'Resilience': A stalwart of the post-2015 development agenda or just unhelpful jargon?
By Eva Comba, Overseas Development Institute
The fourth meeting of the resilience dialogue series is held today in Washington D.C. It features Helen Clark (UNDP), Rachel Kyte (World Bank), Andris Piebalgs (EC) and Ministers from Peru and Japan talking about how to include disaster and climate resilience in the post-2015 development agenda. But is ‘resilience’ really the right hook for integrating disaster and climate issues within the next goals framework?
Recent ODI publications have argued for including ‘disasters’ in the post-2015 development agenda as a standalone goal and as a cross-cutting issue, mainstreamed into other development goals. They also raise the idea of disasters being integrated within an overarching goal on ‘resilience’ alongside other shocks/stresses. Reiterating this point, a UN post-2015 thematic consultation in Jakarta, Indonesia in March 2013, identified the possibility of a disasters-related target being included under a headline goal on ‘resilience’. However, it also raised the possibility of ‘human security’ or ‘development disruptors’ as the overarching hook, under which issues like disasters, conflict, violence and climate change could be aligned.
The ODI facilitated website – post2015.org – has established the Future Goals Tracker, a database of the many different proposals on what should be included in post-2015 development goals and on what the new architecture should look like. It includes some 200 documents and articles. Few proposals focus on ‘human security’, but the concept of ‘resilience’ is covered by a much greater number.
Resilience can be defined as “the ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a shock or stress in a timely and efficient manner”. While the global disasters community has begun to use the term ‘resilience’ more and more, it clearly covers a much wider set of issues associated with the relationship between societies and shocks and stresses – such as those associated with financial crises, conflict and everyday hardships like obstacles to accessing food, water, shelter and basic services. In this regard, many factors can strengthen the resilience of societies, systems, people or infrastructures.
Given its conceptual breadth and political currency, proposals on post-2015 goals have linked ‘resilience’ to almost every aspect of the development agenda. Apart from disaster risk management, the list includes economic and financial stability, environmental protection, diversified livelihood, social security, education, sustainable development, empowerment, urban environments, jobs, gender equalities, improved infrastructures, health universal coverage and food security.
Therefore, it could be argued that the concept of resilience is at serious risk of overstretch and has become something of a ‘catch all’ term for describing the way a wide range of factors link to development processes. For the post-2015 agenda, ‘resilience’ is politically attractive – it conveys good qualities and does so in a positive light, as compared to vulnerability for example, but is perilously difficult to operationalize. The danger then, for any issue seeking ‘resilience’ as a stalking horse for its inclusion in the post-2015 goals, is the risk of incoherence and paralysis when it comes to implementation. For example, if disasters, gender equality and macro-economic stability were all associated with targets under a resilience goal, would governments and organisations feel compelled to execute programming across these areas in a joined up way? Would disaster risk management end up drowning in a sea of complex and divergent issues?
If ‘resilience’ has become too broad to be useful, what are some more promising options? One would be to group disasters with a set of issues that poor people experience directly as shocks to their lives. This would involve bringing together different factors that have the same or similar relationships to poverty – those that are both experienced sporadically and create obstacles to poverty reduction or have the potential to impoverish. Conflict, violence, disasters and the other impacts of climate change are all relevant here and could be allied under a heading of ‘Development Disruptors’. Environmental degradation (of land/biodiversity) and food insecurity could also be added depending on how the overall goals architecture is formulated. Food security could be more productively linked with hunger and poverty reduction goals, while other development disruptors, like ‘inequality’ might find a more coherent home with social justice, security and human rights issues. A ‘development disruptors’ basket could neatly sit alongside baskets of goals on ‘development facilitators’, each supporting headline goals on poverty alleviation and sustainable development.
Many questions remain, however, regarding the nature of the overall framework and the best way of including issues such as disasters, violence and climate change. Despite these uncertainties, global consultations seem to agree that disasters and climate change should have a place in the post-2015 development framework, as they are grim and worsening realities in many areas around the world, particularly in places where poor people live. These issues should be an essential part of the new framework as without addressing them, eradicating poverty and achieving sustainable development will be impossible tasks to accomplish. Any indicators, targets and goals related to these development disruptors should be universal as no country in the world can claim to avoid climate change impacts, prevent natural disasters from striking or promise that violence will never occur within their borders.