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Learning Paper
What does resilience mean in practice? Collective learning from multiple agencies
Produced on behalf of the Interagency Resilience Learning Group
Table of Contents
Introduction. ......................................................................................................................... 3
Resilience in practice. ............................................................................................................ 3
Systems appraoch to resilience. ........................................................................................... 4
Process for resilience programming. ...................................................................................... 7
Resilience in fragile contexts. ............................................................................................... 10
Learning for resilience. ........................................................................................................ 13
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 17
About the authors. .............................................................................................................. 20
About Bond
Bond is the civil society network for global change. We bring people together to make the international development sector more effective. bond.org.uk. This Learning Paper was produced as a result of a joint selection process of the Learning Partnership Steering Committee and Bond.
History of the IRLG
The Interagency Resilience Learning Group (IRLG) began in early 2012, as a learning hub comprising humanitarian, development, and conservation Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and DFID. Initially all IRLG members held a Programme Partnership Arrangement (PPA) with DFID and joined as part of the learning partner- ships for PPA holders. However, in mid-2013 it was decided to open up membership to include non-PPA holders.
Many resilience debates were taking place outside of the domain of the PPA holders,
so it was agreed to expand membership to non-PPA holders as well as academics and the
private sector. Prior to the DFID funding agreements coming to an end in December
2016, it was decided to migrate the group to BOND, the UK body for organizations
working in international development. Today the IRLG has 150 members from 56
different organizations. The IRLG is committed to being an open, multi-disciplinary
network that provides a safe space to share experiences and generate learning and
best practice.
The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors.
What does resilience mean in practice? Collective learning from multiple agencies, March 2017 Published by Bond, Society Building, 8 All Saints Street, London N1 9RL, UK Registered Charity No. 1068839 Company Registration No. 3395681 (England and Wales) © Bond, and the contributors, 2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0 Publishing services provided by Practical Action Publishing www.practicalactionpublishing.org
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Introduction How does resilience make a difference to ‘business as usual’? What difference is it making? The Department for International Development (DFID) posed these questions to the BOND Interagency Resilience Learning Group (IRLG), encouraging practitioners to articulate the added value of using a resilience lens in programming. Keen to answer these tough questions, a small group of IRLG members met in November 2016 to draw out some of the main lessons that are distinctive, important, and challenging in resilience programming. Four main themes emerged, which are explored further in this report:
• Asystems approach to resilience. It is improtant to understand the complex
systems that impact people’s ability to cope with risks and shocks, and adapt to change. A systems approach encourages an integrated approach across sectors and programmes.
• Process for resilience programming. While each organization has a slightly different approach to resilience, there are core elements of the process identified as hugely important.
• Resilience in fragile contexts. In fragile contexts, resilience is critical to provide a strong foundation for meeting humanitarian and development goals. Resilience programming can offer a lens to encourage us to look beyond humanitarian responses, into longer-term programming.
• Learning for resilience. Building resilience in dynamic contexts requires a flexible and adaptive approach to programming, based on the use of information, learning, and innovation.
Resilience in practice A resilience approach provides the opportunity to break down existing silos, opening up a systems approach to think about development and disasters across sectors and at multiple scales. It is vital that resilience is recognized as central to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 and the Paris Climate Agreement. To deliver resilience will require coherence with these international agendas and effective integration across multiple scales from local to global.
The resilience approach requires holistic and people-centred approaches to address the diverse factors, both positive and negative, that influence wellbeing. Wellbeing is the sum of the outcomes from the utilization of assets and capacities minus losses due to shocks and stresses. In development, although shocks and stresses are acknowledged, their impact on wellbeing is not always fully explored and acted upon. Resilience thinking recognizes that for sustainable change, action must be taken to understand, assess, and address the risks associated with particular livelihoods and their contribution to individual and collective wellbeing. For an individual, community, and the systems in which they operate, to be resilient they must possess the capacity to respond to all shocks and stresses in a net positive way, by utilizing any or a combination of the following fundamental approaches:
What does resilience mean in practice?
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Resilience is the ability to deal with shocks and
stresses and invest finite resources in actions that
will maximize the benefits of
development gains
• Absorptive capacity. The capacity to withstand the negative impacts of shocks and stresses and return to a healthy pre-impact level with no net zero consequence.
• Adaptive capacity. The ability to take proactive choices about alternative livelihood strategies based on an informed understanding of changing conditions so that the impacts of shocks and stresses are reduced over time.
• Transformative capacity. Despite suffering negative impacts, the ability to maintain wellbeing and reallocate structures and processes so that if a future shock or stress takes place no negative impacts would occur.
These capacities rarely operate in isolation and their combination is the key to providing a mutually reinforcing response to shocks and stresses. Resilience is the ability to deal with shocks and stresses and invest finite resources in actions that will maximize the benefits of development gains. This requires tackling inherent weaknesses in the system, targeting the weakest links and ensuring that, regardless of development choices, sufficient investments are made to disaster preparedness and response, as no one or no system can ever be 100 per cent resilient.
Systems approach to resilience The essence of systems thinking is in ‘seeing’ the world in a particular way, because how the local situation and context for building resilience is viewed affects the approaches that are selected. Critical for a systemic approach to resilience building is the ability to define the system in question. Four questions guide the definition of the system we are focused on:
• Resilience of what? What are the boundaries encompassing the resilience challenge?
• Resilience to what? What shocks and stresses both natural and humanmade threaten wellbeing now and in the future?
• Resilience for whom? Which groups are most vulnerable, and why? • Resilience by what means? What capacities and assets will help the
system cope, adapt, and transform to current and future risk resulting in risk-informed development?
Start by acknowledging complexity Before starting project activities an in-depth context analysis is necessary. This context analysis should be informed by the four resilience questions above. This analysis can start to lift the lid off the complexity of the place where the programme will happen. A full risk analysis must be embedded within this process, but there must also be a thorough look at the inequalities and power relation- ships, institutions, and policies among others, as well as the livelihoods and how they work. The challenge is being able to acknowledge the complexity in which the project operates, but still being able to identify actions. To aid this process, simple conceptual frameworks are helpful to unpack differential understandings
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Figure 1 Community members learning to read a rain gauge (credit: Care International)
of resilience so that common priorities and approaches can be agreed. Resilience in practice means reconciling differences. The poor deal with complexity on a daily basis without ever attempting to understand it. However, for a resilience planning approach, differences in understanding need to be explored before common approaches can be developed.
To aid projects working in complex situations, BOND agencies have come up with a variety of tools adapted to help resilience projects unpack complexity:
• From Risk to Resilience is Practical Action’s simple conceptual framework to unpack complexity providing communities with a foundation for holistic resilience planning. This builds on earlier work from Vulnerability to Resilience (V2R) which introduced a simple conceptual framework to articulate resilience for the development community
• ActionAid’s new Resilience Handbook is a comprehensive toolkit to support the effectiveness of ActionAid’s work and provides a tool that can be applied in different programme environments
• Mercy Corp’s Strategic Resilience Assessments (STRESS) recognize that we need to understand the dynamic, complex systems people rely on, to help them navigate their uncertainty and unpredictability
• Practical Action’s Participatory Markets Systems Development (PMSD) has been adopted by many agencies to help markets-based approaches deal with complexity and aid in understanding the system in question
• Disaster Risk Reduction for Community Resilience: a synthesis of lessons learned by Concern Worldwide from more than a decade of using multi- hazard risk analysis to build community resilience
• Christian Aid’s Resilience Framework outlines our understanding of resilience and illustrates how country programmes respond to the
What does resilience mean in practice?
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multiple risks and pressures that affect marginalized and vulnerable communities in the countries in which we work.
• A compilation of nine case studies illustrate how we interpret resilience – as a means of putting communities and individuals at the centre of their own development.
When attempting to build resilience we must be aware of the consequences of resilience-building activities across multiple sectors and at different scales. Resilience programmes are complicated and complex. It is important to accept this complexity so that we can ensure that actions to build resilience in one sector do not undermine resilience in another sector. For example, working with the community forestry group to fence off an area to protect regenerating seedlings may be a good idea for the forest users group, but unless this is done in agreement with the herders in the community conflict may ensue as herders see their access to grazing land restricted. So resilience practitioners need to work with both groups and think about the trade-offs between each. Equally at larger scale, what is beneficial for one community may not be beneficial for their neighbours. Community A may want to build a wall to protect them from a flood event, but this may mean that the flood impacts downstream are more severe. It is necessary to think about the consequences of resilience-building across different geographic scales as well as across administrative boundaries, local to national, and vice versa.
What does it look like to really integrate? Programmes should not just be multi-sectoral, but actually seek to put the individual or household or community first. This may mean different ways of designing programmes, so that the target population and all the needs and risks that it faces is the starting point, rather than what the individual agency does best. Once the need, or what would make the target population more resilient is identified, partnerships can be brokered for agencies with different areas of specialization to jointly meet those needs. Often different staff from the same organization work in different sectors (e.g. livelihoods staff, WASH staff
Figure 2 Farmer demonstration plot (credit: Care International)
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and so on), which can make it confusing for communities to understand how things are ‘joined up’. ‘Integration’ doesn’t have to be within one programme or organization; we aim to work with other organizations and share parts of the resilience-building approach. It is important to combine coordination with advocacy, to persuade other stakeholders to also join in resilience building.
Although governments and many aid agencies spilt their work into sectors, for people on the ground these are just different aspects of their daily lives. Therefore although we specialize we have to work holistically to support people to build their resilience.
Combining programmes to achieve resilience There can be multiple programmes working within a context. It is helpful to have a strategic approach for the context, within which different programmes are harmonized with each other. Concern Worldwide in Bangladesh run long-term climate smart livelihoods, disaster risk reduction, and environmental management programmes. Some interventions ask for expensive landscaping (creating ponds, embankments, raised paths, etc.) which are beyond the budget; but when a cyclone comes through, cash-for-work provided by an emergency response can be used to support the aspirations identified in the community planning achieved in the long-term programme.
In Ethiopia, the integration of Mercy Corps’ development and humanitarian programmes helped save development gains during drought.
Process for resilience programming Resilience is risk-centric, as it is responsive to hazards in the form of shocks and stresses, so it is fundamental that individuals and communities are able to identify the risks which they face and to respond accordingly. An effective risk assessment should assess hazards and stresses in a holistic way, and include both natural and human-derived shocks and stresses. It should take a multi- sectoral and multi-dimensional approach, through assessing social (including conflict and power), economic, human, physical, and environmental vulnerabil- ities, including underlying conditions and capacities. The risk analysis should be community focused and centred on their perceptions of risk and vulnerability; however, not all risks will be captured and therefore this local level process must be combined with external sources to provide a comprehensive, multi- stakeholder, multiple scale risk analysis.
Risk analysis tools This risk identification process should also be continuous; the risk assessment should be continually updated based on changes in local context. Some examples of risk analysis tools developed by NGO’s include:
• Risk Analysis Guidelines (Concern Worldwide)
• Participatory Vulnerability Analysis (ActionAid). At the centre of the process is the community’s understanding of the root causes of their vulnerabilities and the subsequent actions they choose to take to reduce
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Measures
must reach the weakest
and most vulnerable members
of the communities
their risk of exposure to disaster. This process involves engagement of key stakeholders, while keeping vulnerable communities at the centre.
• Strategic Resilience Assessment (STRESS) (Mercy Corps). A methodology for applying a resilience lens to strategy development or long-term programme design. It builds an understanding of the dynamic social, ecological, and economic systems within which communities are embedded. For examples of the findings, see the STRESS report for Niger, the PAHAL programme in Nepal, and Karamoja in Uganda.
• Participatory Capacity and Vulnerability Analysis (PCVA) is Oxfam’s guidelines for participatory risk analysis in contexts where natural disasters are significant drivers of poverty and suffering. This tool has been adopted to work in urban environments in Latin America by Soluciones Practicas.
• Participatory vulnerability and capacity assessment helps reveal the links between the different kinds of risk a community faces and the way in which the members of that community interact. Christian Aid’s Good Practice Guide builds on wide experience across the sector to provide accessible ‘how to’ guidance.
Vulnerability profiles Vulnerability varies across given areas and social groups. The inequitable distribution of rights, resources, and power may make certain individuals, households, communities, or groups more sensitive to the impacts of shocks and stresses and less able to access the strategies required to deal with these impacts effectively. By investigating the geographic and social factors driving vulnerability – such as gender, race, ethnicity, cultural practices, and age – we can better understand the kinds of threats different groups face, informing which populations we target for future interventions, and how.
Figure 3 Men’s group doing community risk mapping in Kenya (credit: Care International)
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In Nepal Practical Action has been working on Flood Early Warning Systems, with vulnerability profiles critical to ensure that the flood response measures reach the weakest and most vulnerable members of the communities.
Hazard and stress factor prioritization Communities often manage several shocks and/or stresses simultaneously. A prioritization process should be integrated within the risk assessment process as there are usually too many hazards and stresses to address; it should not come as a surprise if the community prioritizes the most likely hazards over more destructive but less frequent hazards (e.g. hurricanes vs. earthquakes in Haiti).
A resilience
approach must focus on
building up from the most
vulnerable
There may also be hidden hazards that are accepted by the community and stakeholders. This may be due to a belief that they are inevitable and that risks cannot be mitigated. Drowning is often not picked up in health surveillance data for example. The community remember the cause of death for many years but do not have an incentive to report drowning. Reference to external research and coordination with experts in a specific area can be used to pre-identify an issue then apply the resilience process to reduce the associated risks and impact. The following are examples of relevant research and expertise:
• Global Report on Drowning: Preventing a Leading Killer (WHO) • Working Paper on Child Drowning (UNICEF) • RNLI Work in Bangladesh • RNLI Project Bhasa
Responsive programming and resilience action planning Following a risk assessment, it is essential to ensure that we are taking actions which are responsive to the hazards and stresses that have been prioritized, and address the underlying vulnerabilities identified. Addressing these community vulnerabilities enables the most vulnerable to take an active part in building their own resilience. This may involve the development of a stand-alone resilience action plan at community level or the inclusion of resilience building actions in existing plans. At all times an adaptive learning approach to development is essential. Lessons learned during implementation may require the redesign of an existing plan or programme in order to be more responsive to the risk context. Resilience programmes are often characterized by a more intensive and more inclusive inception period, allowing appropriate resources and time to understand the context and develop inter- vention plans that tackle the underlying resilience challenges.
Implementation of planned resilience inter- ventions Resilience actions which are then taken forward may include disaster mitigation, exposure reduction, mobility, or diversification actions to reduce the impact of the hazard or stress. Responsive actions can also include risk transfer or prepar- edness for impact, to increase the ability to respond and recover from the hazard or stress. Contingency is also essential to ensure resilience programmes have
What does resilience mean in practice?
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latent potential to enable them to respond quickly to changing stress patterns. A crisis fund or crisis modifier can be a very practical way to achieve this respon- siveness by ensuring budget flexibility. Usually we have more flexibility in budgets than we expect and multiple donors often work together to enhance the flexibility and duration of programmes to create space for responsive programming and learning.
Monitoring and evaluation Central throughout the different programme’s stages is the management of the knowledge and implementation of a monitoring system to review actions against expected outcomes. Monitoring should be participatory and led where possible by programme stakeholders, particularly by community stakeholders to reinforce local lesson learning and uptake. Participatory monitoring of risk assessment and action plan interventions will also ensure actions remain relevant to current hazards and stresses. Measuring resilience impact is often seen as having increased difficulty over ‘conventional’ impact assessment. This guideline highlights the importance of programme participants defining resilience, and related indicators, in their own terms, as they understand it in their own context. In making the link between regular monitoring and deeper explora- tions of impact, it also recognizes the empowerment potential that comes with promoting processes of self-evaluation.
If we get it right for the most vulnerable,
the rest of the population is
easier!
Inclusion of at-risk groups It is essential that the resilience building process is inclusive of at-risk groups such as children, older people, women, and people living with disabilities, and ensure their effective participation and decision-making in risk assessments, resilience action planning, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. If we get it right for the most vulnerable, the rest of the population is easier! For example:
• ActionAid has developed a gender sensitive toolkit for measuring resilience. The South Asia Women’s Resilience Index is a tool that assesses countries’ capacity for disaster risk reduction and recovery and the extent to which the needs of women are being integrated into national resil- ience-building efforts.
Resilience in fragile contexts Fragile contexts are those characterized by weak governance, and are often either in conflict, or emerging from conflict. These contexts make ‘normal’ development processes extremely challenging to implement. Typically these contexts have seen predominantly humanitarian programming aimed at addressing basic needs. While these contexts may be the hardest ones to work in, arguably it is these contexts that would most benefit from resilience programming. In fragile contexts, resilience is critical to provide a strong foundation for meeting humanitarian and development goals – ranging from keeping families safe and protected to improving incomes and health outcomes.
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Figure 4 Farmer Field School, Zimbabwe (credit: Care International)
More than natural hazards Conflict can be seen as a hazard, and the presence of conflict in a country can be seen as a stress that significantly increases vulnerability while reducing the capacity to address natural or human hazards. A risk analysis process must identify all hazards, as well as analysing and understanding the complex inter- actions between conflict, weak governance, natural hazards, and vulnerability.
It follows that addressing priority risks in fragile contexts is more than what is traditionally understood to be disaster risk reduction, and must take a conflict- sensitive or peacebuilding approach. Peacebuilding and conflict-sensitive approaches can be highly technical but strategic partnerships with organiza- tions that have these skills bring in the necessary capacity and can lead on finding the balance between developing livelihoods alternatives and ending conflict using justice processes.
Addressing conflict and insecurity is likely to be prioritized, especially if insecurity is hampering access to vulnerable communities. Peace processes can bring improvements to freedom of movement and access to water, pasture, and other natural resources that are key contributing factors to households’ resilience to underlying natural stresses.
Peacebuilding interventions that strengthen community and institutional conflict management systems can improve household food security during drought. Greater links across ethnic boundaries did not appear to improve peace or food security; however stronger bonds within communities did. Such intra-ethnic social cohesion can manifest as a community-level social safety net, for example, where community members help each other out during times of stress.
Be realistic Fragile contexts are complicated and there is only so much that can be addressed. Addressing large-scale conflicts is beyond the remit of international NGOs and
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Numerous inequalities need to be overcome,
women’s participation
really matters for resilience
requires political solutions, but such organizations may be able to address some 0f the consequences of conflict and fragility at the community level. In Somalia the BRCiS Consortium has learned that we can build the resilience of people to single, small shocks, but two consecutive small shocks or one large shock can overwhelm them.
Crisis modifiers and embedding emergency response into resilience programmes Fragile contexts can change suddenly, and crises are likely to happen at any moment. Resilience programmes in fragile contexts need to maintain the capacity to switch into emergency response mode rapidly. Having crisis modifiers designed into programmes from the outset make this switch both possible and efficient.
‘The contingency fund was enormously helpful for immediate response. There was no delay between us being able to officially formulate the team [RAIN Emergency Response Unit] and implementation. From then on, it was full on. We could just run. It was enormously helpful. Usually, we know what we need to do but don’t have the funds to do it. It was the perfect scenario. Our people knew the community, knew the needs, and the community knew them. It would have been hard to have those things together if we hadn’t been working in these areas for two years because of RAIN. I can’t imagine anything better for emergency response than we had at that time. [And it was helpful] to managers that they didn’t have to change focus from market development.’ (Mercy Corps Senior Manager)
Governance, or the lack of it In contexts where the reach of the state is limited, you can still establish Disaster Management Committees (or similar) and aim to work through them. They may be rooted in traditional leadership structures (e.g. shura in Afghanistan) but are still necessary for preparedness, response, and coping activities. We should try to link them to the state if we can (possible in Afghanistan, not in Somalia).
Even in the absence of the state, such as is found in Somalia, safety nets that help people cope with shocks can still be implemented – but they would probably have to be delivered by humanitarian agencies until stronger governance systems return. Emergency responses such as cash transfers can be seen as safety nets.
Figure 5 The multiple use water system (MUS) approach reduces conflicts between water for domestic and irrigation uses. iDE Nepal (credit: Bimala Rai Colavito)
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When separate local commissions are responsible for climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction, synergy can still be created by developing national level endorsement for coordinated and harmonized local adaptation plans. The goal is to significantly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of climate change and disaster risk reduction planning and resource mobilization, resulting in local communities that have increased capacities to deal with shocks and stresses.
Addressing social power dynamics and in- equalities Numerous structural barriers and unequal power dynamics need to be addressed. Among the many factors, one issue looms largest: gender inequality. Underpinning gender integration are three key facets: increased access to and control of capital for transforming unequal relationships and systems; empowerment of excluded and vulnerable groups through the engagement of gatekeepers; and inclusion as a necessary social dimension for household and community resilience.
Women’s participation really matters for resilience. When a combination of crises struck Somalia in 2010/11 some families adapted or quickly recovered. We found that women who were more empowered over decisions in their homes had the confidence to negotiate with elites to gain access to essential services, like health clinics and markets – and were thus better able to feed and care for their children. Extended social networks and independent income sources were also important.
In contexts where genders are prohibited from discussing together (e.g. Afghanistan, Pakistan), parallel committees can be established for women, and analysis and plans united later. This builds the voice of women and in Pakistan has resulted in women’s and men’s groups being subsequently brought together.
Christian Aid’s Power Analysis explains what power is, why it is important, how and when to implement power analysis, and which tools to use. It also gives a simple introduction to Power Analysis.
Learning for resilience The problems faced by the poor are complex and ever changing, meaning that initiatives aiming to build resilience need to reflectively and reflexively learn how to adapt over time to remain effective. BOND agencies have intended to focus on supporting communities to do this, but we are asking critically: how much learning and flexibility is there across all of the processes and scales of this work? We regularly discuss and identify learning, but this doesn’t always result in changes to the ways we work. The focus of our work is often on fixed solutions to anticipated problems (e.g. drought-tolerant seeds in a drought-prone area), but not coupled with building capacities of people or our programmes to deal with uncertainty and variability (e.g. when severe rains may cause unexpected flooding in the drought-prone area).
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Flexibility is needed in programming at all scales from households tocommunity, at all levels of government, and in the way we design and manage our programmes. Fixed solutions do not prepare people for the changing context, whether that’s due to climate change, conflict, or socio-political circumstances. The changes needed for people to become more resilient can best come about through space for reflection and learning among all stakeholders. Building resilience in these dynamic contexts requires a flexible and adaptive approach to programming, based on the use of information, learning, and innovation.
Flexible and adaptive programming Flexible and adaptive programming is regarded as beneficial to all development programming, and particularly essential for those programmes that intend to build resilience. Risks are not static: the relationships between people and the drivers of the risk affecting them are dynamic. Designing and delivering programmes which have the flexibility to change with varying risks and contexts are essential to improving resilience. This is necessary in terms of both imple- mentation and project management. Fixed project activities and approaches do not support the ability of implementers or households and communities to learn how to adapt in response to shocks and stresses, such as changes in weather patterns, disaster impacts that are greater than anticipated, or protracted conflict. A focus needs to be placed on flexible support if we want to help those we work with to adapt to shocks and stresses. Programme design should allow for this flexibility and adaptation within the programme, for example by building in contingency funding in budgets (to better deal with unanticipated disasters, rather than relying on external humanitarian interventions), allowing variance in log-frame activities, by not locking programmes into overly rigid outputs and indicators for monitoring and evaluation, and being open to reviewing theories of change. For some thinking on adaptive programming and why and how NGO’s can embrace this approach see the following documents;
• Managing Complexity: Adaptive Management at Mercy Corps is an overview of Mercy Corps’ approach to adaptive management, including a really simple framework and descriptions for how to do more.
• Adapting Aid: Lessons From Six Case Studies is a short report and six case studies from the Mercy Corps and IRC ADAPT collaboration, that draws out five key themes fundamental for adaptive management.
• Adaptive Management for Resilient Communities is an overview of Practical Action’s approach to adaptive management.
Use of information and data Our analysis of practice across BOND members suggests that we need to better use information and data to enable us to make more effective decisions, and embed the production of knowledge as a key component within programme activities so that the poor are producing their own knowledge to inform action. These changes to the ways that we work will ensure that interventions are regularly informed, produced, and used by all stakeholders, facilitating flexibility and longer-term capacity to make adaptations to changing circumstances.
This focus on knowledge production at all scales should stress the importance of creating spaces for communities to generate their own knowledge on shocks
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Figure 6 Farmer field school in Honduras (credit: iDE)
and stresses, as this is known to stimulate agency for adaptations to risk. BOND members themselves need to produce knowledge about current and emerging problems to move from reactive modes of programming to better targeted interventions that support the current and anticipated needs of the poor. An innovative example of this is in the urban areas of Nairobi, Port au Prince, and Freetown, where Concern are developing multi-hazard emergency surveil- lance systems to better provide information as hazards unfold. Concern are also tracking disease statistics in health centres in Kenya and Uganda to scale treatment according to seasonal spikes in diseases.
Rainfall information, seasonal forecasts, market information, commodity shortages, and price fluctuations help communities and households change their plans according to the changing circumstances. CARE’s work in Kenya, Ghana, and Niger through the Adaptation Learning Programme supports local communities and farmers in accessing and interpreting new information to help decide when and what to plant.
Hazard-specific information is valuable not only in the form of early warning systems to trigger response measures before a hazard strikes, but also as a way to help communities understand their hazard profile. Early warning systems support communities to take an interest in data and over time the use and under- standing of this information can inform decision-making. In Nepal communities working with Practical Action have invested in seed storage facilities. This arose when the communities were made aware of the proximity of their existing grain stores to flood-prone areas identified as a result of improved mapping using data collected by the early warning system.
For government and other agency stakeholders, access to data and information helps to ensure that their development planning has considered potential risks, as CARE has evidenced through its Participatory Scenario Planning process for facilitating development of seasonal forecast and sector advisories with government departments and communities.
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However, the 2015/2016 El Niño event serves as a reminder that at a global scale we lack the systems, resources, and coordination to enable us to anticipate, respond, or adapt to emerging threats even with the information and data available. Efforts should continue to be made in developing this, such as through interagency collaboration and data sharing at global levels.
Learning, including Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL) ‘Learning’, in its various forms and meanings, is widely regarded to be essential for resilience. BOND member discussions often focus on learning to improve programmes, but the group analysis of our agencies’ programming suggests many ‘resilience’ programmes are business as usual. BOND members agree that our agencies have learned to be very effective at this, accessing and winning grants in this way and even generating stories of transformational change.
A process for learning should be established in resilience projects, ensuring that the learning focuses on: i) supporting communities/households/stakeholders to learn in a self-sustaining way; and ii) improving the programme (iteratively and adaptively). This approach to learning should go beyond training to support learning from experience, via self-reflection, critical friends, or between peers. We should be stimulating cycles of learning through action and reflection. Training helps transfer skills, but people need to be able to learn reflectively (via critical thinking) and reflexively (learn how to learn/continuous learning) within changing circumstances to enhance adaptation.
Broader research helps build a better understanding about resilience, but to achieve project outcomes and have impact on the lives of people we are trying to support, learning should be embedded in such a way that it focuses first and foremost on improving the programme so that it builds within its lifetime. CARE’s Farmer Field Schools are an approach that helps farmers to learn and share with each other.
Innovation Information and learning are fully beneficial when used to test new approaches and activities, in the face of new knowledge and understanding of emerging risks. This requires a different approach to risk, which is supportive of trialling and accepts the potential for failure. Communities need the space and flexibility to explore different ways of dealing with risks and uncertainties, their changing environment, and unanticipated hazards. They also need the support to take risks with their limited resources knowing that if things go wrong they will be supported. Resilience will not arise from the repetition of low risk, low return activities. Programmes need to find ways to enable beneficiaries to innovate to maximize their returns and in many cases this means increasing their risks over the short term.
Innovation requires willingness to take advantage of opportunities, learn from mistakes, and implement changes. This can include the use and deployment of new and appropriate forms of technology as well as the development of
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deliberate learning strategies that incorporate new experiences into practice. Within CARE’s ‘Where the Rain Falls’ Project (implemented in eight countries in Africa and Asia to better understand the complexities of changing rainfall patterns and their effects on food security and human mobility), the role of research partnerships in supporting community-level innovation has helped improve outcomes for climate resilience.
Organizations themselves also need to have a supportive mind-set to test new approaches to respond to changing circumstances, as in the case of changing procurement procedures for seed fair activities in the Revitalizing Agricultural/ Pastoral Incomes and New Markets (RAIN) project in Ethiopia, led by Mercy Corps.
To improve learning we need to regularly act and critically reflect, encouraging peer-to-peer learning at all scales, and change the ways that we do programming through the use of data and innovation. These changes will help us continue to move beyond the rhetoric of resilience to enable us and the beneficiaries of our work to better respond to shocks and stresses.
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About the authors Colin McQuistan ([email protected]) is Senior Advisor for
Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction at Practical Action Emma Proud ([email protected]) is Senior Advisor – Economic and Market
Development at Mercy Corps Dom Hunt ([email protected]) is Disaster Risk Reduction Advisor at Concern Jonathan Stone ([email protected]) is Global Resilience Advisor at
Tearfund Sheri Lim ([email protected]) is Climate Change and Resilience Team Leader,
CARE UK Richard Ewbank ([email protected]) is Global Climate Change Advisor at
Christian Aid Josh Meek ([email protected]) is Trust Officer at Farm Africa Daniel Tripp ([email protected]) is International Programme Funding
Manager, RNLI Chiara Ambrosino ([email protected]) is Senior Advisor, Climate and
Sustainability at IDE Meghna Manaktala ([email protected]) is Disaster
Resilience and Response Advisor at Y Care International Gemma Bruley-Prince ([email protected]) is Humanitarian
Funding Manager at ActionAid Peter Crawford ([email protected]) is Resilience Advisor at Christian Aid Ruth Unstead-Joss ([email protected]) is Secure Livelihoods Coordinator
at VSO Jason Garrett ([email protected]) is Resilience Programme Advisor at
World Vision UK Elizabeth McLeod ([email protected]) is Policy Advisor at Mercy Corps Clodagh Byrne ([email protected]) is a Resilience and Disaster Risk
Reduction Programme and Policy Adviser with HelpAge International
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