Unexpected epidemics, abrupt catastrophic shifts in biophysical systems, and economic crises that cascade across national borders and regions are events that challenge the steering capacity of governance at all political levels. This article seeks to extend the applicability of governance theory by developing hypotheses about how different governance types can be expected to handle processes of change characterized by nonlinear dynamics, threshold effects, cascades, and limited predictability. The first part of the article argues the relevance of a complex adaptive system approach and goes on to review how well governance theory acknowledges the intriguing behavior of complex adaptive systems. In the second part, we develop a typology of governance systems based on their adaptive capacities. Finally, we investigate how combinations of governance systems on different levels buffer or weaken the capacity to govern complex adaptive systems.

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The notion of resilience is rapidly gaining influence in public administration practice and research, but a more comprehensive resilience research agenda in public administration is yet to emerge. This article aims to clarify how experiences and potential contributions from social-ecological resilience research can inform resilience studies in public administration. By contrasting key components of the resilience paradigm and its policy prescriptions with established findings from public administration research, a set of key shortcomings of social-ecological resilience thinking are identified: (1) deterministic systems models; (2) simplified accounts of politics and policy; and (3) a lack of systematic and generalizable empirical studies. To avoid these shortcomings, it is suggested that public administration resilience studies should explore multiple and competing models for how resilience can be generated; analyse trade-offs between resilience and other values of public administration; avoid systems theoretical resilience models; and apply the notion of resilience in areas beyond crisis management. INTRODUCTION: THE RISE OF RESILIENCEThe notion of resilience has begun to capture the attention of scholars and practitioners of public administration (Wildavsky 1988;Boin et al. 2010;Aldrich 2012;Boin and van Eeten 2013). The rising interest in resilience reflects a need among scholars and practitioners to better understand the conditions for effective and legitimate governance in a complex, interconnected, and volatile world fraught with a new class of poorly understood systemic risks. While previous discussions on how to design public administrations often focused on values such as 'efficiency' and 'equity', contemporary debates display an increasing concern for the 'robustness', 'flexibility', and 'adaptability' of public governance (Hood 1991; Duit and Galaz 2008).As an ideal type, a resilient public administration is in many ways different from a traditional Weberian bureaucracy: it consists of multiple organizational units in non-hierarchical networks with overlapping jurisdictions and cross-scale linkages; it has spare capacity to use in times of crisis; it relies on multiple types of knowledge (e.g. scientific and experience-based) and sources of information; it encourages stakeholder participation; and it uses trial-and-error policy experiments and social learning to keep the policy system within a desirable stability domain.The idea of a resilient public administration raises novel research questions: what factors strengthen and weaken resilience in public administrations; what are the trade-offs between resilience and other values of public administration; and how can a resilient public administration be designed? In pursuing such questions, scholars and practitioners have started to turn to other areas of inquiry and practice beyond public administration in which the concept of resilience has a longer history. One such research area is the so-called 'resilience thinking' paradigm within the social-ecolog...

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