SUMMARY OF THE EXPERT
CONSULTATION ON MEASURING
RESILIENCE
ROME FEBRUARY 19-21, 2013
TANGO International, April 2013
WHY AN EXPERT CONSULTATION?
Given:
• Heavy focus on resilience in development sector
• Lack of consensus on measurement approach
Goals of consultation:
• Determine what types of data need to be
collected, at what scale, how often
• Determine appropriate types of analysis
WHY AN EXPERT CONSULTATION?
Participants:
• international NGOs (CRS, CARE, WV, Mercy Corps,
Oxfam)
• UN organizations (UNICEF, WFP, FAO, IFAD)
• donors (USAID, WB, EU, German government, Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation)
• universities (Tulane, University of Florence, Cornell)
• research institutes (IDS, CGIAR, ILRI)
WHY MEASURE RESILIENCE?
• Recurring crises underscored need for new
approach, combining humanitarian emergency
response and development goals
• Need for verifiable measures to support evidence of
program impact and to inform planning/
programming
Need empirical evidence of what factors contribute
to resilience, under what contexts, and for what
types of shocks.
Defining Resilience
The ability of countries, communities and households to
anticipate, adapt to and /or recover from the effects of
potentially hazardous occurrences (natural disasters,
economic instability, conflict) in a manner that protects
livelihoods, accelerates and sustains recovery, and
supports economic and social development
RESILIENCE PRINCIPLES
General principles for measuring resilience:
Context-specific
 measures resilience of a specific target (who) to a
specific shock/stress (what);
 context changes over time (is affected by previous
conditions/affects future conditions)
Temporal considerations
 panel data collected from same households over
time
RESILIENCE PRINCIPLES
Thresholds/tipping points
 point(s) at which changes in behavior and
performance lead to shifts (transitions) from one
response trajectory to another; can be structural or
transitory
Technical capacity
 resilience measurement should reflect inherent
complexity of concept
 sophisticated methods of analysis
 match methods to available human/financial
resources (factor analysis vs. qualitative methods)
RESILIENCE PRINCIPLES
Cultural relevance
 engage local stakeholders and affected
communities
 benchmarks for success that are locally/culturally
meaningful
Community/higher level measurement
 formal/informal governance and institutional
processes and systems enhance/limit individual and
household resilience
 policies, knowledge/ information management,
laws, programming
RESILIENCE PRINCIPLES
Inter-scalar relationships
 inter-related hierarchy of dependencies (individual,
household, community, regional)
 take into account functional connections and
interactions that cause one level to influence another
Aspirations/motivations
 Influences preferences, choices, and behaviors of
individual, households and communities
 shaped by socio-cultural, gender-based and religious
attitudes and norms
 affects willingness to take risks (leading to improved
outcomes)
RESILIENCE PRINCIPLES
Natural resources/ecosystem health
 livelihoods depend on natural resources
 health of ecosystems important for long-term
sustainability
 need to measure state of health, not just physical
access
CURRENT PRACTICES
Current efforts in measuring resilience include
those by:
FAO
WFP
USAID
Tufts University
Tulane University
CRS
University of Florence
Mercy Corps
Oxfam GB
ACCRA
Food Economy Group
Kimetrica
IFAD
SUMMARY OF SIMILARITIES/DIFFERENCES IN
APPROACH
• Focus on household and community characteristics
of resilience regardless of the nature of the shock
(e.g., Oxfam, ACCRA)
• Focus on capturing changes over time by
monitoring coping/adaptive strategies in response
to specific shocks (e.g., CRS, Mercy Corps)
• Focus on outcome monitoring; are well-being
indicators stable/changing in relationship to shocks
(e.g., HEA, WFP)
SUMMARY OF SIMILARITIES/DIFFERENCES IN
APPROACH
• Use existing data (e.g., USAID, FAO, HEA, WFP)
• Few approaches include psychosocial components
of resilience (e.g., Tulane, Mercy Corps)
• Very few approaches are measuring resilience at
the community level or at multiple levels (e.g., IFAD,
Oxfam, Mercy Corps)
• Limited use of participatory approaches to
measuring resilience (e.g., Tulane)
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Focus of measurement
 Value for money, planning/programming, impact
 Need more analytical work on relative
costs/benefits of different interventions within
different contexts
 What works in one situation may not work in
another; or provide the same value for money
Unit of analysis
 Household, community, higher systems level
 Household-level measurements may not capture
certain indicators (e.g., social capital)
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Types of measurement
 Subjective/objective
 Consultative/participatory processes
 Shed light on higher level factors difficult to capture
through objective measures
Data collection
 Assessment fatigue: too many household surveys,
too lengthy
 Piggy-back on on-going efforts; core set of
questions
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Timing/frequency of data collection
 Appropriateness of development timeline (3-5
years)
 Needs to account for longer-term processes (e.g.,
institutional, governance)
 Use of “lighter” questionnaires, applied more often
Qualitative approaches
 Enhance understanding of resilience – drivers,
constraints
 Use iteratively with collection of quantitative data
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Technical standards
 Need to ensure validity and reliability of resilience
measurements
 Care in assigning weights, identifying factors of
resilience
Harmonization of indicators
 Standard measures
 measurement principles
 New ways of assessing/analyzing existing indicators
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Analytical framework
 General enough to be applied in different contexts
 Flexible enough to be contextualized
 Measures include:




Initial well-being/basic conditions measures
Disturbance measures
Resilience measures
End-line well-being/basic conditions measures
Proposed Analytical Framework for
Measuring Food Security Resilience
Frequency,
duration,
intensity of:
Covariate
shocks/
stressors
• Drought
• Flood
• Health shocks
• Political crises
• Market prices
• Trade/policy
shocks
Idiosyncratic
shocks/stressors
• Illness/death
• Loss of
income
• Crop failure
• Livestock
losses
Absorptive Capacity
• Coping behavior
• Risk management
• Informal safety nets
• Conflict mitigation
• Disaster mitigation &
EWS
• Savings groups
Adaptive Capacity
• Human capital
• Debt and credit
• Use of assets & info
• Psychosocial
• Dependency ratio
• Livelihood
diversification
Transformative Capacity
• Governance
mechanisms
• Community networks
• Protection and
security
• Use of basic services
• Use of formal safety
nets
• Use of markets
• Use of Infrastructure
• Policies/regulations
Indicators
End-line Well-being and Basic Conditions Measures
Indicators
Resilience Response Measures
• Food security
• Health/
nutrition
index
• Asset index
• Social
capital index
• Access to
services
index
• Infrastructure
• Ecological/
ecosystem
services
index
• Psychosocial
measure
• Poverty
measures
Indicators
Disturbance Measures (shocks/stresses)
Baseline Well-being and Basic Conditions Measures
Indicators
• Food security
• Health/
nutrition
index
• Asset index
• Social
capital index
• Access to
services
index
• Infrastructure
• Ecological/
ecosystem
services
index
• Psychosocial
measure
• Poverty
measure
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Resilience learning
 Identification of what constitutes resilience within
various contexts
 Establishment of “resilience hubs”
 Tulane currently working with 20 universities across
Africa to contextualize drivers of household/
community resilience within different environments
NEXT STEPS:
FACILITATED THROUGH FOOD SECURITY
INFORMATION NETWORK
Short-term (within 6 months)
 Establish Community of Practice and Technical
Working Group
 Prepare and distribute workshop proceedings
 Agree on common analytical framework
 Map who is doing what and where
 Initiate data mining/meta-analysis
 Begin online consultation/facilitated dialogue
between programming and decision-makers
 Produce publications, briefs, etc. on results of work
 Call for papers as incentive to Community of
Practice
NEXT STEPS:
FACILITATED THROUGH FSIN
Medium-term (within 1 year)
 Technical Working Group to review papers and
publish
 Case studies, pilots, further testing of approaches in
different contexts
 Identification of good practices
 Develop guidelines for resilience measurement
(e.g., data collection, risk/trend analysis)
NEXT STEPS:
FACILITATED THROUGH FSIN
Longer-term
 Identify set of common indicators to measure
resilience in food and nutrition security
 Identify new indicators to better measure resilience
 Use Community of Practice to identify and share
best practices