Resilience has become popular in foreign aid, but it is far from easy. Previous posts on this blog have discussed challenges of applying the ideas – which emerged from numerous places including ecological sciences – to development and humanitarian aid (see here and here).
A New Scientist editorial piece on the aftermath of hurricane Sandy highlights the fact that the challenges are not unique to our sector. It usefully outlines what I call ‘resilience risks’ – shortcomings which may arise from narrow or simplistic applications of resilience concepts. This post shares the three key resilience risks – which I hope may prove relevant for aid practitioners, researchers and policy makers working on these issues.
Resilience risk 1: Resilience is analysed in highly linear ways
A key critique made in the NS piece was that the potential risks from Sandy were thought about, anticipated and planned for in a linear and simplistic fashion:
Danger of fire? Equip fire departments. Possible electricity failure? Turn off transformers and give hospitals generators. Risk of floods? Build barriers. But in New York City all three risks hit at once, and then some. Houses burned because firefighters couldn’t get to them or operate equipment. Electricity substations exploded as record floods hit. Two hospitals were evacuated as backup generators failed.”
This analysis resonates with a previous post on this blog focusing on complexity and disasters – to quote directly:
Consider the following three ingredients: a mega-city in a poor, Pacific rim nation; seasonal monsoon rains; a huge garbage dump. Mix these ingredients in the following way: move impoverished people to the dump, where they build shanty towns and scavenge for a living in the mountain of garbage; saturate the dump with changing monsoon rain patterns; collapse the weakened slopes of garbage and send debris flows to inundate the shanty towns. That particular disaster, which took place outside of Manila in July 2000… was not inherent in any of the three ingredients of that tragedy; it emerged from their interaction’
Taken to extremes, the linear approach diminishes the potential relevance of resilience efforts. Work by the Stockholm Resilience Centre shows that narrow approaches to resilience can actually heighten rather than reduce vulnerability.
Despite the widely discussed notion that resilience should be a ‘unifying concept’ to bring together different disciplines and approaches, the reality is that the old silos may simply be too rigid to enable such cross-fertilisation.
Resilience risk 2: Resilience is only thought about after crises
The editorial also drew comparisons which will no doubt be familiar to regular readers of this blog:
…the lesson of Sandy is the same as the lesson of the Eurozone crisis and other recent events such as the Egyptian revolution: complex systems play by their own rules. You can’t manage them in a linear way. We live in a web of systems: if one falls, it takes others with it… as climate change bites, there will be more and bigger storms, and other mega-events such as crop failure, political instability and financial crises. The knock-on effects will accumulate. All complex networks are susceptible to collapse. How many body blows can ours take before it can no longer stand back up? (emphasis added)
While this suggests that there is more need for anticipation in our resilience work, and more continuous and ‘joined-up’ resilience thinking, the reality is that we only tend to think of resilience when it is too late. This is what I have elsewhere called the ‘catastrophe-first school of lesson learning’.
Moreover, even when we do try, anticipation is often limited by the too-common tendency to fight the last war. The reality is that the crises of the future are likely to be very different to those we experienced in the past.
Resilience risk 3: Resilience is seen as ‘the money saving option’
Finally, the piece shared some sobering thoughts for initiatives that push hard in the ‘resilience equals value for money’ direction.
[networked] systems can be made more resilient [but] to do so will be expensive. Money-saving efficiency would have to be sacrificed for more redundancy… Resilience may be expensive, but as Sandy showed… we need a lot more of it. [emphasis added]
Clearly, the value for money approach is not going to go away any time soon. But in pushing resilience forward, we have to be careful not to oversell it, raise unrealistic expectations, and thereby diminish its actual contribution. The key I think is not to take too limited a view: what is needed is less of a bean-counting approach, and more of a long-term perspective of the value of resilience.
The overall lesson for those of us working on resilience in development and humanitarian aid may be that we need to find ways of moving away from an overly reductionist approach. Multi-dimensional analytical frameworks (such as the disaster resilience model I developed for DFID in 2011) are an important starting point. But these need to feed into policy and practice, and this is much harder – as suggested by a recent thoughtful (and at times delightfully grumpy) ODI think piece.
My sense is that, to date, efforts which attempt to take a more ‘systemic’ approach to resilience are a bit thin on the ground in foreign aid. As a result, I would argue that we are currently leaving our efforts wide open to all three of the ‘resilience risks’ raised here.
Do others agree, and if so, what might be done? Or am I over-stating the potential impact of these risks on resilience efforts in development and humanitarian work? I’d be interested to know what readers think.