Let's Join Forces: Institutional Resilience and Multistakeholder Partnerships in Crises

Area of Science:

• Social Sciences
• Political Science
• Sociology

Background:

• Institutional resilience is the capacity of organizations to withstand and adapt to adversity.
• Crises, particularly economic and refugee crises, significantly challenge institutional resilience.
• The relationship between institutional resilience and crisis management remains underexplored, especially concerning multistakeholder involvement.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how multistakeholder partnerships in work integration contribute to institutional resilience during crises.
• To analyze crises as moral challenges, emphasizing the role of actor responsibility in engagement.
• To develop a framework and propositions on enhancing institutional resilience through multistakeholder collaboration in moral crises.

Main Methods:

• Comparative process tracing across three European countries.
• Analysis of multistakeholder partnerships in work integration.
• Conceptualization of factors influencing institutional resilience and actor leadership during crises.

Main Results:

• Moral crises can galvanize fragmented efforts into joint action through identified pull and push factors.
• Nested contingencies of institutional resilience are conceptualized, highlighting interactions between institutional capacity, crisis adversity, and precursors.
• Actor leadership in enhancing institutional resilience is conceptualized under specific contextual conditions.

Conclusions:

• Multistakeholder collaboration is crucial for building institutional resilience in the face of moral crises.
• Anticipatory agency and moral pro-activity can prevent crises and benefit both institutional resilience and participating organizations.