This paper suggests that humanitarian debates focus on reducing people’s vulnerability and enhancing their agency, rather than on building resilience. It finds that symptoms of resilience can too easily be misidentified, and that structural factors that prevent people from living with security about their futures can be missed. It notes the importance of the concept of agency – people’s ability to make and follow through on their own plans for socio-economic security – but also of vulnerability as a way of analysing constraints to agency. It suggests that the central guide for developing policy, designing interventions and analysing their impact could become to reduce the degree to which people live in ‘dependent security’, and to increase people’s ‘autonomous security’.
The paper concludes that, with respect to disasters, resilience is limited as an analytical concept, but has potential as a mobilising metaphor and ideal. While it is fairly clear what a ‘lack of resilience’ looks like, this is not the same as having the analytical clarity needed to guide policy, programming and budget allocations, and to have a measurable indicator of progress.
Attempts to assess people’s resilience that focus on certain predetermined dimensions of their lives will inevitably mislead. This is because people are constantly forced to choose between meeting different basic needs, and use a variety of plans and strategies.
Risks are not always best described in terms of shocks or even stresses, but sometimes emanate from the structural dimensions of society, such as inequalities and exclusion. Taken as a whole, the risk environment leads to the creation of chronic uncertainty, where the future has to be heavily discounted for survival in the present. Under conditions of a weak state and market failure, the only source of socio-economic security and ‘freedom from’ threats is to be found in the social relationships that can be established within the household and community. If the nature of those social relationships is exploitative, security can come at the cost of autonomy.
Rather than seeing resilience in particular choices or abilities, it can best be seen through the range of choices that people are able to make, and the degree to which they can make informed choices about their own futures. Instead of measuring specific behaviour, assets or other symptoms, humanitarian and development agencies could examine people’s ‘agency’. A focus on ‘dependent security’ and ‘autonomous security’ would ensure that policy and interventions are grounded in the lives of the people affected by crises, and in the wider political-economy context.
