A Toolkit for Policymakers and Innovators Using the Grand Pathways Framework

Audience & Value of Framework

The Grand Pathways Framework helps planners, policy makers, community leaders, innovators, and others identify opportunities for new resilience science and technology that build community resilience.

Resilience science and technology capabilities may be most effective when they are implemented at the intersection of societal dimensions and cross-cutting enablers. Science and technology capabilities that address multiple cross-cutting enablers and improve multiple societal dimensions help a community anticipate, avoid, adapt to, withstand, and build back better following disruption and destruction. Perhaps even more importantly, these science and technology capabilities enable both the societal dimensions and the cross-cutting enablers to function more effectively on an everyday basis (in the absence of disruption).

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Science and technology can be an enabler itself, either as a direct means of advancing societal dimensions or as a contributor to other cross-cutting enablers.

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Resilience is an ever-evolving challenge, as novel and unpredictable stressors continue to emerge, and historical and environmental factors influence the path to resilience. Resilience can be improved by investments in science and technology. The Grand Pathways Framework looks to support decisionmakers in achieving the goal of resilience by helping them design and implement multipurpose science and technology solutions that strengthen a community’s ability to withstand a wide variety of acute shocks and chronic stressors.

Implementation of the Framework would:

• Encourage end users to think multidimensionally about solutions to science and technology gaps such that solutions could address more than one community need;

• Expand community and developer reference paradigms such that they might see additional applications for existing science and technology solutions or see how existing solutions might be modified to meet science and technology gaps; and

• Identify science and technology gaps that might be served by a single solution, even where the linkages may not be readily apparent.

The Grand Pathways Framework was constructed to be relevant and helpful to a variety of end-users, specifically those who interact with resilience science and technology. The implementation of the Grand Pathways Framework may vary by actor. For example:

• A public health official might use this framework to consider how particular interventions might be able to make a community more safe and secure and contribute to their social cohesion.

• A Federal employee may use this framework to consider which science and technology projects to fund based upon the breadth of their applications along several social dimensions and crosscutting enablers and to determine if a single solution could address multiple science and technology gaps.

• A technology developer engaging with a city official may use this framework to demonstrate how architectural decisions or technical enhancements could improve a community’s infrastructure while increasing financial resilience to hazards and safety and security from climate change.

• The superintendent of a school system might use this framework to invest limited capital dollars in a technical solution that would have the most impact to students’ physical and mental well-being.

• An individual seeking to serve an underserved community might use this framework to propose science and technology solutions that contribute not only to education and employment, but also to a community’s financial and economic resilience.

While the above examples represent some theoretical ways for different actors to implement the Grand Pathways Framework, the following use cases detail how the Framework could be applied in specific scenarios. The use cases highlight the need of many actors to collaborate to identify potential science and technology solutions.

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