Reclaiming community resilience toward more effective aid

Abstract

What is community resilience, who defines it and how can aid better support communities to increase their resilience? Much of current resilience aid policy and practice focuses on human/environmental relationships, with frameworks for livelihood and food strategy in cyclical drought just one example of recent trends.

My approach is to include but expand beyond the confines of environmental disaster parameters to understand the larger complexity of enablers and obstacles to resilience across the community system, inclusive of any context or culture, during times of crisis and in everyday life.

This paper reviews the human development literature around promotive factors, protective factors and competencies, and draws on 10+ years of experience working in myriad aid contexts globally: 1) to reclaim community resilience as a more comprehensive lens than disaster management alone; and, 2) to propose an emergent methodological approach for partnering with communities to identify and address their resilience goals.

The findings will suggest that by recognizing communities as systems, by acknowledging resilience as an ongoing process, by shifting toward community-centered decision-making and action, and by utilizing emergent findings on which to base policy and programming, aid can enhance its efficacy in supporting communities to increase their resilience. Show more