Resilience is becoming influential in development and vulnerability reduction sectors such as social protection, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. In that context, the objective of this paper was to assess in a critical manner the advantages and limits of resilience. While the review highlights some positive elements –in particular the ability of the term to foster integrated approaches across sectors– it also shows that resilience has important limitations. In particular it is not a pro-poor concept, and the objective of poverty reduction cannot simply be substituted by resilience building. The paper examines four case studies of programmes in Mexico, Ethiopia, South Africa and Bangladesh.
Key Findings:
- ‘Just cash’ can do more than merely allow people to cope with shocks, especially if the amounts transferred are large enough. The strongest evidence for this comes from South Africa´s grants, which are at the upper ends of social transfers for middle-income countries in terms of the amount transferred, and have been found to be used in a number of complex ways to improve people´s livelihoods. These uses of grants could potentially contribute to ‘adapting’ or even ‘transforming’ people’s lives in the context of uncertainty and (climatic) shocks if these grants could strengthen or generate types of livelihood strategies (e.g. migration) that are less vulnerable to these shocks.
- Resilience needs to be built through a holistic approach that integrates and implements a variety of interventions. These interventions should combine protective, preventative, promotional and transformative measures into a sequential and incremental approach.
- Preventative and promotional measures can be incorporated by linking a social protection programme with other schemes. What is missing, however, is a more rigorous and thorough discussion of the impacts of these combined interventions in terms of resilience building.
- The importance of safety nets as the ‘bedrock’ of transformational social protection and resilience can be seen in the fact that all programmes in these case studies have a ‘protective’ component, even those which are strongly focused on ‘promotional’ or even ‘transformative’ outcomes. This suggests that while the ‘protective’ component is insufficient to bring about resilience on its own, it can be a pre-requisite for preventative, promotional and transformational measures to be effective.
Recommendations:
- The politics of resilience (who are the winners and who are the losers of ‘resilience interventions’) need to be recognised and integrated more clearly into the current discussion. In particular, a resilience-based systems approach might end up leading us towards abandoning interest in the poor(est) for the sake of system-level resilience.
- Practitioners need to step back, consider the objectives of their interventions and then consider how resilience may support or actually hinder these objectives. Being a term that is used (loosely) in a large number of disciplines, resilience can be a very powerful integrating concept that brings different communities of practice together.
- By emphasizing the importance of scale and boundaries, resilience also offers some value for social protection in relation to ‘spatial’ processes, such as rural-urban, or trans-boundary, migration.
- Resilience thinking can help better incorporate the social-ecological linkages between the vulnerable groups and ecological services on which they depend, thus contributing to a more adequate targeting of (future) vulnerable groups.
