Resilience and its Limits: Education Futures and the Question of What Comes Next
This blog was originally published on the education for planetary futures website on May 1, 2026.
“Resilience” has emerged as a central concept in global education policy. In the wake of COVID-19, and amid intensifying climate disruption, political instability, and rapid technological change, the imperative to build more resilient education systems has gained renewed urgency. The Global Partnership for Education’s Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (GPE KIX) has taken up this challenge through the launch of the GPE KIX Observatory on Education System Resilience — a multi-regional initiative designed to generate and mobilize evidence on how education systems anticipate, respond to, and adapt in the face of disruption. Spanning six regions — Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Pacific, and South and Southeast Asia — the Observatory reflects an important shift from a focus on crisis response toward a broader engagement with uncertain and emerging futures.
In a world defined by disruption, it offers a promise that systems can absorb, adapt, and endure. Yet this promise raises a deeper question: what kinds of futures are made possible — and what kinds are foreclosed — when resilience becomes the organizing frame?
This question was taken up in a panel at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) 2026 conference — “Regional Perspectives on Education System Resilience: Insights from the Pacific, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean” — which brought into dialogue emerging findings from the GPE KIX Observatory. Drawing on presentations by Cassity and Reddy (Pacific), DeJaeghere and Dao (South and Southeast Asia), and Cueto (Latin America and the Caribbean), the panel offered a multi-regional lens on how resilience is understood, practiced, and contested across contexts. What follows draws on reflections offered in response to that panel discussion, exploring how “resilience” it is being taken up, stretched, and contested, and what this might suggest about the futures education systems are being asked not only to navigate, but to sustain.
Resilience as plural: coexisting, and not fully reconcilable
Across regions, resilience does not appear as a single, coherent concept. Rather, it takes shape through multiple, partially overlapping, and at times incommensurable logics: from technical and system-functional (oriented toward absorbing, adapting, and recovering) to structural and political (shaped by inequality, governance, and exclusion) to relational and cultural (grounded in Indigenous epistemologies, spirituality, and interdependence).
These are not simply different dimensions of the same concept. They point to fundamentally different understandings of what resilience is, what it does, and what it is for. This becomes especially visible in the Pacific framing presented by Elizabeth Cassity and Krishneel Reddy, where resilience is not about “bouncing back” to a prior state, but about sustaining continuity across generations—embedded in vanua (relational belonging), kastom (ancestral knowledge), and broader ecological and spiritual relations. Here, resilience is not something a system possesses, but something that is enacted through relationships, obligations, and practices that sustain collective life over time.
This suggests a deeper tension: Are we talking about resilience of systems or resilience of worlds? These are not the same project. And they may not be fully reconcilable within a single framework. For an initiative like the GPE KIX Observatory, which is tasked with generating comparable, policy-relevant knowledge across diverse contexts, this raises an important challenge of how to engage conceptual plurality without reducing it to a single, standardized definition.
Resilience as redistribution: what it reveals and what it displaces
A second tension emerges across the research: resilience is often mobilized as a solution, while the conditions that produce vulnerability remain insufficiently examined. Across contexts, a recurring pattern appears. Systems may demonstrate resilience in one domain while remaining fragile in another; responses tend to be reactive, short-term, and unevenly distributed; and critically, inequalities are not only outcomes of disruption — they are among its primary drivers.This is evident in the work of Joan DeJaeghere and Vu Dao and Santiago Cueto, where resilience is shown to be deeply shaped by structural conditions. Disruptions intersect with existing inequalities, often along gendered lines, shaping who leaves school, who assumes care burdens, and who is expected to adapt. In this sense, resilience is not evenly distributed but is differentially demanded.
At the same time, the landscape of disruption is shifting. As DeJaeghere and Dao’s findings suggest, artificial intelligence — rather than climate change or political instability — is emerging as a key anticipated disruption, raising new questions about how systems engage with uncertainty. Yet responses remain uneven. Teachers adapt without sufficient support, and policies invoke resilience without specifying how it will be enacted for those most affected. This raises a fundamental question: Are we building resilience within existing systems or addressing the conditions that make systems fragile in the first place? Without this distinction, resilience risks stabilizing inequity rather than transforming it, shifting the burden of adaptation onto those already most affected by disruption. For the Observatory, this suggests an important opportunity of not only documenting resilience practices, but surfacing the structural conditions that shape them, including inequality, governance, and uneven access to resources and decision-making.
Resilience and the question of futures
A third tension emerges across the panel: resilience is not only about response, but increasingly about how systems engage with uncertain futures. Across regions, we see early indications of this shift. In the Pacific (Elizabeth Cassity and Krishneel Reddy), resilience is framed as intergenerational continuity and ecological relation. In South and Southeast Asia (Joan DeJaeghere and Vu Dao), there are emerging concerns around future disruptions, including artificial intelligence. In Latin America and the Caribbean (Santiago Cueto), the emphasis is on the need for more coordinated, system-wide, and intersectional approaches. Taken together, these perspectives suggest that resilience is not only about managing disruption, but about how education systems anticipate, imagine, and organize themselves in relation to what lies ahead.
And yet, these openings remain partial, raising a further set of questions: Are we building resilience into existing systems or rethinking the systems that make resilience necessary? And what kinds of futures are current approaches to resilience enabling and which might they be foreclosing? These are not only policy or technical questions. They are also questions of imagination, inviting a more uncomfortable possibility: What if resilience is not always about adapting to disruption but, at times, about refusing the conditions that make adaptation necessary?
Resilience and its limits
If resilience is becoming a dominant way of thinking about education systems, it is worth asking what such a framing makes possible and what it leaves out. What happens when resilience becomes the primary lens through which the future is understood? What other possibilities — justice, repair, transformation — might recede from view? From this perspective, resilience may be less a solution than a limit concept: a way of naming the growing pressures placed on systems, and the expectation that they must continue to absorb, adapt, and endure.
This does not diminish its importance. But it does suggest the need to hold the concept open to question what it does, what it assumes, and what it asks of those who live within the systems it seeks to describe. At stake, then, is not only how education systems respond to disruption, but how they are imagined – with whom, and for whom those futures are being sustained.
