Resilient European societies? Unpacking the sources of resilience across Europe

To build resilient European societies, local authorities, national governments and international organizations, like the EU, have pursued policies, implemented measures, improved their risk and crisis management systems, and sought cross-border cooperation. Societal resilience is influenced by several factors: how institutions work to reinforce societal resilience and handle societal vulnerabilities, the level of social capital, and how individuals and groups perceive risks and are aware of them are few examples. The scholarship has generally focused on one or two of these factors at the same time to study of how resilience unfolds when a crisis occurs. This paper, on the contrary, aims at analysing how all those factors impact societal resilience through an all-inclusive approach developed within the H2020 project BuildERS, Building European Communities’ Resilience and Social Capital. This approach seeks to establish relationships among vulnerability, social capital, risk awareness and risk perception in resilience building. These links are not necessarily linear: for instance, strong social capital is not directly correlated with less vulnerability and more robust societies. The approach rather shows all the societal implications of considering these factors at the same time and how they can influence resilience building. The paper will present BuildERS all-inclusive approach drawing from the projects’ findings: then it will challenge the EU’s approach to resilience building by questioning to what extent the EU has included all these factors, by discussing which ones are more prominent, in which policy areas the EU resilience building is most successful, and which results the EU has obtained in boosting societal resilience for the European societies.