Fostering Resiliency in a Post-Pandemic World

The coronavirus pandemic has not only broken many public systems we rely on, but has revealed systems that were already broken before the crisis began. Domestic manufacturers and supply chains could not accommodate the massive surge in demand for PPE and other essential equipment to safeguard public health at the outset of the crisis. Education systems buckled as schools struggled to migrate online and provide online education to many children and families who lack access to reliable internet. State and federal government agencies were unprepared to process and deliver unprecedented amounts of financial relief to American families. The pandemic has revealed that many of our core institutions are ill-equipped to handle the shocks imposed by a severe crisis, imposing hardships on communities and individuals.

In the fifth edition of Transformation, the New America’s Digital Impact and Governance Initiative (DIGI) convened top leaders from civil society, academia, and the private sector to discuss reforms and partnerships that can foster resilience in the face of future crises. DIGI Director Tomicah Tillemann moderated the discussion, which welcomed World Bank Global Practice Manager for Fiscal Policy & Sustainable Growth Chiara Bronchi, Ernst & Young US Advisory Principal and Life Sciences Sector Commercial Lead Susan Garfield, MIT Professor of Connection Science Sandy Pentland, and Libra Association Vice Chair and former DIGI Senior Fellow Dante Disparte. Together with New America, these organizations are the founding members of the Prosperity Collaborative, a coalition developing open source technologies to help governments solve public finance challenges.

DIGI kicked off the event with the launch of a new report on fostering resilience entitled The Great Correction, co-written by Dante Disparte and Tomicah Tillemann. The report details how the government agencies that should have navigated American communities out of the crisis were constrained by the pandemic and calls for a whole-of-society effort to build more resilient systems. The panel surfaced key observations that reflect how governments can prepare to respond to emerging threats like the coronavirus pandemic.

• Resilient systems require planning. Countries with established ICT systems and disaster preparedness strategies rapidly mobilized resources during the early stages of the pandemic. Advanced public sector technology infrastructure helped countries use data to quickly adapt plans to the current crisis and implement decisive policies to contain its impact.
• Public trust is key when using technology in crisis response. Transparency and data literacy help build a collective mindset that we need to mount a whole-of-society response to disasters. People will oppose a distrusted technology, even if it can help the community weather a disaster.
• Resilience requires human-centered design. Schools, health clinics, and high-speed internet are useless if communities cannot use them. Technologists and policymakers should ensure that everyone can fully access public health services, education, and digital technology to make a genuine positive impact.
• Risk is an evergreen issue. Existing emergency response institutions are ill-equipped to handle the constant risks that confront communities. We need a national strategy that constantly invests in resilience to address risks that we can foresee and those we cannot.
• Partnership models that convene diverse stakeholders yield creative and resilient solutions. Long-term resilience comes from building ecosystems where people and organizations from different fields can leverage their unique perspectives to tackle a problem. By examining the incentives for cooperation across sectors, stakeholders can move past short-term fixes and sustain long-term infrastructure development.

The pandemic has revealed deep fissures in public service delivery infrastructure, and we cannot afford to ignore the painful lessons learned from this crisis. We have an obligation to scientific, health, and education professionals, and all those affected by the coronavirus outbreak, to build a better system on the other side of this crisis. Only technology systems and institutions that can adapt and quickly respond to emerging crises will succeed in an increasingly volatile world.

We look forward to working with partners around the world in the months ahead to explore how digital technology can strengthen public institutions. Send us a tweet at @DIGI_NewAmerica, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our newsletter. We look forward to working with you to solve the monumental challenges facing institutions worldwide.