Finding Resilient Networks: Measuring Resilience in Post-Extreme Event Reconstruction Missions

To be effective, governance structures in rapidly changing environments must not only have the capacity to govern, but also the resilience to respond to that changing environment. In disaster management, resilience in response networks is a product of identifying and exchanging information among participating actors regarding on-going changes in the system. Monitoring changes on the ground, coordinating actions within your own organization and with other organizations, and adapting to changing conditions with available resources produces resilience. These are overlapping concepts that often correlate, inhibiting easy combination. This research proposes a measure built from four components of resilience: presence on the ground, internal coordination, external coordination, and adaptation, using ordinal scales in a network analytic framework. Each component is scored in network interactions, and a factor analysis examines correlations among the components and calculates factor loadings that can aggregate to a measure of resilience. Data come from two events of post-conflict reconstruction: the UN interventions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which began in 1995, and in Haiti, which began in 2004. The research proposes a measure of resilience that is based in a complex adaptive systems approach and applies that measure to these two cases to verify its effectiveness.