Artikel,
Toward a Comparative Framework for Measuring Resilience in Critical Infrastructure Systems
Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 14 (2): 114-125 (2012)
Zusammenfassung
A major problem in building community resilience in the face of disasters is
understanding resilience as an organizational property. A fundamental problem in this
understanding is the imbalance in disaster research between the large number of variables and
the relatively few cases involved. While resilience is a complex process with many variables at work
in determining outcomes, disasters afford far fewer cases with which to compare and understand
the multitude of these variables. This is especially true when disasters have a great deal of variety
and seldom occur in the same places over the same set of community and organizational variables.
Under these conditions it continues to be difficult to isolate causal, much less predictive, factors in
resilience. This research has found that far more events challenge resilience in communities and
organizations than might be assumed, were one looking only at disasters. In fact organizations can
signal their readiness for resilience through measurable responses to far smaller-scale performance
challenges. This paper presents a strategy for developing resilience indicators in critical
infrastructures that would allow comparative assessment of risks to resilience across
infrastructures in different sectors and communities. The strategy is illustrated in resilience
indicators developed within one infrastructure, a large and complex high-voltage electrical grid.
This strategy is extended and its potential analytic application to additional infrastructures and to
the assessment of compound inter-infrastructure reliability is discussed.
