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Health systems are periodically confronted by crises – think of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, H1N1, and Ebola – during which they are called upon to manage exceptional situations without interrupting essential services to the population. The ability to accomplish this dual mandate is at the heart of resilience strategies, which in healthcare systems involve developing surge capacity to manage a sudden influx of patients. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper relates insights from resilience research to the four “S” of surge capacity (staff, stuff, structures and systems) and proposes a framework based on complexity theory to better understand and assess resilience factors that enable the development of surge capacity in complex health systems.

Detailed and dynamic complexities manifest in different challenges during a crisis. Resilience factors are classified according to these types of complexity and along their temporal dimensions: proactive factors that improve preparedness to confront both usual and exceptional requirements, and passive factors that enable response to unexpected demands as they arise during a crisis. The framework is completed by further categorizing resilience factors according to their stabilizing or destabilizing impact, drawing on feedback processes described in complexity theory. Favorable order resilience factors create consistency and act as stabilizing forces in systems, while favorable disorder factors such as diversity and complementarity act as destabilizing forces.

The framework suggests a balanced and innovative process to integrate these factors in a pragmatic approach built around the fours “S” of surge capacity to increase health system resilience.

This paper aims to provide scholars with a deep understanding of the field through the identification of strengths and weaknesses in the literature and support decision-makers in the development of new practices in local risk management based on scientific data. The specific question in this review asks: what are the drivers and barriers to local risk management?

This paper provides an overview of the scientific literature produce over the past 20 years of the divers and barriers to local risk management. This paper presents a scoping review of peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2019 inclusively in the fields of public policy and public administration.

This paper makes three main observations regarding the state of the literature. First, this paper finds that scholars mainly focus on single risk and certain regions of the world. Second, there is multiple approached used by the literature to study risk management at the local level. Third, little attention is given to the political context in which local risk management takes place.

This paper is a complete literature review of more than 500 peer-reviewed articles published in academic journals regarding risk prevention policies over the past two decades. This paper analyzed the main findings of the current literature to provide a general view of the scholarship and improve the collective understanding of risk management at the local level by providing future research avenues.

We argue that national security is a public good and its production can be analyzed in a strategic context. We first present the context of the border between Canada and the United States. Next, we discuss the options of status quo and adoption of a common security perimeter relative to sovereignty and security. We show that efficient border policies could require cooperation among countries but motivating such collaboration may be difficult since joint border security policies may involve a prisoners’ dilemma problem. On the other hand, we show that the likelihood of joint increased security will be higher if there are country-specific benefits for a country improving security at its border. If this is the case, we demonstrate it is possible to reach optimal security using independent border policies.