From reaction to anticipation: four levers for resilient public services

The question is not if a “crisis” will hit your public services, but when will it happen. Public services are exposed to pandemics, conflicts, natural catastrophes, energy blackouts, or cyberattacks. Under such conditions, the continuity of service delivery is more important than ever. Very often, services are in the front line of impact – and can be the first line of resistance. For businesses and citizens, getting rapid and trusted information, immediate aid, or alternative paths to keep their interactions with the government as undisrupted as possible is of extreme importance.

Governments can make their services better prepared for such scenarios of “crisis” and improve the capacity to resist, rebound, and emerge stronger. As part of that, governments need to move beyond reactive approaches, when rushed solutions are improvised in response to shocks. No one questions the notable demonstration of flexibility and stamina that public servants around the globe provided during the COVID-19 pandemic, as illustrated in the examples gathered in the SIGMA report Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in 2011 the European Commission (EC) mentioned already the importance of considering a possible “pandemic flu” disrupting European public services to conceive of a specific “life event” around that situation^[1]. Seen in hindsight of the COVID-19 pandemic, the scenario seems visionary – but at the same time raises questions about the ability of governments to translate insights into action before a crisis hits.

On 28 May 2026, SIGMA organised a webinar to discuss governments’ approaches to delivering public administrative services to citizens and businesses during and after critical situations, such as pandemics, (post-)conflict situations, and natural catastrophes. The goal was to better equip governments across EU Enlargement and neighbourhood regions to enhance the preparedness, responsiveness and resilience of public administrative services. For that purpose, practical experience and lessons learnt from such situations are especially valuable. The webinar gathered speakers from the OECD, the EC, and government institutions in the MENA and Eastern Partnership regions.

This article highlights four key takeaways that governments can use and adapt to their own contexts, relating to the exchanges during the webinar and supported with relevant resources from the EC and the OECD that readers can explore for further information.

European Commission and World Bank data show that investment in crisis preparedness (e.g. wildfires, pandemics, earthquakes, etc.) produces, in Europe, two to ten times more benefits than costs (p.14).^[2] The economic, social and environmental value is a compelling argument to optimise public administration responses to “crises”.

More generally, this insight illustrates the importance of systematically adopting preparation measures before a shock hits, starting with the capacities with which governments can immediately absorb the shock. Protecting the core functions for service delivery is a good starting point to ensure that critical infrastructure remains operational during such times. As Peter Benczur (Scientific Officer, EC Joint Research Centre) highlighted, policy interventions can include creating emergency protocols and contingency plans in advance; defining institutional arrangements across government to handle “crisis” with agility (e.g. task forces); and establishing crisis-ready legislation and regulations (e.g. remote work arrangements, moratoria on documents renewal, etc.). Service continuity can also be protected with the organisation of fallback options, such as digital channels if in-person desks close (or telephone and in-person options for addressing digital disruptions).

Partnerships can be established and nurtured in advance, bringing ecosystem stakeholders on board to address potential disruptions to public services. Tamer Qarmout (Associate Professor, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration) noted the benefits of establishing pre-crisis agreements and dialogue. Instead of acting on impulse to browse contact lists once the “crisis” happens, governments can create spaces for exchange and collaboration among all relevant partners (civil society organisations, universities, scientific research centres, businesses associations, start-ups and private sector networks). As a matter of fact, many of the “crises” under consideration bring transversal challenges that governments cannot address single-handedly and require a whole-of-society approach that can pool resources, share risks, negotiate solutions, and/or orchestrate interventions.

Public administrations need to be flexible enough to provide effective responses to shocks. However, their approach should go beyond their capacity to improvise under stress. Adopting the perspective of the full cycle of resilience enables governments to consider options for improving public services that go beyond “emergency responses”. Indeed, for the OECD, resilience comprises “the capacity of systems to absorb a disturbance, recover from disruptions and adapt to changing conditions”, primarily to retain the functions they performed prior to the “crisis” and, taking into account the changing conditions it creates, to transform service delivery rather than simply restore pre-existing arrangements (that is, going back to “business as usual”).

Public services resilience can be improved by taking into account this whole cycle.^[3] The question then is to institutionalise resilience within governments capacities, so service delivery does not operate only in emergency mode. The example of Ukraine shows the importance of nurturing lasting enablers that secure resilient public services. Nataliia Shamrai (Director of Kyiv’s Centre for Administrative Service Provision (TSNAP); Chairperson of the Ukrainian Association of TSNAPs) and Natalia Tkach (Deputy Head of the Kyiv’s TSNAP) emphasised the importance of recognising and empowering the “human factor”, i.e. the public servants and managers involved in service delivery, including through specialised training, leadership development and support to staff well-being. In addition, resilience means bringing flexibility to administrative arrangements, allowing for quick staff redeployment and continuous exchange of lessons learnt across public organisations. The creation of fallback service delivery channels can also ensure that users are not underserved, even if key technologies, buildings, repositories or databases collapse. In Ukraine, this portfolio approach to service delivery included the creation of “mobile units” to provide services in hard-to-reach communities. The importance of co-ordinating service delivery should not be underestimated in challenging times, quite the contrary. Fast, evidence-informed, and co-ordinated decision-making processes need to be put into place to optimise the use of resources and keep up with the surrounding changes.

A particular point to mention is the reinforcement of critical digital platforms and tools, in particular through security and protection measures. Aspects such as cybersecurity, data backup and recovery, offline operating procedures, or the hosting of registries and databases, need to be considered. The EC’s Thematic Analysis of Digital Public Services under the Recovery and Resilience Scoreboard (2024) illustrates the strong commitment to modernising public services, notably by reducing administrative burdens and streamlining user interactions through the digitalisation of services; boosting cybersecurity; and promoting “smart public services” that leverage data collection and exchange to increase efficiency and accelerate decision-making.

Governments can prepare (see Section 1) and reinforce their resilience capacities (see the previous Section 2) to ensure service delivery during challenging times. Rafal Kierzenkowski (OECD Senior Counsellor for Strategic Foresight, Office of the Secretary General) reminded us, however, that “the future will not simply be a more efficient version of the present”. For that reason, “services must be designed for uncertainty, not only optimised for today”. Public servants and managers can lever actionable approaches to stop planning uniquely for the predictable future, i.e. the future understood as the repetition or extrapolation of the present.

Governments can explore alternative scenarios using strategic foresight. Strategic foresight helps improve governments’ effectiveness by strengthening their capacity to envisage and act upon alternative futures, identifying opportunities, challenges, risks and disruptions that may arise over the coming years.  This, in turn, stimulates action-taking to explore benefits and prevent costs. The OECD Strategic Foresight Toolkit for Resilient Public Policy is designed to help anticipate challenges and opportunities that could reshape the policy landscape between 2030 and 2050. Through extensive research, expert consultations, and workshops, the toolkit identifies potential future disruptions and provides a structured process to guide users to proactively approach those time horizons.

There is no need to wait for a “crisis” to happen to discover the results or to learn from experience. Governments can rehearse responses to “crises” under controlled conditions. Public servants and managers can also stress-test existing service delivery strategies against extreme scenarios. A good starting point is the public services wind-tunnel, a tool the OECD and SIGMA have been using in collaborative workshops to explore the impacts of critical events (e.g. cyberattack, conflict, etc.) on specific public services, identify possible disruptions, define mitigation and prevention actions, and develop a roadmap for change. The public administration of the Azores (Portugal) has used this tool to assess the resilience of existing public services to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, natural phenomena that are part of the region’s reality.

Governments can also simulate new conditions to conceive unprecedented solutions. A relevant tool for this purpose is the creation of so-called “future personas”. The OECD Public Services Innovation Booster defines personas as fictional profiles developed to represent different types of users and their daily life routines. Future personas are created to materialise into coherent profiles the possible or probable changes in users’ expectations, needs and behaviours under a given future scenario.

For governments facing a “crisis”, the challenge is not so much to bounce back, as to bounce forward. Governments need to keep the machine running while “crises” unfold, however they can also use these moments to “change the machine” and improve the way it works during and after this journey.

The COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to important after-action reviews and lessons learnt that pointed to the need to move beyond simply restoring the status quo. In this sense, this crisis provided an opportunity for public sector organisations to test and reflect on their performance and impact, as both the OECD and the EC stated in due time. While critical functions and service delivery were generally maintained across European public administrations, specific measures have the potential to bolster the resilience of public sector organisations. Peter Benczur (Scientific Officer, European Commission, Joint Research Centre) revisited the post-pandemic context to share examples of how European governments have bounced forward. The spread of teleworking and online technologies in service provision (e.g. remote appointments); the changed privacy and security paradigms; and the shift towards performance-based EU financing are among the actions mentioned.

For the European Commission, such transformative process (see also Section 2 above) means that “crises” and the responses required to address their consequences can become opportunities for progress. However, this leap forward does not happen automatically and require policies that provide positive impulses. Such interventions include rebuilding the different forms of capital (built, human and social) eroded during the crisis; balancing short-term interventions (e.g. addressing users’ urgent needs) with medium- and long-term measures; ensuring that core values drive the options taken, preserving citizen participation, trust in institutions, or the trade-offs between security and privacy; and supporting effective communication with partners and users throughout the whole process.

Uncertainty is no longer an occasional phenomenon. Multiple “crises”, with their combination of short-term effects and long-term impacts, overlap and increase the complexity of the policy environment in which governments operate. Governments are not powerless and can lead reforms to improve preparedness, resilience, and prospective. Among others, as Guillaume Fine (Head of Unit, EC) mentions, strategic foresight, digitalisation, and transparency are three levers that governments can use to improve public services. Taking into account the key trends shaping the future of work, the EC’s Foresight Report 2025 introduces the concept of “Resilience 2.0”, a new level of resilience that recognises that the EU needs forward-looking capabilities “to scan proactively beyond immediate threats, considering unfamiliar or even hard-to-imagine longer-term scenarios” (p.5).

More specifically, the four levers presented in this article converge to define the passage from reactive to proactive governance of public services. In a reactive model, governments remain on standby and improvise solutions built on past experience. By contrast, proactive governance combines forward-looking approaches with flexible arrangements to anticipate potential threats and opportunities, ensuring that public services are designed and delivered with the future in mind. In the global context of public services, the OECD highlighted in 2024 the use of future-oriented techniques to design public services among the most notable emerging trends that governments are following to foster human-centred public services.

In spite of their promising signals, such approaches require constant and sustainable investments – starting with political commitment – to keep a transformative direction and to achieve their envisaged impact. The future of service delivery is in the making.

This text is an original contribution that, building on the contributions shared during the webinar, pinpoints actionable insights. It does not attempt to replace the speakers’ points of view or provide an exhaustive representation of their inputs. The text is the sole responsibility of its authors.