The relevance of ‘resilience’?
HPG policy briefs issue 49:
This paper acknowledges the attraction of the concept of resilience: the moral duty to prevent the most vulnerable from suffering during crises and supporting what people can do for themselves. It addresses the scepticism about how much current thinking about resilience will help achieve this, and raises concerns about the current ‘resilience optimism’. It argues that current ways of portraying resilience are not useful as a guide in diagnosing people’s vulnerability, and are also too vague to help designing any policies or programmes for improving resilience, because they allow anything to be called ‘resilience building’.
The paper states that uninformed optimism on resilience, even where there is no reason to believe that that it is possible to avoid crises and expensive humanitarian assistance, may be dangerous, in particular for the use of humanitarian funds. The authors argue that what is required is a much bigger body of empirical studies from specific crises, helping us to understand exactly what did give some people more resilience, and helping us to understand what can realistically be achieved in the aftermath of such disasters.