Walking the post-pandemic talk : how to incorporate resilience in better regulation systems

Abstract

• The pandemic revealed at once the lack of preparedness of many governments, and the inadequacy of existing scientific advice mechanisms in times of emergency. • Use of foresight techniques and meaningful scientific advice can help governments anticipate possible low-probability, high-impact events that could have a disruptive impact on the economy and society. However, these techniques should be fully embedded in the policy cycle. • Policies should be stress-tested regularly to ensure that they remain relevant and able to withstand unforeseen shocks. • The bottom-up nature of contemporary policy evaluation is, by design, incompatible with long-term objectives such as ensuring systemic resilience. • Rather than cost-benefit analysis, a more suitable decision-making criterion in policy appraisal would be the adoption of multi-criteria analysis, under the condition that criteria adopted for decision-making incorporate resilience alongside other policy goals, such as sustainability.