Navigating Future Challenges with the Grand Pathways Framework

Future Efforts

The Grand Pathways Framework provides an approach for identifying gaps, aligning capabilities and work streams, and prioritizing resilience science and technology capabilities to meet these needs and improve community resilience. This Framework can form the basis for stakeholder discussions across different communities in considering both the gaps in societal dimensions and cross-cutting enablers, and the role of science and technology in building resilience. By connecting the various aspects of resilience in a single combined framework, end users can seek solutions that address multiple concerns at once to more efficiently use limited resources. Moreover, SRST hopes that end users will be able to identify new opportunities to work more holistically to anticipate, avoid, adapt to, withstand, and build back better from acute shocks and chronic stresses with the potential to cause disruption or destruction.

To determine if the Grand Pathways Framework met SRST goals, it was piloted to a select group of interagency partners from April to June 2022. The pilot effort focused on obtaining feedback on the usefulness of core Framework principles and to identify areas for future improvements and efforts. Each piloting agency approached the implementation of the Grand Pathways Framework differently. For example, agencies found that the Grand Pathways Framework could be applied to individual program results and after-action reviews, as well as to larger, long-term research and development efforts. Pilot agencies noted the importance of establishing and promulgating a common resilience lexicon to ensure that collaborators at all community levels have the same understanding of critical terms. In addition, the outcome-based approach of the Grand Pathways Framework can focus technology developers on a range of potential solutions.

Following the publication of the Grand Pathways Framework, SRST will explore the development of supporting materials. While the Framework is meant to be flexible guidance, rather than a strict set of implementation rules, SRST notes that additional implementation guidance might be useful to facilitate community adoption. In addition, further uses cases could help explore the application of the Grand Pathways Framework to a large range of events to emphasize the distinction between commonly used concepts and terms (e.g., the difference between key functions and outcomes). Along with considering how best to develop supporting implementation guidance, SRST will continue to work with users to collect feedback on the usefulness of the Grand Pathways Framework, help catalog potential use cases to which the Grand Pathways Framework has been applied, and seek to understand the benefit of these Grand Pathways Framework. These stakeholder inputs will inform the development of and the next steps to achieve Resilience Science and Technology Grand Pathways and to develop a Resilience Science and Technology Research and Development plan.

If you are interested in piloting the Grand Pathways Framework or would like additional information on the Framework, please contact SRST at [email protected].