Recovery, Renewal, Resilience: Informing, supporting and developing guidance for local Resilience
Our project takes a systems approach to Recovery and Renewal from COVID-19 to build Resilience.
Description
Our project takes a systems approach to Recovery and Renewal from COVID-19 to build Resilience. We are developing a new framework which supports Resilience partners as they design Recovery Strategies that will reinstate local preparedness for future emergencies. The framework also supports those who design Renewal Initiatives that strive to deliver major transformations of local Resilience. The framework is being developed through extensive partnership working with local governments, and has led to an international standard (ISO 22393) on Recovery and Renewal for Resilience. Our framework, partnership working, and ISO 22393 aim to make a difference in the aftermath of COVID-19.
Our project team produces ‘The Manchester Briefing on COVID-19’, a fortnightly document that brings together international lessons which may prompt thinking on Recovery and Renewal from COVID-19. The Manchester Briefing is distributed to over 50,000 through a network of partners and is core to our engagement with the Resilient Cities Network which disseminates it to its 4,000 cities.
This research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to Covid-19 (Project number: ES/V015346/1), by The University of Manchester, and partners.
Did the Sendai Framework change or contribute to changes in your activities/organization? If so, how?
The Sendai Framework provides specific encouragement to academic, scientific, and research entities in regards to their contribution to disaster risk reduction. For example, we found motivation in the call to “promote common efforts in partnership with the scientific and technological community, academia and the private sector to establish, disseminate and share good practices internationally.” Furthermore, there is a renewed call so that these partnerships can support local communities and authorities, closing the gap between policy and science for decision-making.
What led you to make this commitment/initiative?
What was your position before making this Voluntary Commitment / prior to the Sendai Framework?
Recovery is "the process of rebuilding, restoring and rehabilitating the community following an emergency" (HMG Emergency Response and Recovery, 2013). For COVID-19, Recovery will involve all-of society (because everyone in the country has been affected to some extent) and whole-system (because every organisation, service and function has been affected). Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic we have deployed our research expertise in emergency Response and Recovery to support government. This has involved providing ongoing information about Recovery, producing rapid Response guides on aspects of Response and Recovery, and identifying opportunities for research to support the Recovery effort. This project builds on this initial work to understand how government develop plans for short-term, transactional 'Recovery' and how they think strategically about longer-term, ambitious, transformational change which we call 'Renewal'.
Deliverables and Progress report
Deliverables
Deliverables are the end-products of the initiative/commitment, which can include issuance of publications or knowledge products, outcomes of workshops, training programs, videos, links, photographs, etc.
This database will collate the lessons on recovery across the world and the UK, developed through our work on The Manchester Briefing, a document produced every two week that synthesises international lessons, along with expert topic briefings, on how to do Recovery and Renewal.
See our previous briefings and sign up to receive future briefings here https://www.alliancembs.manchester.ac.uk/news/recovering-from-covid-19/briefings/
We will use outputs from our work to develop guidance on recovering from pandemics. This will result in an International Standard that will provide a framework for how to assess the impacts of a crisis on communities, and address these by developing short-term Recovery actions and designing ambitious Renewal initiatives.
This will involve:
1. Test and enhance our framework internationally
2. Produce and International Standard (through the International Standards Organisation ISO)
3. Translate the ISO into a British Standard (BS)
4. Translate the ISO and BS to enhance UK National Government Guidance for Recovery
A theoretically underpinned, practice-tested framework to support thinking about Recovery and Renewal for local Resilience.
We will design an evaluation methodology to be used by local authorities to gauge the impact of the Recovery framework on their activity. The methodology will build on one we developed in the EU UScore2 project (which was standardized in ISO022392) and will enable local authorities to self-assess the extent to which they have addressed core areas from our Recovery framework.
Porgress report
The ESRC-funded ‘Recovery, Renewal, Resilience – Developing guidance for local Resilience’ project was successful in establishing a new international narrative for the aftermath of crises. Our project first advocated the term “Recovery and Renewal” – that traditional (transactional) Recovery could not address the inequalities exposed by COVID-19 so government should develop transformational Renewal initiatives to build Resilience (named Recovery, Renewal, Resilience - RRR). The Manchester Briefing (TMB) (27th April 2020) was the first to promote and design guidelines for “Recovery and Renewal” which are now prolific in the UK (e.g. local government’s strategies; LGA’s Recovery and Renewal Panels; ESRC’s RRR programme).
An evaluation study showed that The Manchester Briefing (TMB) has an instrumental impact on its intended audience. First published on 4th April 2020, 51 Issues of TMB have now shared >620 lessons from >105 countries. Through a global network of distributors TMB now reaches an audience of >85,000 people from over 140 countries.
Our project has produced:
- The international standard ‘ISO/TS 22393 – Guidelines for planning Recovery and Renewal (August 2021)
- A freely available ‘Database of International Lessons for Recovery and Renewal’
- >70 webinars and workshops
- 6 YouTube modules on how to plan to recover and renew
- Journal articles
More details in the attached.
Organizations and focal points
Implementing Organization(s)
- Alliance Manchester Business School
- Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester
Focal points
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