Photo: Ellie Solloway for StateUp
Today’s policymakers must navigate through an unprecedented era of disruption. The compounding impacts of climate change are already straining our systems, institutions and economies. Meanwhile, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence hold deep promise for unlocking global prosperity, but require dexterous decisionmaking to reach their full potential.
To offer ideas for confronting these challenges, the Bennett Institute of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge brought together leading policymakers, practitioners and academics for their annual conference on March 28, 2025. Speakers offered a wide range of expertise from disciplines like policy, psychology, economics and organisational behavior. The panels, keynote and sideline conversations underscored the importance of co-designing resilience amid upheaval and transition.
Resilience can be understood as the capacity of societies to mitigate, transform and even thrive in the face of complex challenges and uncertainties, be they environmental, security related or technological. For instance, will flood, drought and natural disaster prevention systems be able to withstand the increase in severe weather events due to climate change? Can international and regional defence compacts survive increasingly complex security threats? How can artificial intelligence best be harnessed to enhance economic prosperity across society?
StateUp research has shown that building the capacity to withstand such challenges– both acute shocks and gradual shifts– requires the active participation of diverse stakeholders. Policies, technologies, and behaviours all play a role in developing resilient people, organisations, and places that are prepared for future uncertainties.
To that end, Bennett conference panelists emphasised that tackling increasingly intertwined and complex issues requires collective investment across borders and fractured markets. For example, on the question of national security, Dr. Guntram Wolff, senior fellow at Bruegel and Professor of Economics at Université libre de Bruxelles, explained that generally, EU countries rely on domestic production of defence equipment with very little internal competition and strong procurement relationships with central governments. However, with growing defence needs across Europe, deeper cross-border market integration could engender “efficiency gains and cost savings.” Governments and industry will need to continue seeking “collaborative solutions” to enable defence trade across the region, he added. Dame Dr. Diane Coyle, co-director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, added that such initiatives, like stable tax environments and R&D subsidies, must work not only for established industry players but also for startups and smaller enterprises.
“Place-sensitive” policies were also touted as a component of resilience-building on issues such as impacts of changing climate and the transition to low-carbon energy to the increasing dominance of AI. Addressing spatial inequalities in how different places respond to disruption will require “policymakers to understand much better the social and cultural conditions that have made communities more or less resilient over time,” said Dr. Michael Kenny, Inaugural Director of the Bennett Institute.
Relatedly, investing in smaller cities and underrepresented localities can pay dividends. “Everyone is telling us that we need to supercharge the places that are the most dynamic,” said Dr. Andres Rodriguez-Pose, Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, “but the biggest innovations that we’ve had in Europe haven’t come from the usual suspects.” Dr. Rodriguez-Pose cited COVID-19 vaccine development at Mainz, Germany-based BioNTech as recent proof that watershed technological and scientific breakthroughs can come from unlikely places.
In his keynote presentation, Dr. Sander van der Linden, Professor of Social Psychology in Society at Cambridge, spoke about the threat that widespread mis- and dis-information poses for resilient societies and institutions. Dr. van der Linden explained that today’s information ecosystem requires not just better fact-checking and debunking mechanisms, but also more robust “cognitive antibodies” that empower people to scrutinise the veracity of information they encounter. “We shouldn't underestimate the lingering risk” of misinformation, he noted, adding, “overtime, it builds– it seeps into decreasing trust in official institutions, decreasing trust in media, creating broadscale resentment.” This echoes findings from a 2023 StateUp report that highlighted the importance of a reliable, localized information environment on the front lines of the climate crisis.
The Bennett conference reflected the sobering realities that will underwrite current and future policy decisions. Contending with the existential challenges of our time and seizing the opportunities of technological progress will certainly require innovative, multi-scalar policymaking. Leaders who are able to engage a wide variety of stakeholders, synthesize evidence from a multitude of disciplines, and propose bold solutions are best poised to enable resilience through periods of disruption and into the future.
