What makes Local Governments Resilient?

Local governments operate in contexts of polycrisis (Duit & Galaz, 2008), defined as a complex system of interconnected crises that transcend specific areas and influence each other. From the Great Recession to the pandemic, including migration, climate or housing crises, we have seen local governments having to respond to these external shocks and threats. These events test their ability to maintain services and sometimes reshape the conditions under which local autonomy and institutional capacity are exercised. As Ladner (2017) argues in relation to austerity, external constraints may weaken local discretion but can also trigger institutional adaptation, strategic reorientation and renewed investment in local government. In this context, resilience refers to the capacity of systems —whether ecological, social, or economic— to withstand shocks and stresses, adapt to changing conditions, and transform themselves when necessary (Taşan-Kok et al. 2013)
Resilience policies, therefore, are not simply about reacting to crises, but rather about planning and investing to minimize the impacts of future events and ensure the well-being of the community in the medium and long term. In this sense, as highlighted in the European Commission's Strategic Foresight Reports (2020, 2025), resilience must go beyond merely managing the response to crises and focus on fostering anticipation, adaptation, and the sustainable transformation of places and their communities. Resilience policies are thus an emerging area of public policy, intrinsically local in nature, resulting from a dynamic process that combines three interrelated capacities: (1) Anticipation (preparation and forecasting), (2) Response (absorption and management of impacts), and (3) Adaptation and transformation (learning and structural improvement). This panel examines local resilience understood not only as survival or recovery, but as the ability to reorganise, learn, mobilise resources and respond to changing conditions.
Previous research has shown how austerity reforms can constrain local autonomy while generating processes of institutional adaptation (Navarro & Pano, 2019), or how differences in organisational and administrative capacity condition municipalities’ ability to take advantage of new policy opportunities (González Medina & Navarro, 2022; Navarro & González Medina, 2023).
Building on these ideas, the panel looks for attracting papers presenting cases in which local governments have exercised resilience in response to crises, external pressures or significant institutional challenges.