Risk and resilience in the Scottish social housing sector: ‘We're all risk managers’

Social housing providers confront an array of risks strategically and operationally. Recently, models of hybrid organisations have been developed to understand how non-profit landlords are changing in response to market and other external pressures. In this paper, we draw on a multidisciplinary conceptual framework of external and internal risks, multiple stakeholders and resilience strategies, as well as the notion of hybridity, in order to make sense of change in Scotland's social housing sector. The paper draws on elite interviews as well as case studies that seek to capture the range of approaches adopted by providers. Although providers handle and respond to risk in a variety of ways, risk management is a necessary part of the management of social housing businesses. Increasingly, providers are concerned with questions of resilience – the need to make themselves as organisations more resilient and also to promote greater resilience amongst tenants as a way of mitigating risk. Our research suggests that this is leading to some positive outcomes e.g. greater diversity within the sector and increased customer focus but there is concern that government policies remain within silos and are insufficiently flexible to deal with changed circumstances and the evolving needs and aspirations of the sector.