The Mercatus Center is pleased to announce a cohort of Resilient Societies grant recipients. Following a call for proposals in March, Mercatus selected 16 projects to receive grants of up to $6,000 each.
Learn more about the Resilient Societies initiative here. Meet the grant recipients and explore their projects below.
Meet the grant recipients:
Joshua Anumolu, Washington, DC, will explore the question: Is there a framework in which AI and globalization could together catalyze a new, localized economy of self-empowered individuals and artisans? In particular, what local institutional capacity has the best chance of enabling such a transition?
Fernando Arteaga, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, will explore the question: How does a society’s broader cultural environment reshape institutions through gradual external influence? Using the Anglican Communion as a case study, the project examines how power is distributed among active practitioners, state and cultural elites, and nominal members—and how those relationships affect institutional leadership, doctrine, adaptation, and fracture.
Curtis Bram, Dallas, Texas, will explore the question: When stress makes centralized AI-assisted recommendations look like the obviously responsible answer, what institutional arrangements preserve decentralized judgment and adaptive self-government rather than turning public participation into ceremonial oversight?
Justin Canfil, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will explore the question: What specific forms of legal precision promote institutional resilience to technological change, and how severe is the tradeoff between precision-driven compliance and long-run adaptability? Can the wrong kind of precision—the kind that looks rigorous on paper—actually be self-undermining, producing the very loopholes, contestation, and fragmentation it was designed to prevent?
Stephen Corson, New York City, New York, will explore the question: Does a city’s budget monitoring system produce a complete and reliable account of fiscal conditions, particularly when those conditions are under stress? Specifically, the project asks whether the structure of the monitoring system, and the incentives embedded within it, lead to systematic gaps in how fiscal risks are identified, analyzed, and communicated.
Deshdeep Dhankhar, Santa Barbara, California, will explore the question: When do courts and opposition-controlled subnational governments preserve democratic contestation under executive-centered stress, and when do they fail?
Naela Elmore, Dallas, Texas, will explore the question: Does AI-enabled surveillance strengthen authoritarian regimes’ adaptive capacity, or can it make them more institutionally brittle? The project examines whether surveillance technologies displace distributed sources of information, optimize state responses around previously observed threats, and encourage rigid or miscalibrated responses to novel shocks.
Marcos Lüdy, Paris, France, will explore the question: What mechanisms allow institutions to recognize failure, correct “maladaptive” rules, and restore social coordination under conditions of severe stress? Why do some societies adapt after crises while others remain trapped in dysfunctional arrangements?
Trent Macdonald, Parkdale, Victoria, Australia, will explore the question: When does AI enhance institutional evolvability, and when does it merely make existing institutions more efficient at preserving maladaptive structures? Further, what makes institutions evolvable under stress, and how does AI change the mechanisms by which societies generate, test, and stabilize new rules?
Sabina Mihailescu, Bucharest, Romania, will explore the question: Under what conditions does voluntary, decentralized civic infrastructure generate institutional trust in societies where formal institutions have failed, and what determines whether individual community-level arrangements adapt or collapse when stressed?
Sam Patterson, Grand Rapids, Michigan, will explore the question: Can AI help lower the cost of structured revisitation in a decentralized fashion? He will further investigate whether a voluntary claim-accountability framework could improve the lifecycle of serious public claims.
Veeshan Rayamajhee, Las Cruces, New Mexico, will explore the question: What happens when the state nationalizes community-managed institutions that have governed local life for centuries?
Hilton Root, Arlington, Virginia, will explore the question: Why do some institutions adapt under stress without letting emergency powers become ordinary government, while others respond to disruption by centralizing authority in ways that are hard to unwind? And what institutional mechanisms make that difference?
Taylor Schmidt, San Francisco, California, will explore the question: What does it take to build and finance single-stair apartment building statewide? The project examines why legal reforms do not automatically produce built outcomes and identifies which barriers involving underwriting, comparable properties, construction, permitting, and practitioner knowledge are temporary and which are likely to persist.
Bill Tulloh, San Francisco, California, will explore the question: How can we design decentralized systems that make it more likely that the agents will choose the abstraction-preserving path in times of stress? In particular, what affordances and ready-to-hand tools and options would make abstraction-preserving choices more likely?