 percent by 2050 as more and more people seek access to basic infrastructures, services, jobs and education. Cities are thus constantly under pressure to develop local coping mechanism to enable urban living and working. At the same time the pressure to implement policies and regulations to reduce urban energy usage and green-house gas emissions and to locally manage the effects of climate change is mounting. The problem of declining revenues and increasing costs may leave hardly any scope for learning and innovation, but cities and their inhabitants constantly change nevertheless.  It is through small encounters between individuals within and across socio-ecological system and institutions that socio-economic relationships, norms, rules and systemic attributes emerge from this that either hinder or support these efforts. Urban systems that can deal with associated shocks and stresses without losing their key functions (e.g. supply clean water, police the street, collect waste) are defined as 'resilient'. Whereas the notion 'adaptation' often implies a one-off change, 'resilience' recognizes the fluent nature of urban hazards and the need for cities to remain resourceful and responsive (1). Inter-disciplinary research consortia, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, recently started to inductively assemble factors with potential to influence the resilience building process in an analytical framework that links actors to institutions and systems. Their ambition is to guide local practitioners who will need to assess the risks and make adaptation decisions that would allow an urban system to maintain their function after stresses and shocks punctuate its equilibrium. Due to the poly-centric nature of the policy process, their target group includes policy actors and specialists from different administrative levels and sectors who participate in the resilience building process at different time-scales and whose individual intentions and actions need to be coordinated and linked together into one well-founded strategy that benefit not just one group but a large number of individuals from different communities and walks of life. The proposed panel addresses in particular the usefulness of contemporary policy process theories to support and guide their efforts. It introduces approaches to structure the analysis of urban policies over time, and explores ways to develop a shared language to communicate, compare and verify research findings across academic disciplines, professions and administrative boundaries. (1) Tyler, S. and Moench, M., 2012, A framework for urban climate resilience. Climate and Development, 4, pp. 311-326.