What does resilience look like, and how is it measured?

Resilience is increasingly employed as a concept to guide praxis on climate change and development. There has been an increase in academic interest around this subject in the last decade and, related to this, an increasing number of organisations attempting to integrate ‘resilience thinking’ into their work. Resilience may be an elegant heuristic, but there is growing concern as to how this concept, developed within the natural sciences, can be applied to social systems. Unlike the natural environment, socioecological settings are populated with individuals and their subjective values, agendas, points of view and priorities. Resilience building initiatives must therefore reflect on normative questions, such as ‘resilience of what, to what and for whom?’ These questions arise because of the desire to make resilience operational: to design strategies to promote it and frameworks to measure it. Yet measuring the resilience of various systems to diverse shocks and stresses presents its own set of challenges, partly because the term is infused with theoretical ideas from systems thinking and complexity science that are difficult to gauge and evaluate.

Over the past decade, organisations and researchers have enthusiastically wrestled with this challenge. The results of these efforts are now visible in a rich and growing landscape of resilience measurement approaches. These frameworks systematise resilience concepts and components into schema to guide efforts aimed at measuring, evaluating, testing and analysing resilience. Despite this growing body of work however, major conceptual challenges persist. For example, a recent review of resilience measurement frameworks found that a large percentage of these propose methodologies and indicators that are not informed by the perspectives and priorities of vulnerable communities. This is surprising given that there is an extensive body of evidence highlighting the specificity and high variability in people’s ability to engage with shocks and stresses, even within relatively contained and socially homogenous settings. Approaches to measuring resilience tend not to consider that people’s sources of resilience may indeed be subjective. Linked to this is the tendency of existing approaches to also consider resilience as a set of inputs and output of interventions/projects, as opposed to outcomes.

Addressing these questions is key to understanding how projects funded under the BRACED programme are contributing to the resilience of marginalised communities to climate extremes and disasters. Research under this theme will therefore seek to generate new knowledge on measuring resilience using data generated by what is probably the world’s largest operational resilience programme.

In particular, this theme will employ primary and secondary research methods to examine:

• Approaches to understanding the components and factors of resilience, from the perspective of vulnerable communities
• Capacities that could be considered to be representative ‘outcomes’ of resilience building processes
• The strengths and gaps within a range of M&E approaches being deployed by BRACED implementing partners
• Changes in resilience over time and across scales in BRACED countries
• Thresholds (in terms of assets and processes) of resilience
• The role of ICTs and ‘Big Data’ methods in measuring resilience and innovative ways of promoting their use for M&E and improved targeting of resilience-building initiatives