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Resilient urban systems:
a socio-technical study of community scale climate change adaptation initiatives
3.3
Socio-technical framework
The method for assessment and analysis is structured around two frames of understanding socio-technical
system resilience. The first explicitly positions adaptive capacity as one ingredient of system resilience with
the capacity to re-shape, build or undermine a systems’ resilience. This framing is critical in the context
of this project because it recognises that the integrity of infrastructure systems is partly dependant on the
capacity to adapt, but also that, through adaptation, the system itself can change (e.g. in expectation of
new threats).
The second framing (Figure 3) recognises that infrastructure systems function through interactions between
people (users), physical systems (technical hardware) and institutions (governance and management
arrangements) and that elements within each domain can support or undermine system resilience.
Figure 3: Framework for socio-technical system resilience
Institutional
governance and
management
arrangements
Social, behavioural
and cultural
characteristics
Technical and
physical design
attributes