Pär Malmberg

The world is becoming increasingly unpredictable due to geopolitical and geoeconomic instability, climate change, and digitalization with its cyber threats. In response, society—with its public and private sector actors—seek resilience, the ability to handle, recover, and learn from disturbance. The growing need for resilience has sparked research and recent review articles make efforts towards conceptual harmonization. A central development theme deals with resilience-enhancing actions and resilience-conducive circumstances, i.e., resilience factors. Some commonality can here be seen around seven concepts: Awareness, Direction, Governance, Processes, Redundancy, Adaptability, and Cohesion. However, much of the research has been done at the firm or unit level rather than for societal sectors and societies. In addition, the interrelation between the resilience factors is rarely studied empirically and helping and hindering government action is equally rarely looked at in the context of a public-private system. This paper works in these research gaps by comparing emergent resilience factors in the literature with empirics for Sweden and sets out to discuss the causal relationships between resilience factors at the societal level and how government builds resilience in the market-based society. The results presented include a suggested causal model of resilience factors together with specific government action found to be critical to building societal resilience.