10 actions for governments to strengthen socioeconomic resilience

Governments must focus on 10 key areas in national recovery efforts to avoid a recurrence of unprecedented disruption from global crises.

In brief

• Governments can take steps to avoid unprecedented disruptions from future global crises.  
• Lessons learned from the recent COVID-19 pandemic experience indicate 10 key areas that they can focus on.
• Examples include flexible capacity, better use of data for decision-making, and strengthening collaboration between the government and other stakeholders.

Global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical conflicts have had an uneven impact on economies worldwide, severely testing governments’ ability to respond to large and unexpected shocks across multiple areas. This has shown that recovery from past crises alone is not enough to address future global disruptions. Governments must respond by taking a long-term view of challenges and opportunities in recovery efforts or risk facing socioeconomic disruptions of a similar scale in the future.

The pandemic challenged many governments to rapidly scale up capacity or redeploy resources to meet sharp increases in demand. It also severely disrupted education systems and ways of working. Yet, the lack of timely data hampered governments in controlling the spread of COVID-19 and mechanisms were not in place to coordinate national, regional and global responses. With the hybrid model expected to remain in the long term, governments must also manage this effectively to avoid negative effects on work-life balance, physical and mental health, delivery of education services, collaborative working, and innovation.

The scale of the fallout from the pandemic and urgency to address it have presented the imperative and possibility for change, cutting through years of institutional and systemic inertia. To build better resilience against future disruptions and drive sustainable, inclusive growth, governments need to incorporate lessons learned from the crises into recovery efforts across 10 key areas.

1. Meet fluctuating demand through flexible capacity

Governments must balance efficiency goals with the ability to adjust capacity when needed to cope with fluctuating demand. This can be achieved by updating enterprise IT systems and creating cross-government platforms to facilitate rapid scaling up or development of new services. It would mean breaking down silos to take a longer-term view of capacity needs — not just within individual agencies but also across the whole government to enable efficiency and flexible capacity.

2. Address education inequality and technical talent shortage

The pandemic brought education systems to a halt, with school closures affecting 1.6 billion learners globally. Governments can enable remote and hybrid education to offer a more equitable future of learning. This involves leveraging public-private partnerships to develop financing and delivery models for infrastructure and investing in infrastructure, including access to electricity, internet connectivity and affordable devices for low-income families.

To lay the foundation for the future economy, the broader population must be equipped with sought-after skill sets that not only meet current needs but also future ones. The public and private sectors can collaborate to build a talent pipeline to complement those produced by institutes of higher learning. Such a symbiotic arrangement is necessary for the nation’s long-term growth.

While digital solutions are necessary to help spur economic growth, the shortage of technical talent could be a stumbling block to greater digitalization of public- and private-sector services. Governments, therefore, need to institute programs or initiatives to build up the talent pool to seize these opportunities.

4. Engage more inclusively to build public trust

Public trust is one of governments’ most valuable assets, but it requires better, more inclusive engagement. Poor communications, such as inconsistent messaging and frequent changes to guidelines, will undermine cooperation and compliance with government policies, especially during a crisis.

Governments can communicate more effectively by using a range of offline and online channels to disseminate timely information. This requires consideration of the audience’s socioeconomic, cultural and psychological contexts through segmentation and tailoring communication and ways of engagement accordingly. Marginalized groups must be involved in governance and decision-making for inclusiveness, with continuous monitoring to help counter harmful disinformation.

5. Improve identification of beneficiaries and delivery of funds to them

While rapid distribution of financial support for citizens and businesses was urgently needed during the COVID-19 crisis, getting the support to the right recipient at the right time was a challenge for many governments. Many countries lacked key enablers, including strong digital identification systems, linked administrative population data sets, widespread account access and interoperable payment systems.

Improving identification of beneficiaries and delivery of funds to them can enhance safety nets and reduce fraud. The public sector needs to create unified digital identities to authenticate citizens, link personal data from different information systems using the common identifier and enable interoperable, seamless payment services. Digital literacy and robust technological and legal safeguards will help balance citizens’ needs with their privacy rights.

8. Establish mechanisms to coordinate national, regional and global crisis response

Strategic and coordinated action across the whole international system is the only way to tackle future global challenges. Governments need to have a more global perspective beyond the national agenda and rethink multilateral rules and procedures. Key international institutions need to broaden their scope of influence for more coordinated action between nations to impose protocols for preparedness, data sharing and resource optimization.

In preparation for future crises, governments must work together to strengthen global governance and consider creating a new international financing facility for crisis preparedness and surge funding in case of a global threat, such as the pandemic.

9. Be prepared for high-consequence, low-likelihood global events

Governments can no longer ignore the risk of high-consequence, low-likelihood global events and need to strengthen their strategic foresight, horizon scanning and risk anticipation capabilities. They must incorporate central risk analysis into every aspect of government policy and departmental planning. Another key action is the creation of early warning systems that monitor local developments and alert authorities to risks before they escalate.

Resource simulations and civil contingency exercises can help prepare critical sectors, delivery systems and infrastructure so that they are ready to respond to crises.