Reflexive Governance for a Resilient Urban Crisis Recovery?

The COVID-19 has strained urban resilience on multiple levels. Yet, the crisis is argued to present an opportunity for enhancing cities’ resilience through transformative solutions while recovering from the current crisis. The Hague and Rotterdam are the only Dutch cities joining the Resilient Cities. Thereby, the two cities have committed to becoming more future-proof already before the pandemic by means of dedicated resilience teams and urban resilience strategies. The international network supports knowledge exchange between cities seeking to integrate resilience principles in COVID-19 recovery. The mechanisms of reflexive governance are arguably key to translating lessons learned from the crisis into transformative strategies, that address the corona crisis and other urban challenges in integrated ways. Reflexive governance is a self-critical, learning-oriented and participatory mode of governance that recognizes its own dynamics as part of the problem structure. This multiple case study fills the gap in empirical contributions on reflexive governance. It is the first study to embed reflexive governance in a crisis context and links it with the governance objective of adaptive urban resilience. It investigates how reflexive governance is enabled or restrained by an interplay of conditions generated by the corona crisis and the attributes of the governance network, in which it takes place. Accordingly, 18 in-depth interviews with actors related to the governance objective of adaptive urban resilience in Rotterdam and The Hague during the corona crisis were conducted. This qualitative research offers a unique perspective by including representatives of the resilience programs, policy-science interfaces, different departments of the municipalities, and NGOs in the sample. The results show how conditions generated by the corona crisis like the sense of urgency, increased problem complexity, and a window of opportunity for change and transformation boost reflexive governance. Also, specific attributes of the governance network have been identified as conducive of reflexive governance during the corona crisis. These encompass existing local and international networks for knowledge exchange, trust between actors from different knowledge and practice backgrounds, and boundary-spanners. At the same time, findings point to challenges to leveraging lessons learned from the crisis into recovery and resilience strategies with long-term orientation. These are, namely, the municipalities’ overarching resource focus on the immediate crisis response and short to medium-recovery measures, the departmentalized organizational structures of the municipalities in which the resilience programs are integrated, and the electoral cycles of local politics. Based on these insights, several practical recommendations are formulated. In brief, they encompass investing in diverse infrastructures for knowledge exchange, including boundary-spanning individuals, involving community actors in recovery planning to contextualize knowledge and match solutions with the local urban context, fostering networks across municipal departments around the boundary-object of urban resilience, and creating governance incentives for aligning crisis response, recovery, and adjacent transformation.