Integrating Fail-Safe and Safe-to-Fail practices in resilience planning

Resilience planning has gained significant attention from scholars and practitioners. However, most resilience planning based on either engineering resilience or ecological resilience concepts have shown deficiency in the face of the uncertainty of disturbances. One major reason is that those resilience planning practices follow the Fail-Safe view which assumes the purpose of action is to protect existing functions and the consequence of planning is predictable. We argue that Fail-Safe resilience needs to be complemented with Safe-to-Fail-based resilience thinking, which requires accepting that changes are an intrinsic system property, and the future is uncertain. Disasters are signals of deficiencies in the existing system, therefore, we ought to implement Safe-to-Fail resilience planning in two areas. First, we need to build evolutionary resilience capacity to treat uncertainties as opportunities to improve system adaptability and transformation capabilities. Second, we need to pay attention to the broad consequences of planned actions because they can induce disturbance to the socio-ecological system we live in.