In recent years, policymakers and practitioners have identified the concept of resilience as a way to connect the universe of humanitarian, development, stabilization, risk reduction and climate change communities. Resilience thinking recognizes that current approaches and outcomes have failed to yield adequate results in the face of interconnected risks.
Resilience thinking changes the status quo by providing a more sophisticated response to risk through joint analysis, and strengthening the resilience of people and systems (individuals, communities, states and institutions) who face complex risk each day. Resilience thinking can work within existing platforms to catalyze a more holistic, integrated and connected response to complex risks that can improve the ability of human society and our ecosystem to thrive in the face of uncertainty.
The Global Resilience Debate: Why Resilience?
The concept of resilience has gained currency in the global humanitarian and development policy debate in recent years. This prominence is based on the growing understanding of the interconnected nature of transnational risk. Today’s risk landscape features interconnected risks from climate change, natural disasters, global financial instability and recovery, political transition, food price shocks, endemic poverty, wealth distribution and land use patterns.
The current response mechanisms to address these challenges are not yielding desired results. National and international systems to respond to these risks are in place but have not worked in a systematic and coordinated approach to deal both with the symptoms and root causes of these risk vectors.
Resilience refers to a concrete method for connecting policy agendas to address these diverse risks. Resilience offers an attractive way for policy makers and practitioners to rethink current problem solving approaches, and to develop new collaborations to meet today’s risk landscape. Resilience offers a specific framework for bringing together leaders and systems within national governments, humanitarian, stabilisation, development, climate change and land use practitioners to design concerted programing that matches the risks that face our planet.
What is Resilience?
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines resilience as “the ability of individuals, communities and states and their institutions to absorb and recover from shocks while positively adapting and transforming their structures and means for living in the face of long-term challenges and uncertainty” (OECD 2014). There are many flavors of resilience definitions in the mix today but the OECD team has established a clear, functional definition that helps action-oriented humanitarians.
Mapping the Resilience Debate at the Global Level
The current resilience debate at the global level draws on multidisciplinary thinking with origins in ecosystem stability, engineering, psychology and disaster risks reduction. The current debate applies cross-disciplinary ideas about resistance to disturbance, change and uncertainty to social development systems (ODI 2012).
In response to this growing policy debate, international organizations, the United Nations system and Non-Governmental organizations have worked to define the term, and translate its meaning into concrete programing. Given this on-going definition process, there are wide-ranging understandings of resilience at the global level, and varying types of integrations of the term into ongoing programing. Some organizations have defined resilience as simply a substitute for existing disaster risk reduction programing, while others have developed more detailed and concrete definitions based on social protection and development theory.
Resilience is widely used in climate change adaptation literature, mostly as a desirable end state for climate change adaptation programing. The term has become associated with climate change and disaster preparedness for some observers, with an assumption that the ideas do not apply outside of the climate sphere. In a related initiative, the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities network focuses on urban resilience to a range of 21st century risks. Funding related to the program establishes planning and a Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) for each city to guide system-wide planning and programing (Rockefeller Foundation 2014).
How is Resilience thinking different from what exists today?
Resilience incorporates elements of a risk management approach and uses a Resilient Systems Analysis (RSA) to tackle today’s risk landscape. Find additional supporting material at the OECD. The resilience approach is a specific political and technical method that allows layers of society to absorb, adapt, and transform in the face of shock. Resilience means collectively understanding the risk landscape in each particular context, determining which layer of society can best counter this risk, and working to strengthen these layers of society to meet these risks.
Existing methodologies in development, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction all address specific elements of resilience, but the resilient systems approach unifies these disparate parts for collective analysis and action. The resilience approach includes a political aspect that allows all elements of society to understand and endorse the concept, and a technical element that allows policy makers to roll out resilient programing through existing mechanisms and initiatives.
While resilience includes a set of technical measures, the approach also calls for a new way of working to bridge existing divides between humanitarian, development, disaster risk reduction and climate change programing. The technical resilience approach provides a format for achieving this integration.
What Resilience is Not:
Resilience is not a reformulation or replacement for development, climate change action or disaster risk reduction practice. While it may include elements of these approaches, it offers a holistic risk- based approach to solving system wide problems in society. Similarly, it goes beyond a simply pro-poor or anti-vulnerability agenda to empower all segments of society to assess and make informed choices about risk.
Alternatively, resilience does not imply an additional development pillar, or a dedicated funding stream. Instead, resilience implies coordinated, risk informed choices about existing mechanisms and programs that empower all aspects of society. Resilience does not imply a stream of new funding or new programing. Rather, it is a way to integrate existing information flows, coordination systems for an enhanced coordination and system-wide outcomes.
Finally, resilience is not simply ‘whatever we are doing now in our programing’. Resilience is not a general goal of all development and humanitarian and disaster risk reduction programing. It is a specific risk-informed, technical approach to a coordinated systems outcome. It can be defined, measured and attained.
The Takeaway
Humanitarian and preparedness practitioners use and work with others using an alphabet soup of acronyms and fashionable buzzwords. There is broad use and misuse of the term in our work but the OECD has presented a practical option that makes sense for action oriented humanitarian professionals. We can apply resilience thinking to our lives and work as a way to build better, stronger systems to face the inevitable coming shocks.
Rivanna Strategy 