A Strategic Approach for Sustainability and Resilience Planning within Municipalities

Sammanfattning: This research started by recognizing the role that local, municipal governments can play to reach the global goal of sustainability. In addition,a municipal community must be able to cope with change and disturbance in order to successfully achieve a sustainable future. This research investigates how improving municipal resilience can be a strategy to reach sustainability, and answers the primary research question “How can planning resilience help a municipal government lead a community towards sustainability?” Research was conducted through an inter-disciplinary literature review focusing on identifying key characteristics of resilience.Other methods included diagramming exercises to identify factors which foster or undermine resilience characteristics. Finally, implementable measures where identified which municipalities can implement to improve resilience and sustainability. These measures were selected using a synergy matrix, which helps select measures which most support principles for sustainability and resilience characteristics. The feasibility and current adoption of such measures was checked through interviews with municipal experts of Swedish, Canadian and Finnish municipalities.