International Conference on Resilient Systems 2026 - Resilience, Social Structures and Transformation

Track: Resilience, Social Structures and Transformation

INTRODUCTION TO THE TRACK

Resilience literature increasingly recognizes that socio-technical and environmental systems are embedded within normative, power-laden, and societal contexts. This “social turn” in resilience discourse has prompted researchers to frame resilience not just as persistence or recovery, but as a path to social transformation. As a result, practitioners are encouraged to clarify the type of “resilience society” they seek to foster through their interventions – one that contributes to addressing deep-rooted sociocultural structures that perpetuate inequality, racial discrimination, and injustice. Nevertheless, resilience approaches have not yet fully developed a theory or clearly defined how resilience interacts with social and cultural structures, which limits our understanding of both its potential for transformation and its normative implications.

This track aims to strengthen the dialogue between current approaches to resilience systems (i.e., Systems Engineering, Self-Organizations, Complex Adaptive Systems) and debates on social embeddedness and causality in contemporary sociological theory, in order to refine both explanatory and normative approaches for steering resilience toward social transformation. Authors are invited to theorize or present empirical illustrations of socio-cultural embeddedness and potential trajectories of transformation, offering insights into how socio-technical and environmental systems can (and should) build resilience to sustain and adapt their functionality while also developing mechanisms for social and cultural transformation.

TRACK TOPICS

Contributors are asked to elaborate explanatory and normative frameworks to answer the following questions:

Explanatory questions:

How to theorize the socio-economic, political, and cultural dimensions of the structural contexts in which socio-technical and environmental systems operate?
How do social and cultural structures influence the adaptation capacity of people within socio-technical and environmental systems when faced with shocks and stresses?
What are the mechanisms by which socio-technical and environmental resilience contribute to the persistence or transformation of social and cultural structures?

Normative questions:

What kinds of socio-cultural transformation trajectories might be desirable for shaping the design, management, and governance of socio-technical and environmental resilience systems?
Which processes in resilience design and practice favour participation and deliberation for social transformation, and which ones prevent it or discourage it?
Which deliberative strategies can be employed to foster collective agency and awareness of socio-cultural embeddedness among actors confronting shocks and stresses?
What responsibility arrangements or frameworks are best suited for desirable transformation in societies exposed to shocks and stresses?

The track will open with a keynote panel introducing realist sociological theory as an approach to theorizing the interplay between resilience and sociocultural structures and systems, discussing commonalities and divergences with current approaches to resilience (i.e., Systems Engineering, Self-Organizing, and Complex Adaptive Systems).

Dr. Leigh Price, Associate Professor, Faculty of Teacher Education and Pedagogy Department of Pedagogy, University of Inland Norway (To be confirmed)

Dr. Price will introduce a “third generation” of systems theory, which overcomes the reductionism and determinism of the first (positivist) generation and the relativism of the second (constructivist) generation (Price, 2023). The third generation conceptualises (social) systems as entities irreducible to agents, their observable relational patterns, or an analyst’s “mental model.” This approach supports an ethical framework informed by the principle of homeostasis, in which a deeper understanding of human subjective experience within social structures refines our approach to knowledge acquisition and action.

Dr. Karim Knio. Associate Professor in International Political Economy and Governance at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Dr. Knio will address the contributions of social theory to conceptualise the emergence and persistence of sociocultural systems (Knio, 2023). He will raise the need for an explanatory framework that studies causation in sociocultural systems, as well as why and how sociocultural systems evolve across different times and scales than socio-technical and environmental systems. This approach emphasizes the importance of theorizing the broader social environment in which socio-technical and environmental systems operate, rather than confining the analysis of technical or environmental systems to their internal boundaries or taking the “socio-cultural” dimension only as their given background.

Prof. Neelke Doorn. Full Professor ‘Ethics of Water Engineering’ at the Department of Values, Technology and Innovation at Delft University of Technology (To be confirmed)

Prof. Doorn will reflect on the alternative conceptualizations of “emergence,” social systems, and “sociocultural” structures introduced by Dr. Knio and Dr. Price. Specifically, she will consider whether it matters to conceptualize social systems as existing above and beyond individual actions when addressing the question of defining responsibility arrangements in concrete situations (Doorn & Copeland, 2023).

TYPE OF CONTRIBUTIONS: