Social and Financial Resilience

The “Social and Financial Resilience” module focuses on the fact that resilient societies, which enable humans to cope with and recover from crises and to achieve new equilibria, depend not only on the resilience of technical infrastructure systems and digital ecosystems, but also on the resilience of their populations. Societies can only be resilient if individuals, social networks and societies’ financial systems are successful in anticipating and handling crises.

The module analyses how individual, social, and financial resilience are coupled and identifies conditions under which the respective types of resilience can be promoted so that a resilient society can be established. The module is structured into three Workstreams:

• Workstream 1 (Social Resilience) focuses on social resilience building, emphasizing the key role of trust. Positive and negative effects of digitalisation on social resilience will be investigated and different archetypes of citizens promoting or preventing social resilience will be identified.
• Workstream 2 (Financial Resilience) investigates how new technologies and markets, including FinTech tools, algorithmic trading, or dark pool markets can both disrupt and enhance resilience.
  
• Workstream 3 highlights the interdependence of Social and Financial Resilience. We will analyse whether and how a higher financial resilience contributes to a higher level of social resilience and vice versa.
  

Expected outcomes

This module will provide policymakers, regulators and world-shapers in Singapore, Switzerland and other countries with insights that will be useful for generating country-specific institutional and technological frameworks to ensure a high degree of resilience towards future crises. We will also show how and which measures could support social, digital and technology-related as well as financial systems in order to foster countries’ resilience.

The outcomes of this module will not only comprise science-based results but also many multilateral discussions with units implementing governmental policies. Such interactions will help making scientific results transferable to real-world applications and inspire science to discover new topics of practical societal relevance.