The significance of informal responsibilities and social infrastructure for enabling psychological resilience
The relatively free-flowing format of the Building Resilience game allowed the players at Nordregio Forum to imagine resilience responses that did not necessarily follow security strategies or previously instructed action. We also notice that people’s choices did not directly correlate with the immediate responsibilities of certain institutions, namely in the sense that many institutions were viewed as capable of taking on a broader set of responsibilities should a crisis hit. Public institutions (instead of private buildings) were clearly preferred for seeking trusted information and for use as gathering points. Institutions that serve their communities in a more general sense—libraries, community centres, even schools and churches—received most traction as communal anchors. These results suggest that psychological resilience is not solely about knowing what exactly should be done at a certain event; rather, knowing how and where to go to find out the what can play an essential role.
Another key finding from the play scenarios was the pivotal role that informal social structures and networks of trust played in the imagined communities, especially the smaller and more rural ones. The importance of these two pillars—public institutions able to take on a variety of roles and informal community actors—points to the already existing alternatives to resilience-related actions mainly as individual responsibility. The game discussions point towards investing in and maintaining everyday social infrastructure and long-term community building as a way of ensuring that people have access to spaces during possible crises that support them in remaining calm and making rational choices. A question that remains open, however, is whether the national states and regions should utilise informal community actors (such as voluntary neighbourhood organisers) and their positive informal influence to greater effect in building resilient communities, or whether assigning more formal responsibilities would, in fact, limit the flexibility that makes them so easily adaptable to different needs.