Resilience: Applications to welfare state understanding and analysis

This article engages with the concept of resilience, inquiring about its main features and developing its application to social policy and the welfare state. The article is organised around three main tasks: identifying the main elements of the concept, reviewing how it has been used in social policy scholarship, applying it to welfare state analysis. The particularity of resilience is its focus on the imperative to respond to shock and disturbance and this sets it apart from other concepts such as social investment. A resilience perspective most readily envisages three possible social policy functions: withstanding shock and risk, improving responsiveness and coping ability, enhancing preparedness for shocks and risks. Resilience is useful in envisaging a set of social policy function but the analysis cautions that, if we are to use the concept for social policy purposes, we need to do so with care. In particular, the concept’s relative lack of attention to structural factors, its over-emphasis on agency and process and its functionalist orientation to change limit its usefulness as a framework for understanding social policy and its reform.