Recovery is "the process of rebuilding, restoring and rehabilitating the community following an emergency" (HMG Emergency Response and Recovery, 2013). For COVID-19, recovery will involve all-of society (because everyone in the country has been affected to some extent) and whole-system (because every organisation, service and function has been affected). Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic we have deployed our research expertise in emergency response and recovery to support government. This has involved providing ongoing information about recovery, producing rapid response guides on aspects of response and recovery, and identifying opportunities for research to support the recovery effort. This project builds on this initial work to understand how government develop plans for short-term, transactional 'recovery' and how they think strategically about longer-term, ambitious, transformational change which we call 'renewal'. Objective: This project works closely with resilience partners in three Local Resilience Forums (LRFs) to develop a generalizable, theoretically underpinned framework for how recovery and renewal to COVID-19 can enhance resilience. The framework will: - Take a whole system approach to recovery and renewal (from communities to national levels) - Explore how to manage the changes in people, places and processes that is needed to live with COVID-19 - Address short-term, transactional recovery as well as longer-term, transformational renewal - Complement existing guidance and resilience standards and inform an international standard that we will write on recovery and renewal Approach: The framework will be informed by (and inform) Recovery Coordination Groups (RCGs) by using an action research approach to work closely with the resilience partners and engage with local and national organisations on how they plan recovery and renewal on a system-wide basis. Our partner LRFs have different structures (e.g. for local governance and recovery governance) and characteristics (e.g. partnerships, priorities, populations, local challenges, inequalities) so we can create a framework that is widely applicable to local variations. Activities: We will: - Collect and analyse national/international lessons on recovery and renewal - Gather primary data by interviewing experts across the world on emergency planning, risk, and resilience - Contribute to three Recovery Coordination Groups (RCGs) as well as three specific renewal projects (e.g. on volunteering, community resilience, demand management in emergency services) - Extensively engage with other local and national government organisations to ensure alignment of our framework and exploit ongoing opportunities for impact - Facilitate webinars and training on recovery and renewal for resilience - Develop and test a framework for recovery and renewal, refine it in different contexts (national and international), learn about its application, and use feedback to improve it - Develop and test a methodology to assess the impact of the framework Main deliverables: - A searchable database of lessons for recovery and renewal for local resilience - Expert briefings on how to implement recovery and renewal for resilience - A generalizable, theoretically underpinned, practice-tested framework to support government's thinking about recovery and renewal for resilience - A self-evaluation methodology to reflect on recovery practices - Publish fortnightly 'The Manchester Briefing on Recovery and Renewal' currently distributed directly (and through a network of national/international partners) to 52,000 people along with case studies and training products - International and national standards having a global impact