ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT, CRISIS PREPAREDNESS, AND ORGANIZATIONAL RESILIENCE

Enterprise risk management (ERM) is frequently organized around risk inventories, yet an inventory cannot explain how several individually manageable disruptions combine to threaten the continued delivery of essential services. This chapter conceptualizes risk management as the governance of uncertainty across strategically interconnected enterprise functions and organizational resilience as a context-dependent capability to anticipate, withstand, respond to, recover from, and learn through disturbances. Drawing on a purposive, critical synthesis of foundational scholarship, peer-reviewed research, professional guidance, and official Rwandan evidence available by 3 November 2026, it examines twelve approved domains spanning risk governance, strategic and financial exposures, operations, technology, people, assessment methods, business continuity, interconnected crises, and adaptive recovery. The analysis contrasts decision-theoretic, enterprise-wide, high-reliability, resilience, contingency, and real-options perspectives, explicitly identifying the assumptions that limit their application. Rwanda’s enterprise statistics and documented flood disruptions provide institutional grounding without being misrepresented as firm-level causal evidence. A constructed Kigali distributor case integrates an auditable risk register, business impact analysis, continuity arrangements, cash stress test, expected-loss comparison, and exercise schedule. Comparative discussion of international standards distinguishes voluntary guidance from binding obligations and examines the costs of transferring complex systems to resource-constrained firms. The chapter argues that defensible resilience is neither the elimination of uncertainty nor the duplication of every resource; it is a continually tested alignment of decision rights, essential services, financial capacity, information, relationships, and ethically legitimate recovery priorities. Its integrative propositions are conceptual rather than empirically validated.