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What transformations do municipal administrations implement to enact a resilience policy? This article responds to this question from a comparative perspective by analyzing enabling and impeding mechanisms developed in the cities of Montreal (Canada) and London (UK) as they establish their strategies. Collaborative network governance and institutional work mechanisms used in Montreal and London are analyzed in connection with the influence of macro‐ and micro‐contextual elements under which a network can resiliently manage risk and crises. In both cases, the development of resilience emerges from their emergency management structures, as units in charge try to animate their new area of responsibility through collaborative governance. As a siloed approach this is embedded in daily routines, organizations with limited resources focused on shared motivation and values, collaboration across organizational boundaries and creation of joint capacity to implement resilience. This transformative process concerns the organization in charge of resilience in the municipal administration and the wider network that they build and animate.

One of the main challenges in crisis management is to assess, ahead of time, the resilience of a system before a crisis erupts (pandemic, computer bug with large‐scale effects, cascade effects in critical infrastructure, etc.). In this article, we propose to reconcile the multiple and sometimes divergent definition of resilience by explaining the complementarity of stability and adaptability inherent to the concept. Also, we integrate a new dimension to the assessment of resilience by analysing the dynamics of negentropy (order, stability) and entropy (disorder, change) between factors. Until now, the evaluation of organizational and interorganizational resilience focused on analysing the presence or absence of resilience factors. With this new dimension, we show the complementarity and interdependence of resilience factors. Finally, we demonstrate how resilience is based on both favourable order and favourable disorder which create diversity and conformity in the system, while vulnerability relies on unfavourable order and unfavourable disorder.

AbstractThrough analysis of the narratives of participants to the London Common Operating Picture (COP), this study discusses the "information warehouse" and the "trading zone" theoretical perspectives on the COP that consider it, respectively, as an information system to share common information on a crisis or as a relational space of learning in which common meanings enable decision‐making and coordination. The trading zone approach has started to examine its role as a coordination tool, but there is little empirical research on how it can foster network's collaboration. Through an exploration of the COP participants' positions as boundary spanners, this study puts forward the trading zone perspective, showing that in London it has become a regular mechanism of collaboration and coordination. It argues that boundary spanners operate at multiple boundaries that enable network's collaboration and coordination, and the relational character of the COP create bonds of trust that foster collaboration and common understandings on the role of communication, collaboration, information sharing, and coordination for the security of all. We show that the COP is a relational space that creates a sense of belonging to a common community of security that believes in the role of networks' information sharing and collaboration for urban resilience.