Ever since I started to work for the Southern Region office of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (Statens vegvesen Region sør) three years ago I haven’t been able to come up with a good job title in English. There simply isn’t any immediate equivalent in English to the Norwegian title that springs to mind, or that exists in a similar fashion in the English-speaking world. It was only after reading Erik Hollnagel’s definition of resilience that I finally realised that I am an Resilience Adviser.
Safety or security ?
Even in Norwegian it’s hard to explain to friends and family, and colleagues for that matter, what I actually do for a living. I am an adviser in “samfunnssikkerhet” as it is called in Norwegian. Finding the English equivalent hasn’t been easy, as I said, until I started studying the concept of resilience. So why does samfunnssikkerhet equal resilience?
Well, samfunn in Norwegian means society, sikkerhet can mean either safety or security in Norwegian since we do not have separate words for it. So samfunnssikkerhet can be societal security or societal safety, or both.
Samfunnssikerhet and Societal security
Societal security is a concept developed by the Copenhagen School of security studies in the 1990s (Wikipedia). It refers to
the ability of a society to persist in its essential character under changing conditions and possible or actual threats
The standard definition for samfunnssikkerhet in Norway, set by a government commission in 2000 is
the ability of a society to maintain critical (essential) functions and the life, health and essential needs of its population under various forms of stress
The wording is perhaps not exactly the same, but both definitions emphasize “essential”, and in my view social security as the English translation captures what samfunnssikkerhet is all about.
Societal security as the English translation of the Norwegian samfunnssikkerhet has been used in particular by Jan Hovden from SINTEF,the research intstitute of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU. He even wrote an English paper on the subject in 2004 titled Public policy and administration in a vulnerable society: regulatory reforms initiated by a Norwegian commission. I found and reviewed it on my blog 5 years ago: Risk society.
Societal security and safety – Resilience
What I found most brilliant about the paper was how he managed to merge the concept of societal safety and security. So safety is included in societal security, but is societal security then really the right word? I think perhaps.
Samfunnssikkerhet and Societal safety
Societal safety as the translation of samfunnssikkerhet is mostly used by SEROS, the Centre for Risk Management and Societal Safety, a research centre with the University of Stavanger, UiS. They describe social safety as cross-disciplinary theory and methods for social planning, emergency preparedness, crisis management, safety management, risk perception and risk communication.
UiS offers BSc, MSc and PhD in samfunnssikkerhet or what they in English call Risk Management and Societal Safety, and societal safety is then the term that is most likely to be widely used for samfunnssikkerhet in the future. Is that the right word? I don’t think so.
Samfunnssikkerhet and Resilience
While societal security or societal safety are no too bad translations of samfunnssikkerhet that do make sense in English, I’m not so sure they capture the essence of samfunnssikkerhet. That is why I am strongly in favor of resilience. As Hollnagel puts it, resilience is
the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions
If you think of society as a system and if you replace required with essential in this definition, or if you replace the words vice versa you pretty much have the same definition.
Meet the Resilience Adviser
In my view resilience would be a much better English word for the Norwegian samfunnssikkerhet, just look at Resilient Organisations in New Zealand. They have taken research on resilience in organisations (and society) to a whole new level and put it into practice, and I hope to spread and disseminate what they do in my own work, and thus contribute to spreading resilience thinking in Norway.
So I now call myself “Resilience Adviser”. And what do I do? My job is to oversee that the state-managed road network in my region is planned, built, operated and maintained so that it can function 24/7/365, and thus ensure societal safety and societal security, i.e. resilience.
The only problem now is that there is no good Norwegian word for the English word resilience…sigh…
Related links
- resorgs.org.nz: Resilient Organisations
Related posts
- husdal.com: Risk society
- husdal.com: Are computers more important than roads?
