This is a presentation by Professor Patricia Longstaff at the RUSI Resilience Conference 2014.

1. International cooperation for
RUSI P.H. Longstaff 2014
Resilience
P. H. Longstaff
Syracuse University

2. Disaster Cooperation requires trust
• Necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) Robert Aexelrod
• Long-term relationship
• Frequent contact with opportunity to cheat/cooperate
• Recognize other’s agents and interests
• Institutional memory to keep track of cheating (e.g., corruption)
RUSI P.H. Longstaff 2014
and cooperating
• Maybe industry or government or NGO
• Between
• Donor and Donor
• Donor and Recipient

3. We do not need to all agree
• We do need to expect that there will be
surprises in complex, unpredictable
environments
• “Disaster” (without a star)
RUSI P.H. Longstaff 2014
• We need to know the other’s interests -
what will guide them
• Regime A (SOP)
• Regime B (disaster plans)
• Regime C (everybody for themselves or a
guiding star)

4. Interests/Goals
• Resistance (The Citadel)
• In battle, surprise or superior force reduces
ability to resist
• Tendency to fail catastrophically
RUSI P.H. Longstaff 2014
• Trust high until failure
• Resilience (Surviving to operate another
day)
• Static: Bouncing back – return to “normal”
• Adaptive: Bouncing forward
• Trust built and reinforced often

5. Some current research efforts
for resilience
• NSF: Microscope v. Kaleidoscope
• Defining, Measuring and Predicting
• Trusted sources of information
• Citizens as assets
• Citizen Sensors then and now
RUSI P.H. Longstaff 2014
• Citizens as responders/organizers: Panic or partner
• Adaptive regulation/control
• For crisis
• Empowering Improvisation: human and technical
• For creeping disasters: Set up sensors that indicate when
• adaptive mechanisms are failing (e.g. Challenges cascade)
• tipping points are near
• buffers/reserves are near exhaustion

6. Breaking resilience:
Introduce surprises that are
• Too novel
• Black Swans and Unknown-Unknowns
• Too fast
• No connection to fast scale
• Slow to adapt (tight coupling, llooww lleeaarrnniinngg))
• Too many
• Not enough diversity or enough weak ties to resources
to deal with MULTIPLE TYPES
• A few surprises (experience) is good but too many is
bad