Every now and then the
development community comes up with a new buzz word that sounds like the next
big solution to the challenge of long term sustainable development.
The current one seems
to be resiliency – it was the focus of a panel discussion at Busan’s High Level
Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-4), organized by the Red Cross, and with CIDA President Margaret Biggs, among
others; the recent food crisis in the Sahel (the third in five years) saw the
launch of a new “Partnership for Resilience”; and project and program proposals are now increasingly
framed as contributing to ‘resilience’.
A key challenge is
that everyone is using the term to describe different things and in doing so, resiliency
risks losing its utility as an organizing concept. Better defining what
resiliency is, allows practitioners to more clearly determine what it is good
for, when and why (and what it is not). As one commentator has said, it is just
as useful to include within a definition of resilience things that we should exclude as resilient.
We had the opportunity
to get our heads around the issue at a recent workshop on “Linking Short Term and Long Term Food Security: Humanitarian and Development Perspectives”,
organized by the Canadian Food Security Policy Group (FSPG) and the
Humanitarian Coalition.
At the meeting, a
number of the bigger Canadian development NGOs presented a series of case
studies. These were based on where groups have tried, both successfully and not
so successfully, to integrate short-term and long term approaches to food
security into their programming with a view to building the resiliency of very
vulnerable households – particularly in parts of the world that are suffering
from chronic food insecurity and child undernutrition. Here is what we got from
the meeting (and from a little extra side reading):
What is resilience?
As understood at HLF-4, it is about “ensur[ing] that development [and
humanitarian] strategies prioritise building resilience among people and
societies at risk from shocks. [...] Investing in resilience and risk reduction
increases the value and sustainability of our development efforts.” (Busan
Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, Para. 27)
Drawing from various
thinkers on this (see links above, and remember there is no commonly agreed
definition), it is about shock and risk management, mitigation and ‘building
back better’. It is about anticipating, preventing, learning from and adapting
to these shocks. It is about ensuring that vulnerable individuals’ and
communities’ capabilities (such as health and education) and assets aren’t
depleted as a result of these shocks, and that in fact their lives and
livelihoods are getting better not worse.
In practice, for
climate groups it is about better integrating climate adaptation into
development programming; for humanitarian groups it is about emergency
preparedness and early response, and disaster risk reduction (although it is
arguably a longer term “development” issue); and for the Canadian Food Security
Policy Group, it is in large part about how to support better transitions
between emergency and long term approaches to food security.
Ultimately, what I
took from the workshop (and the approach of these different groups) is that
resiliency is another way of talking about long-term sustainable change and
equity. It means taking a more holistic approach to development—one firmly
grounded in improving the lives of the most vulnerable households and
communities in the developing world.
This blog was written by Fraser
Reilly-King, Policy Analyst (Aid), CCIC, and Paul Hagerman, Co-Chair of the FSPG and
Director of Public Policy at the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFGB).
The views expressed are their own, and
do not necessarily represent the views of CCIC CFGB or their members.
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