Resilience

The term ‘resilience’ is used widely in the field of development, particularly in relation to climate variability and change. However, like ‘vulnerability’ and ‘adaptive capacity’, resilience remains a vague, confusing, and contested concept. There is little agreement on how to define, let alone operationalise or measure, resilience, and its relationship to other commonly used concepts such as transformation and transformational adaptation remains opaque. Despite these challenges, many development initiatives explicitly seek to build or enhance resilience. The focus on resilience by development programmes and climate funds means that there is a demand for monitoring frameworks and indicators to track resilience at various scales.

Garama has undertaken pioneering work in the area of resilience, including:

  • The development of guidance for the UK’s International Climate Fund (ICF) on the measurement of resilience, in the form the methodology for the ICF’s Key Performance Indicator for tracking the number of people with improved resilience as a result of ICF support (ICF KPI4).
  • Leading on the methodological development of IIED’s Tracking Adaptation and Measuring Development (TAMD) framework, which relates institutional climate risk management to resilience and development outcomes through a framework that can be used to develop systems for monitoring, evaluation and learning around resilience and development in relation to climate change.
  • The development, with IIED, of step-by-step guidance on adaptation M&E, based on the TAMD framework and including guidance on measuring resilience at the local level.
  • Delivery of training on resilience and its measurement as part of Garama’s regular in-house training courses and tailored courses for specific institutions.
  • A learning assignment around resilience and adaptation for the DFID-funded StARCK+ programme in Kenya.
  • Preparation of an ‘Evidence on Demand’ review of frameworks for measuring resilience.

We participated in Oxfam GB’s June 2017 symposium on Resilient Solutions in Oxford, where Garama’s Director, Nick Brooks, took part in a panel discussion on ‘transformation’. See our Oxfam blog post for this event here, and this article on zilient.org, in which we get a mention.