Resilience in Environmental Governance: Public environmental agencies through Austerity, under Covid-19 and beyond.

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to confront many home-truths about the resilience (or lack thereof) of public environmental agencies to crises and rapid change. In many cases resilience within agencies has found to be low - based on fragmentation, de-funding and politicisation pressures. However, this paper argues the seeds of this poor resilience were sown long before the Covid-19 pandemic and will last for a long time after it. It explores this qualitatively through the case of a UK arms-length environmental agency. It utilises semi-structured interviews with the senior management team of the case agency conducted in the summer of 2020 at the height of the first wave of the pandemic. These are analysed through an organisational resilience framework. It was found that the political austerity agenda of 2010-2020 had significantly weakened the agency’s resilience. This was seen in its organisational structures, processes and culture; but also its external governance relationships and capacities for regulatory good governance and enforcement. It concludes by theorising why the damage of the austerity years on organisational resilience will be long lived and explores what this might mean for future environmental governance.