Abstract
This introductory article to the special issue of PP&A on “Robust Governance in Turbulent Times,” defines the concepts of societal turbulence and robust governance and explains their relevance for understanding the current predicament characterized by polycrisis. It also explains the reasons for expecting multilevel governance, hybrid governance and societal intelligence to support and scaffold robust governance, and why liquid professionalism may amplify the impact of these three governance factors. The arguments are brought together in a theoretical framework intended to inspire future crisis management research and has already generated interesting new research contributions. The conclusion points out avenues for future research.
Keywords
Looking at history in the long-durée, it becomes clear that human societies have always been haunted by destabilizing events, developments, and demands that foster change. Disruptive events, such as wars, migration waves, famine, natural catastrophes, and power struggles, have forced people to change their way of living. Key developments in scientific knowledge, technological capacities, and political ideas have spurred the rapid transformation of social, economic, and political systems. Demands for the satisfaction of basic needs, social equality, the right to speak up, and the ability to influence key decisions have created conflicts and struggles with unpredictable outcomes. New and unforeseen events, developments, and demands have often merged and exacerbated one another, creating societal turmoil and disrupting the stable reproduction of society.
While spells of societal turbulence have caused social and economic devastation and political chaos, it would be wrong to think of people as mere victims of disruptive forces, since they have often harnessed problems, challenges, and opportunities to adapt and transform their way of living, sometimes even for the better. Frequently, people have exploited the openness of turbulent times to create new and promising futures and thus have contributed to maintaining or even improving economic prosperity, social cohesion, and individual security. Attempts at adapting and innovating in the face of turbulence have made human societies relatively robust in the sense of being able to uphold some basic human ambitions and goals by means of minor and major adjustments triggered by sudden and unpredictable dynamics.
This special issue takes an organizational perspective on governmental efforts to achieve robustness in the face of turbulence. While focusing on societal turbulence, it addresses the capacity of the public sector to produce robust governance in the face of heightened societal turbulence. We strongly believe that public governance and administration scholars should further investigate how to respond robustly to rising turbulence in society. The days are over when we can trick ourselves into believing that state bureaucracies can secure world peace, social welfare, and continued economic prosperity while fending off occasional crises by means of swift and effective crisis management.
We are by no means denying that the Western world has experienced an extraordinarily long period of social, economic, and political stability in the postwar era. The mid-20th century saw the growth of public bureaucracy, aiming at a stable, rule-bound regulation of society and the economy, and the rise of organized capitalism based on interorganizational negotiation and social compromise. In the postwar period, liberal democracy spread and fostered a stable order based on political parties formed around clear class cleavages. Elected governments adopted Keynesian economic regulation aimed at steering society clear of economic crises and created the modern welfare state as a tool for socializing individual risks. The Fordist era of mass production and mass consumption spurred economic growth and prosperity based on new technologies that rarely disrupted the basic technological paradigm. The nature and climate crises were seen more as negative externalities and less as challenges to economic and social life. Finally, Pax Americana created a relatively peaceful world based on undisputed U.S. hegemony.
While everything was peaceful and quiet for a brief period, the bubble ultimately burst in the 1970s onwards. There was growing criticism of bureaucracy, corporatist arrangements eroded, new political cleavages emerged, economic stagflation undermined Keynesianism, the welfare state was found to create a new set of risks, the era of Fordism crumbled, and Pax Americana was replaced by global competition for hegemony. In addition, new technologies tend to disrupt social, economic, and political life; globalization shrinks the world, transforming minor local crises into major global ones; and planetary limits to growth threaten life on Earth. As if this were not enough, we have recently been hit by a growing number of unpredictable societal dynamics triggered by a global financial crisis, a deepening refugee crisis, a raging pandemic, military conflicts, terrorist attacks, energy shortages, supply crises, and increasing floods and wildfires, among others. Researchers now talk about a ‘polycrisis’ that arises when multiple enduring crises overlap and exacerbate one another (Lawrence et al., 2024; Zeitlin et al., 2019). In sum, societal turbulence seems to have become the “new normal.”
Heighted societal turbulence challenges the ability of the public sector to uphold its core functions, purposes, and values. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a case in point. The exponentially growing number of infected people put pressure on healthcare systems, and the more or less draconian lockdowns of schools, workplaces, and public institutions problematized the ability to deliver education and social well-being to children, maintain economic growth and prosperity, secure a high level of employment and reduce poverty, and provide proper care for the elderly, the disabled, and other vulnerable groups in society.
Rising societal turbulence forces public organizations at different levels to respond to disruptive events, developments, and demands to uphold key public functions, purposes, and values. Flexible adaptation and proactive innovation become necessary when public goals and ambitions are jeopardized and traditional ways of doing things in the public sector are rendered obsolete by sudden and unpredictable dynamics. To illustrate, when COVID-induced lockdowns forced public schools to close and send children home, schoolteachers were quick to switch to online learning and adapt their teaching methods to the new situation. When schools re-opened, the risk of creating conditions conducive to the spread of the coronavirus was mitigated by sorting children into new kinds of “bubble groups,” applying new rules for hygiene, and increasing the use of outdoor teaching.
We need to better understand how public organizations can meet rising societal turbulence with robust governance that aims to change what needs to be changed in order to preserve what must be preserved. Here, we can undoubtedly learn a great deal from the crisis management literature (’t Hart et al., 2001), and not least from research on so-called High Reliability Organizations that are designed to operate in turbulent environments (LaPorte, 2007; Sutcliffe, 2011). However, much of the crisis management literature focuses on brief moments of crisis rather than on enduring spells of heightened turbulence. Moreover, it tends to emphasize how to “bounce back” to the status quo rather than how to “bounce forward” toward new and better futures (see Boin and McConnell, 2007). Hence, in an attempt to explore the potential benefits of responding to enduring periods of turbulence by drawing on a “dynamic conservatism” (Ansell et al., 2015) that aims to change in order to preserve, we ask: How can public organizations respond to societal turbulence with robust governance, and how can key governance factors—such as multilevel governance, hybrid governance, and negotiated societal intelligence—support and scaffold robust governance? This pertinent question is addressed through concept formation and theory building, leading to the development of a theoretical framework that will broadly inform the empirical studies presented in this special issue.
The next two sections define and explain the key concepts of societal turbulence and robust governance. The third section introduces three governance factors that may support the development of robust governance responses to heightened societal turbulence. The discussion section brings these concepts together in a theoretical framework and reflects on its limits, achievements, and applications. The final section summarizes the argument and sketches a future research agenda.
Societal turbulence
Societal reproduction and efforts to govern socioeconomic development may occasionally take the form of smooth sailing in calm waters, where most parameters are stable, change is incremental, and public decision-makers have the time to carefully consider future directions and next steps. As argued above, such periods of relative peace and quiet tend to be the exception rather than the rule, since most of the time human societies find themselves in rough seas. As the ancient Greek philosophers recognized, turbulent weather—with high winds, large waves, and strong currents—creates challenges for the captain and may blow a ship in unforeseen directions, harboring unexpected dangers.
This sea metaphor is not accidental. Derived from the Latin turbulentia, meaning perturbation, trouble, and irregularity, the notion of turbulence gained increasing prominence after the 2nd World War in the field of fluid mechanics, where it refers to unpredictable fluid dynamics, such as stormy weather, cloud movements, river currents, and fire whirls (Eckert, 2012; Schmitt, 2017). Researchers in fluid mechanics insist that turbulence describes irregular but not wholly disorderly movements. Sreenivasan (1999: 383) notes: “The swirling motion of fluids that occurs irregularly in space and time is called turbulence. However, this randomness, apparent from a casual observation, is not without some order.” When observing turbulent fluids, we can therefore discern irregular patterns in their dynamic movements. Turbulence is not the same as chaos, since it involves “the co-existence of structure and randomness” (Falkovich and Sreenivasan, 2006).
In the social sciences, references to “turbulence” began appearing in the late 1960s, when the postwar consensus began breaking down (Easton, 1965; Emery and Trist, 1965; Waldo, 1971). Drawing on fluid mechanics, Popper famously distinguished between irregular, disorderly, and unpredictable “cloud problems” versus regular, orderly, and predictable “clock problems,” and urged greater attention to the former (Popper, 1965). The turbulence concept has since become increasingly common across disciplines, including international politics (Brown et al., 2008; Rosenau, 1997), macro- and microeconomics (Ashworth and Heyndels, 2002; Tsai and Yang, 2014), natural resource management (Allen et al., 2011; Dobbs et al., 2021), and the broad field of public administration and governance (Ansell et al., 2017; Carstensen et al., 2023; Drucker, 1993; Nolte et al., 2020; Zhong et al., 2023). Turbulence points to the limits of efforts to replace temporal disorder with stable spatial order.
Despite growing recognition of the challenges posed by turbulence, scholarship in this area has remained relatively marginal, perhaps reflecting preferences among many social scientists and journals for studies of routine governance and administration in stable contexts that facilitate the use of sophisticated quantitative methods and the testing of parsimonious causal models. Fortunately, scholarship on societal turbulence is now expanding. A first step in building further momentum is to define the concept. Drawing on Ansell et al. (2024), we define societal turbulence as a more or less enduring situation characterized by unpredictable, uncertain, and unsteady dynamics arising from the contingent interactions among highly variable, inconsistent, and uncertain events, developments, and demands. Defined in this way, societal turbulence has ontological status, since no social, political, or economic system can fully constitute or protect itself from dislocating events, developments, and demands (Laclau, 1990). This is confirmed at the ontic level of empirical reality, where “all that is solid melts into air” (Berman, 1983) due to increasing interpenetration and causal connectedness across scales, regions, countries, sectors, organizations, and types of social agency. These dynamics generate troubling events that cannot be fully domesticated and therefore challenge entrenched ideas, dogmas, routines, and regularities.
A basic level of turbulence will always exist due to the constant emergence of unforeseen problems that are not only complex in cognitive and political terms but also tend to evolve over time, thereby preventing routine problem-solving. Turbulence may spike when multiple disparate events, developments, and demands contingently combine to create a perfect storm. To illustrate, during the British “winter of discontent” in 1978‒79 (see Hay, 1996), a series of cultural and ethnic clashes involving skinheads and punks occurred alongside widespread strikes by private- and public-sector trade unions, causing significant public disruption during one of the coldest winter in 16 years. These developments coincided with internal disputes within the governing Labour Party and a hostile press response to its failure to resolve the economic crisis. This confluence of cultural change, the decline of corporatism, the erosion of Keynesianism, and the rise of the New Right created a highly turbulent situation that contributed to the election of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Heightened turbulence may also be triggered by political, cultural, socioeconomic, or environmental crises—defined as critical moments of systemic threat that may lead to either collapse or recovery (Rosenthal et al., 2001)—that are not properly managed and spill over into other systems. Unintended negative consequences of crisis management may generate additional waves of turbulence. Interestingly, societal turbulence triggered by crisis management, such as draconian lockdowns, large public-sector cutbacks, and declarations of a state of emergency, may persist long after the immediate threats have been mitigated.
It is often easier to detect crisis-induced turbulence than endogenous turbulence resulting from the contingent interaction among numerous relatively independent events, demands, and developments that produce problems, stress, and disruption. Crisis-induced turbulence begins with a dramatic shock, generating waves of unforeseen, society-wide repercussions that expand across sectors and domains. By contrast, endogenous turbulence tends to emerge gradually, as seemingly unrelated problems and conflicts continue to grow, multiply, and exacerbate each other to create a disruptive and tumultuous period in which policy implementation and goal attainment become difficult and changes in the modus operandi of the public sector are required to uphold key commitments.
It is possible to further operationalize the societal turbulence concept to render it amenable to public administration and governance research. Societal turbulence may be deemed present if:
First, an unexpected and troubling situation has emerged that makes it clear to key governance actors that some core functions, goals, and values of the public sector can no longer be maintained based on its current modus operandi.
Second, closer analysis reveals a complex and dynamic interaction among multiple events and developments that generate new demands, tensions, and maladaptive governance practices, thereby intensifying the situation.
Finally, the dynamic interaction between events, developments, and demands creates unique, evolving, and unpredictable conditions for public governance and administration that force public governors to observe and respond rather than predict and deliver.
Equipped with this operationalization of societal turbulence, we now turn to how it can be addressed through robust governance that responds to these unpredictable dynamics.
Robust governance
Societal turbulence seems to have become the norm, which demands that public governors find answers to questions about how to deliver effective and legitimate governance in tumultuous situations. Classical rationalistic strategies of forecasting, preparedness, and insurance are of limited use when confronting turbulent problems characterized by dynamic unpredictability (Ansell et al., 2024). It is impossible to forecast, prepare for, or insure oneself against what is akin to a zombie attack in the sense of involving a series of “unknown unknowns.” Alternatively, the increasingly fashionable resilience and agility strategies both pay full attention to the rise of turbulence and to the need for a strategic response to unpredictable perturbations. Yet, the conclusions they draw about the type of strategic action that follows from this appreciation of turbulence differ considerably.
While some researchers have stressed the importance of adaptation as part of a “dynamic resilience” strategy (Chen et al., 2022; Deloukas and Apostolopoulou, 2017), the core of the classical “static resilience” strategy is to bounce back by restoring the equilibrium that existed before the system was disturbed by turbulent events (Folke, 2006; Holling, 1973; Walker et al., 2006). The problem with this strategy is not only that a return to the status quo ante may be neither desirable nor feasible, but also that “bouncing back” precludes the possibility of exploiting turbulence to reach a new and better state by “bouncing forward” in the hope of “building back better.”
If the resilience strategy is in this sense too backward-looking, the alternative agility strategy goes too far in the opposite direction in its restless endeavor to embrace, learn from, and harness turbulence—and perhaps even orchestrate perturbations to stimulate creativity, perpetual innovation, and revolutionary change (Johnson, 2018; Light, 2005; Room, 2011; Sarasvathy et al., 2014). While this strategy may work well for small private start-up companies that are ready to constantly reinvent themselves as long as they remain profitable, public organizations must aim for “ambidexterity” seeking to combine the stable delivery of core functions, purposes, and values with ongoing innovative adjustments (Palm and Lilja, 2017).
Robust governance offers an alternative to the stark choice between the backward-looking resilience strategy and the radically transformative agility strategy by insisting that, during spells of heightened societal turbulence, the modus operandi of the public sector must be transformed to uphold its key functions, goals, and values (Ansell et al., 2024). Rather than viewing change and stability as mutually exclusive opposites, the concept of robust governance is premised on the idea that change is necessary to secure stable functional performance, and that stability in key functions, purposes, and values enables, guides, and constrains the change process (Ansell et al., 2023; Carlson and Doyle, 2002).
In colloquial language, “robustness” is associated with the strength, vigor, and sturdiness of an object that makes it unlikely to break or fail. In mathematics, there is a longstanding discussion of robustness referring to the insensitivity of an estimation technique to small departures from idealized assumptions (Hogg, 1979). In the 1990s, scientific discussions of robustness began to emerge elsewhere in the natural sciences (see Jen, 2005). In chemistry, there is a focus on robust processes (Song, 2004), dynamics (Deng et al., 2010), and substances (Zang et al., 2021). In biology, robustness is seen as a property of living systems, whether in reference to cells (Stelling et al., 2004), complex biological systems (Krakauer, 2006), or entire ecosystems (Cai and Liu, 2016; Kitano, 2004). In engineering, robustness is a quality of systems that are functionally reliable in the presence of probable and improbable failures (Carlson and Doyle, 2002; Taguchi et al., 2000), and in computer science it refers to software and computer networks capable of performing correctly in situations involving expected user or data failure (Willinger and Doyle, 2005).
In the social sciences, early discussions of robustness emerged in the work of Leifer (1991) and Ansell and Padgett (1993). Economists discuss the robustness of market economies capable of withstanding the stresses and strains wrought by human imperfections (Pennington, 2011). Environmental planners call for strategies to develop sustainable energy systems that are robust in the face of different climate change scenarios and that perform well even when confronted with surprises or catastrophes (Lemperts and Schlesinger, 2000). Disaster management researchers claim that robust disaster relief depends on combining pre-positioned relief supplies with supplies procured after a disaster (Velasques et al., 2020). Policy analysts focus on robust policy designs with the capacity to perform well across different contexts and to survive internal and external perturbations (Capano and Woo, 2018; Ferraro et al., 2015). Howlett (2019) argues that the deliberate sequencing of policy instruments is key to ensuring robustness in turbulent times, and Carstensen and colleagues (2023) highlight the role of bricolage, which combines and repurposes elements from competing and co-existing governance paradigms.
Based on an interdisciplinary review of recent robustness literature, Ansell et al. (2024) define robust governance as the capacity to uphold key public functions, purposes, and values in times of heightened turbulence by means of flexible adaptation and proactive innovation in public policy, regulation, and service delivery. Robust governance aims to sustain effective and legitimate governance by adapting and innovating both the form and content of public outputs (Ansell et al., 2021), as well as the institutions through which they are produced and delivered (see Bentzen and Torfing, 2023). Adaptation concerns the extent to which existing governance tools are modified to fit new and changing problems and situations, whereas innovation concerns the development and implementation of creative solutions that break with conventional wisdom and established practices. When adapting and innovating public value solutions, public governors may also redefine the public functions, purposes, and values they seek to uphold. Hence, in some cases, robust governance may both transform the modus operandi of the public sector and rearticulate its goals (Jen, 2005).
The adaptation and innovation associated with robust governance should not only contribute to upholding key ambitions and commitments of the public sector but also avoid increasing the overall level of turbulence. This requirement calls for continuous efforts to balance stability and change: there should be sufficient change to ensure the functional performance of the public sector, but not so much that it triggers new turbulent developments. It is also important to note that robust governance is not a one-off intervention but rather a series of adaptive and innovative actions unfolding over time and across contexts. Hence, when governing robustly in the present through some combination of adaptation and innovation, public governors help to ensure future capacity for further adaptation and innovation. Indeed, maintaining flexibility and keeping options open is a key feature of robust governance (Leifer, 1991; Sørensen and Ansell, 2023). To illustrate, if a new law is created in response to rising turbulence, it should include built-in mechanisms allowing for revision in the face of new perturbations.
List of robustness strategies.
Situated actors may deploy one or more of these robustness strategies based on a mixture of pragmatic reasoning, trial and error, and organizational learning. However, institutional conditions inherent in formal laws and rules, informal procedures, norms, and values, as well as the distribution of power, may structure and guide their pursuit of some robustness strategies rather than others (March and Olsen, 1995). Actors may expand their repertoire of robustness strategies as a result of organizational learning. Hence, while the above list is by no means exhaustive, it captures important strategies for adapting and innovating public governance in turbulent times.
Governance factors conducive to robust governance
The new and expanding research on robust governance emphasizes the impact of both institutional and actor-related conditions on the ability to govern robustly (Ansell et al., 2021, 2024), but it does not offer systematic reflections on the role that different governance factors may play in the development of robust governance responses in times of heightened societal turbulence. To compensate for this benign neglect, we consider how three key governance factors can support robust governance: multilevel governance, hybrid governance, and negotiated societal intelligence. Our choice of these governance factors is supported by the observation that societal turbulence penetrates and affects different levels of governance, problematizes entrenched forms of governance, and is difficult to make sense of and fully comprehend. It goes without saying that legal regulation is also an important governance factor affecting efforts to respond robustly to crisis-induced turbulence, but that aspect is covered elsewhere (Sørensen et al., 2025).
Our expectation is that these three governance factors support the pursuit of robust governance in different ways (see Torfing et al., 2025): (1) interaction between public and private actors across multiple levels of governance may prompt and legitimize the adaptation and innovation of public value solutions (Kuhlmann and Franzke, 2022); (2) hybrid forms of governance, combining different ways of organizing, governing, and leading public organizations, allow public governors to mix and match tools and solutions in a flexible manner in the pursuit of adaptation and innovation (Eckhard et al., 2021); and (3) societal intelligence, produced through negotiated knowledge production involving elected politicians and their administrative aides, scientific experts, and lay actors, facilitates joint sensemaking and expands the range of feasible solutions, thereby enhancing adaptation and innovation (Enst et al., 2014; Kettle et al., 2014). Let us take a closer look at each governance factors to define it more precisely and offer a set of conjectures about how it may be conducive to robust governance.
Multilevel governance
The efforts of public governors to respond to rising societal turbulence with robust governance are conditioned by political and administrative action taking place at other levels of government. Hence, local governance networks are embedded in multilevel governance systems that enable and/or constrain robust governance (Caponio et al., 2023). The connections between the local level and strategies, policies, and actors at the regional, national, and supranational levels may be strong and well-developed or weak and underdeveloped. Still, the local actors depend on the provision of guidelines, resources, and information, as well as the delegation of authority and the ability to mobilize support for new initiatives.
The multilevel governance debate has expanded steadily since the publication of the seminal works of Hooghe and Marks (2001), Bache and Flinders (2004), and Piattoni (2010), producing competing definitions of the concept. The main strand of literature defines multilevel governance as a complex governance architecture in which the once-sovereign power of national governments is distributed across a wider spectrum of interdependent yet autonomous public and private organizations operating at local, regional, national, and supranational levels (Bache and Flinders, 2004; Hooghe and Marks, 2001; Marks, 1993). A more process-oriented alternative to this architectural conceptualization tends to focus on how policymaking increasingly takes place in multilevel governance settings in which policies are uploaded, downloaded, and negotiated within networks of distributed governance actors (Piattoni, 2010; Scholten, 2013). This process-oriented conceptualization reflects the fact that the formulation and implementation of public policy and governance solutions involve not only involve negotiation between public and private actors at the same level but also interaction with actors across levels of government (Alcantara et al., 2016; Alcantara and Nelles, 2014; Caponio and Jones-Correa, 2018). A key strength of this new conceptualization of multilevel governance as distributed policymaking processes based on negotiation is that it captures both horizontal and vertical relationships and considers both formal and informal processes. Its focus on policymaking in relation to specific problems and challenges renders it particularly well suited for the study of robust governance.
Multilevel governance plays a key role in emergency response, which requires collaboration across all levels of government, as well as between public and private actors (Arendt and Alesh, 2015; Comfort and Kapucu, 2006; Sylves, 2020). However, coordination among actors across levels of governance is notoriously difficult in crisis situations characterized by high uncertainty, complexity, and time pressure. The provision of robust governance in the face of crisis-induced turbulence will therefore depend on the quality of the negotiated interaction among distributed actors linked by complex interdependencies.
We stipulate that the more multilevel arrangements facilitate inclusive interaction—both formal and informal—and are based on trust among different types actors and across levels of governance, the more they will contribute to robust governance by fostering horizontal and vertical goal alignment and stimulating adaptive learning (Klinke, 2017; Pahl-Wostl, 2009). A second conjecture is that the more higher-level government actors solicit and receive policy input from lower-level actors, enabling them to adjust laws, regulations, and recommendations to changing conditions on the ground, the more robust governance will we observe. Finally, we hypothesize that the more lower-level government actors interact with nongovernmental actors and cultivate relationships with higher-level government actors to leverage support for local actions that deviate from standard operation procedures, the more robust governance will emerge (see Torfing et al., 2025).
Hybrid governance
The co-existence of different public governance paradigms—and their hybrid combination and integration—facilitates the purposeful mixing and matching of practices, tools, and instruments in response to changing problems, thereby enabling public governors to adapt and innovate.
Shifting fads and fashions have transformed how the public sector is organized, governed, and led (Powell and DiMaggio, 1983; Torfing et al., 2020). In the postwar period, the public sector was gradually reformed in accordance with the principles of Weberian bureaucracy. Rational-legal authority was exercised by public-spirited civil servants through hierarchical governance, horizontal specialization, and rule compliance (Wilson, 1989). In the 1970s and 1980s, “bureaucracy bashing” (see Downs, 1967; Niskanen, 1971) spurred the introduction of New Public Management reforms combining privatization, outsourcing, and the commercialization of public service production with performance management based on management by objectives, performance measurement, and transactional leadership (Hood, 1991; Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). New Public Management was subsequently criticized for contributing to the fragmentation of the public sector (Rhodes, 1997) and for turning public employees into cynics due to its emphasis on monitoring, control, and transactional leadership, which tend to crowd out intrinsic motivation and public service motivation (Moynihan, 2010). These problems were addressed by advocates of New Public Governance (Osborne, 2006, 2010), who recommended the formation of collaborative networks and partnerships (Kickert et al., 1997) and the introduction of trust-based management (Torfing and Bentzen, 2020). In sum, governance paradigms have shifted from hierarchical control to market competition to network-based collaboration. Importantly, the emergence of new paradigms has not displaced earlier ones; instead, paradigms coexist and compete, creating opportunities for hybrid combinations (Koppenjan et al., 2019). Similar forms of inter-paradigmatic governance hybridity seem to be emerging between competing forms of law and democracy (Nõmmik et al., 2023).
While hybridity is a growing theme in public governance and administration (Brandsen and Karré, 2011; Koppenjan et al., 2019; Meuleman, 2019; Røiseland et al., 2024), it has remained relatively marginal in the crisis management literature (but see Lee and Wong, 2021). However, recent research on robust governance highlights hybridity—often in the form of bricolage—as a key condition for adaptation and innovation during periods of turbulence (Carstensen et al., 2023).
The basic assumption is that governance becomes more robust when different paradigmatic forms of public governance coexist and are purposefully combined in response to shifting conditions (Nõmmik et al., 2023. While coexisting governance forms provide the raw material for creating adaptive and innovative hybrids, the effectiveness and legitimacy of existing hybrid arrangements help justify the development of new ones. Thus, efforts to promote robust governance appear path-dependent, conditioned by the prior existence of diverse governance forms and positive experience with their hybridization. More concretely, we expect that combining authoritative top-down governance with outsourced service provision that mobilizes specialized private-sector competencies, alongside collaborative networks that align goals, share knowledge, and facilitate mutual learning and experimentation, will promote robust governance in the face of unpredictable dynamics (see Torfing et al., 2025).
Societal intelligence
Although turbulent problems are both complex and evolving, the creation of robust solutions through adaptation and innovation requires sensemaking processes that clarify how emerging challenges jeopardize core public functions, purposes, and values and what can be done about them (Homsy and Warner, 2013; Russo and Van Dooren, 2023).
Diagnosing turbulent situations and designing robust responses is facilitated by collective wisdom (Landemore and Elster, 2012; Sloman and Fernbach, 2017) and collective intelligence (Boucher et al., 2023; Landemore, 2017), which combine and integrate diverse forms of knowledge. This collective capacity to deal with turbulent situations is enhanced by involving a plethora of actors with complementary competences, skills, and forms of knowledge. Drawing on the knowledge and experiences of diverse groups tends to outperform the cognitive and imaginative capacity of individuals when it comes to creative problem-solving, innovation, and foresight (Boucher et al., 2023). Different actors—including elected politicians and civil servants, scientific and professional experts, and lay actors (e.g., users, citizens, neighborhoods, and civil society organizations)—possess distinct forms of data, information, and knowledge rooted in different epistemologies. When these are shared and applied in creative problem-solving processes, they generate a form of societal intelligence that enables actors to interpret, analyze, and act effectively (De Angelis, 2013).
Exchanging, aligning, and mobilizing diverse forms of knowledge in the pursuit of societal intelligence requires the creation of arenas and interfaces in which actors can negotiate differences in knowledge and experience, address uncertainty, stimulate learning, and (perhaps most importantly) manage ambiguities, inconsistencies, and conflicts. While such exchanges may generate contestation and conflict due to clashing epistemologies, worldviews and interests, they can also foster joint sensemaking (Maitlis and Sonenshein, 2010; Weick, 1988) and help establish common ground for problem-solving, thereby facilitating the co-creation of flexible and innovative solutions (Fazey et al., 2013; Gray, 1989; Pütz and Brassel, 2021). Based on these arguments, we define societal intelligence as the capacity to make adaptive and innovative governance decisions informed by diverse forms of knowledge that are exchanged, aligned, and mobilized through negotiated processes of constructive disagreement.
We expect that the more diverse these interfaces are, the denser their interactions, and the more they facilitate cognitive negotiation rather than mere knowledge transfer or contestation, the more they will enhance robust governance. Moreover, the more they support early and nuanced detection of emerging problems and expanding the solution space by introducing novel and feasible ideas, the more they will stimulate robust governance. Finally, the more they promote mutual learning and the co-creation of joint solutions, the more they will advance robust governance (see Torfing et al., 2025).
Multilevel governance, hybrid governance, and societal intelligence may operate independently, each exerting its own effect on robust governance. However, they may also interact and combine in ways that reinforce their impact. A key finding from the Horizon Europe ROBUST project is that robust governance is conditioned by different constellations of the three governance factors across phases of the COVID-19 pandemic (robust-crisis-governance.eu). In the initial outbreak phase, robust governance was achieved either through societal intelligence—generated by combining political, scientific, and lifeworld knowledge—or through a combination of multilevel and hybrid governance. In the subsequent phase of consolidated pandemic responses, societal intelligence alone was insufficient and needed to be combined with multilevel governance. By contrast, in later phases, hybrid governance—combining different crisis management tools—appears in some cases to have been sufficient to sustain robust governance.
A final but important point is that the emergence of a new form of “liquid professionalism” (Kuiper et al., 2024) may amplify the impact of these governance factors. Professionally trained public employees play a key role in delivering robust governance, as they are often responsible for adapting and innovating public regulation and service delivery in turbulent contexts. They also interact with other actors in multilevel governance settings, combine and repurpose tools from different governance paradigms, and participate in knowledge interfaces that generate societal intelligence that allows swift and innovative responses to changing circumstances. These tasks, which are intrinsically related to robust governance, require public professionals not only to draw on but also to reconfigure their traditionally “solid” professional roles. Echoing Bauman’s (2013) notion of liquid modernity, we suggest that professional expertise is becoming more dynamic, contested, and evolving; that professional autonomy is increasingly relational and negotiated; and that hierarchical authority structures are giving way to more participatory and fluid systems based on trust (Bentzen and Torfing, 2023; Kuiper et al., 2024). In this sense, the relationships between the three governance factors and efforts to promote robust governance are mediated by the emergence of liquid professionalism.
The conceptual framework and its ability to leverage new research
We have introduced, defined, and explained the key concepts of societal turbulence and robust governance and have also identified numerous actor-based strategies for achieving robust governance. We have then added a second analytical layer by showing how three important governance factors may contribute to enhancing robust governance and how their impact may be amplified by the development of a new type of liquid professionalism. This final step advances emerging research on robust governance in turbulent times by pointing both researchers and practitioners to the conditions under which robust governance emerges—an area that requires much more systematic study.
It is now time to bring these elements together in a conceptual framework that provides a heuristic illustration of the argument and helps guide empirical research by specifying the causal relationships among well-defined concepts. Figure 1 presents this framework, showing how the three governance factors—mediated by liquid professionalism—enable social and political actors to deploy different robustness strategies in the pursuit of robust governance. In turn, robust governance seeks to mitigate societal turbulence that would otherwise jeopardize the ability to uphold key public functions, purposes, and values. Conceptual framework relating governance factors to robust governance of societal turbulence.
As explained above, robust governance can be achieved through different combinations of robustness strategies, and its pursuit can be positively impacted by different combinations of governance factors. Since both robustness strategies and governance factors can be combined in multiple ways, the analysis of robust governance calls for a configurational approach that holistically examines the impact of clusters of factors on governance outcomes (see Ostrom, 2007). Empirical studies using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (Rihoux and Ragin, 2009) to identify different constellations of robustness strategies and governance conditions leading to successful outcomes will allow practitioners to select suitable pathways to robust governance in turbulent times.
The arguments informing the conceptual framework presented here have already stimulated important and potentially impactful research. Scognamiglio et al. (2023) have conducted a systematic literature review of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic that confirms the empirical validity of the robust governance concept and provides evidence of a configurational approach to robustness, with government agencies simultaneously employing multiple robust strategies. Interestingly, the study finds that robust governance was often co-created with civil society actors through the construction of new types of proto-institutions designed to help mobilize new ideas and resources.
Salvador and Sancho (2023) have analyzed the pandemic responses of local municipalities to better understand the dynamic capabilities that enable them to respond robustly to heightened turbulence. They find that robust governance is conditioned by the presence of contingency-planning capacity, analytical capacity, organizational-management capacity, and collaborative capacity, and they develop a framework for evaluating local government performance.
Finally, Micacchi et al. (2025) have studied pandemic response efforts in six Italian regions to better understand empirical variation within robust governance arrangements in terms of structures, coordination mechanisms, and forms of leadership. Their configurational analysis shows that network structures centered on adhocracies consistently occur in robust governance, and that hybrid coordination mechanisms—mixing formality and informality—are also consistently present. The study further addresses a blind spot by showing that energizing leadership is a recurrent feature of robust governance.
Conclusion
This article has introduced the key concepts of societal turbulence and robust governance and explored the conditions for the latter. The central claim is that the conceptual pair of turbulence/robustness better captures the present predicament of enduring social, political, and economic turmoil than the traditional crisis/crisis-management framework.
The argument summarized in the conceptual framework in Figure 1 informs the contributions to this special issue, which aims to advance research on robust governance in increasingly turbulent times. These contributions provide clear examples of societal turbulence, demonstrate how public governors seek to develop robust governance responses, and highlight the impact of different governance factors. They advance our understanding of how robust governance operates in practice, but further research is needed to develop this emerging field into a full-fledged research paradigm. We therefore outline five important directions for future research.
The first task is to further explore and expand the list of robustness strategies and relevant governance factors, as the set identified here is by no means exhaustive. Inductive analysis of multiple cases of robust governance may help uncover additional strategies and factors, thereby refining the conceptual framework.
The second task is to further develop configurational analyses of how different combinations of robustness strategies and governance factors shape outcomes. Several methods are available for such analysis, including Qualitative Comparative Analysis, which is well suited to medium-N studies (20‒50 cases). However, this requires clear operationalization and measurement of robustness strategies, governance factors, and their key dimensions.
The third task is to further pursue the actor-centric approach to robust governance through empirical studies of how individual actors or small groups perceive and make sense of societal turbulence, how they design and deploy robustness strategies, and what enables or hampers their success. Such research will help build capacity for robust governance in the public sector.
The fourth task is to examine how robust governance is implemented in practice and what barriers or challenges this entails. As noted above, public professionals may not be sufficiently trained to act flexibly or embrace change, and public leaders may be risk-averse and reluctant to pursue the transformations necessary to uphold core public functions, purposes, and values. Institutional path dependencies may weigh heavily on public employees and managers, constraining adaptation and innovation even when urgently needed. In addition to these barriers, maintaining legitimacy poses a major challenge. Robust governance requires ongoing changes in public regulation and service delivery, which may lead to declining support from citizens and stakeholders who perceive shifting policies as inconsistency or become fatigued by continuous disruption.
The final task is to broaden the robust governance perspective to encompass society as a whole. Thus far, research has primarily focused on public sector organizations. However, as noted in the introduction, robust governance ultimately concerns how society as a whole can become robust in the face of crisis-induced turbulence. This broader perspective requires mobilizing not only public authorities but also private companies, NGOs, local communities, and citizens.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the European Commission, Horizon Europe Framework programme, grant no. 101061272.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.