Resilience Building Policies and their Influence in Crisis Prevention, Absorption and Recovery

Abstract

Resilience building has become one of the most promising strategies for crisis managers to improve the security and proper functioning of critical infrastructures (CIs). Therefore, crisis managers will benefit from both general and detailed guidance for building and maintaining CI resilience levels. This paper aims to contribute to this purpose by presenting a framework that helps crisis managers improve the resilience level of CIs based on internal and external aspects of the CI that are often overlooked. This framework proposes sixteen resilience policies that have been suggested as influential in developing resilience. The influence and relative effectiveness of each policy in promoting the resilience of the system is postulated. The framework was reviewed and validated through an expert panel and a Delphi process providing grounded support for the evaluation and prioritization of the resilience policies. The results show that internal policies are the most influential ones when avoiding a crisis occurrence and external policies are most helpful when bouncing back to the usual state.