Organizational Resilience and Crisis Management in Public Administration: Building Adaptive Governance Capacity in an Age of Compounding Disruptions

Abstract

Public administration systems globally are confronting an era of compounding, cascading disruptions - from pandemics and climate-induced disasters to geopolitical instability, fiscal shocks, and the systemic risks of accelerating technological change. In this context, organizational resilience has emerged as a central imperative for public institutions, yet scholarly understanding of how government organizations build, sustain, and deploy resilience capacity remains theoretically fragmented and empirically thin relative to the practical urgency of the challenge. This article develops the Adaptive Governance Resilience Framework (AGRF), a theoretically integrated, empirically grounded model of organizational resilience in public administration contexts. The AGRF is developed through a systematic review of 96 peer-reviewed studies (2003-2025) and validated through cross-case analysis of institutional responses to seven major crisis events across fifteen government organizations in Asia, Europe, and Africa. Drawing on complexity theory, organizational learning theory, and the crisis management literature, the AGRF identifies absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, and transformative capacity as the three pillars of public sector resilience, specifying their antecedents, developmental pathways, and performance implications. Key findings reveal that transformative resilience - the capacity to reconfigure governance systems in response to crisis signals is the most consequential and least institutionalized capacity dimension in government organizations; that inter-organizational trust networks function as the most critical resilience infrastructure whose development cannot be deferred to the crisis response phase; and that governance structures characterized by excessive hierarchical rigidity systematically impede adaptive capacity while paradoxically providing the command clarity valued during acute crisis response. The article concludes with a structured policy agenda for building institutional resilience in public administration.