capacity for resilient futures
Systems & Strategy
Navigating complexity for resilient futures
Communities, governments and organisations are facing challenges that are complex, uncertain and interconnected. Climate change, water scarcity, shifting economies and social pressures cannot be solved by quick fixes. To build resilience, strategies need to look beneath events to the patterns and structures that shape them.
How we work
Our approach combines consultation, facilitation, research and co-design. We create processes that bring people together, build shared understanding and deliver strategies that are both rigorous and owned by those who must put them into action. We draw on our strengths in evaluative learning, governance and collaboration so strategies can adapt and improve as conditions change.
What we deliver
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Resilience strategies and adaptation pathways that help regions and organisations prepare for disruption and change with confidence
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Systems mapping and analysis that reveal the hidden structures influencing outcomes
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Decision-making frameworks that guide choices under uncertainty
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Facilitated workshops and engagement processes that build ownership and commitment
Systems change in practice
some examples of our work
Image: The Next Economy
Hay and Carrathool Regional Drought Resilience Plan
We partnered with The Next Economy to develop the 2024 Hay and Carrathool Regional Drought Resilience Plan, co-designed with over 300 participants, sets a 10-year vision for prosperous, connected, climate-resilient communities. Guided by five regional strategies and 26 priority actions, it builds adaptive capacity, strengthens local economies, and fosters collaboration to ensure the region remains healthy, vibrant, and prepared for future challenges.
Transformation of the Melbourne Sewerage System
The Australian Resilience Centre has been a long term contributor of resilience, adaptation and transformation expertise to the Melbourne Sewage Strategy 2018. The 50-year strategy aims to transform the Melbourne Sewerage System from a single-use linear system to a circular re-use system by 2070, enhancing Melbourne's treasured liveability for future generations.
Lifelines
We worked with a cross-disciplinary team of academics and practitioners on the innovative Lifelines project, funded by the Natural Hazards Research Australia. The Lifelines project aims to develop a conceptual framework and research agenda for understanding and improving the resilience of Australia's critical infrastructure, known as "lifelines" (like power, water, and transport) during natural hazards. The project involves a cross-disciplinary team, international literature review, and stakeholder engagement to define common understandings of lifeline resilience and identify key research needs to inform future policy and planning for disaster mitigation and recovery
Transformation for resilient landscapes and communities partnership
The Australian Resilience Centre participated in a five-year research partnership between researchers and natural resource management (NRM) practitioners collaborating on new approaches and different thinking to address intractable NRM and sustainability problems.
The research explored the value of the concepts of resilience thinking, adaptive governance and collective learning, separately and particularly together, in tackling these issues and enabling transformative action.
What is system transformation?
Transformation is about creating deliberate, deep change. It involves changing the underlying paradigms and structures to the way a system works, in part or in whole. Through this change, new patterns of thinking and practice emerge, with these patterns coalescing over time into a new approach. In doing so, transformation creates a new identity for a system. Society needs transformation in many areas if we are to create a sustainable, fair and just world.
There are few reliable or tested methods for driving transformation, it is an emerging area of both theory and practice. We have been at the forefront of developing and applying transformation processes in a range of settings, learning and improving our practice and approaches with our partners and collaborators as we go. We continue to develop and explore new ways of approaching and driving transformation in this emerging area, recognising there is no single recipe that will work everywhere.