In brief

Kate Cochrane shares insights emerging from a workshop hosted by the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience, and the UK Resilience Academy (UKRA) which explored the idea of ‘relational resilience’ and what it might offer to emergency planning, response and recovery. Ultimately, ‘relational resilience’ is useful because it makes visible a part of resilience practice that is often assumed but rarely examined: the relationships through which people notice, understand, decide, support, challenge, and act together under pressure.

Kate Cochrane is Resilience Lead for NHS Highland, Co-Founder of the After Disasters Network, and Professor in Practice at the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University. Kate has worked in the resilience sector for over two decades, including supporting the Falkland Islands Government during the height of the Covid pandemic as Emergency Planning Officer.

In August, we attended a workshop hosted in partnership by the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University and the UKRA to explore the developing idea of ‘relational resilience’ and what it might offer to emergency planning, response and recovery. The starting point was not to prove that relationships matter. Across public services, community development, mediation, public health and resilience work, that argument has largely been won.

The more useful question is how relationships matter, and whether we can describe that in ways that help practice rather than simply decorate it.

The workshop brought together resilience and emergency planning, relational working and mediation, and synthetic learning environments using scenarios to support high-pressure decision-making. We wanted to test whether relational resilience could become more than a helpful phrase: whether it could help people notice more widely, understand need more carefully, and collaborate more deliberately before, during and after disruption.

Our working proposition is that relational resilience does not simply mean resilient relationships. It is concerned with the role relationships play in resilience practice.

Relationships shape what is noticed, whose knowledge is heard, who is believed, how decisions are challenged, where support travels, and whether action connects or collides.

Participants worked with Notice, Need, Collaborate: what is being noticed, what need is being surfaced, and what relationships are needed for action.

Alongside this, they used ‘Strong / Strained / Changing / Hidden’ as prompts for looking beyond formal lists of agencies, risks, vulnerable people or assets, and asking what else might be present around an incident.

The scenarios showed that noticing does not sit in one place. Formal responders and public services see part of the picture, but so do affected people, households, carers, schools, faith groups, businesses, local vets, farmers, elected members, voluntary organisations and informal groups. They are not all noticing the same things or connected to the same routes for making what they notice visible.

The discussion pushed noticing away from simple awareness and towards practice. One workshop question stayed with us: is noticing a skill? The answer seems to be yes, though not as another competency to add to a framework. Noticing depends on curiosity, permission, confidence, routes for escalation, and ways of holding onto weak signals before they are crowded out by the first available explanation.

Time became equally important. Need is not fixed at the point of impact. Some needs are visible immediately, some become clearer over days, and some only become apparent over weeks or months. Formal response structures often work to shorter timeframes than lived consequences. A relational approach asks not only what is needed now, but what may become visible later, and whether formal systems will still be listening when it does.

The workshop gave a richer account of what hidden can mean. Hidden realities include people who are not on formal lists, but also hidden strengths, dependencies, hazards, relationships, histories, routes of influence and forms of exclusion.

The word community was usefully unsettled. Community may mean place, identity, faith, interest, shared practice, online network, school catchment, professional network or shared exposure to risk. Communities may hold solidarity, care, knowledge, equipment and mutual aid, but also exclusion, gatekeeping, mistrust, unequal capacity and conflict. Community should not be treated as a single actor or a ready-made resilience resource.

One of the strongest cautions was that relational language must not quietly shift responsibility onto communities, volunteers and informal networks without capacity, authority or support. Informal relationships are not free infrastructure. When formal systems draw on community capacity, they need to understand what they are asking those relationships to carry, and what support is needed.

Building on the workshop, we are now developing this work into a series of short thought papers to stimulate further conversation. These are not final statements. They are a way of testing the language, inviting challenge, and exploring whether relational resilience helps people see something useful in emergency planning, response and recovery.

Alongside the thought papers, we are developing a small set of practice tools: a one-page inquiry framework, a relational intelligence prompt set, and short scenarios to test the approach with practitioners. The purpose is to find out whether relational resilience helps people notice something they would otherwise have missed, surface hidden or delayed needs, understand informal routes and gatekeepers, support better challenge, and avoid placing unsupported burden onto communities.

The workshop suggests that relational resilience is useful because it makes visible a part of resilience practice that is often assumed but rarely examined: the relationships through which people notice, understand, decide, support, challenge, and act together under pressure.