A theoretical exploration of resilience and effectiveness requirements' compatibility in formal and permanent emergency networks

•Formal and permanent emergency networks need to be both effective and resilient.•Effectiveness and resilience requirements might overlap.•Overlap can be positive (reinforcing) or negative (contradictory).•Contradictory requirements require a precarious balancing act.

Resilience is a trending topic within the field of crisis management. It remains, however, quite unclear what emergency networks need to do if they want to act in a resilient manner while simultaneously achieve their core function: mitigating, managing, and ending a crisis. In this article we combine emergency network, resilience, and crisis management literature to outline the requirements formal and permanent emergency networks need to meet in order to be both resilient and effective. Our exploration shows that contradictions which seem problematic in theory, might be manageable in reality.