1.
What are the strategies that have been successful in building resilience?
Can we build resilience in general or does it always have to be in relation
to a (known) type of shock?
There is a consensus emerging on what needs to change in the delivery of aid
including integrated multi-sector programming that brings together the different tracts
of humanitarian, development and environment sectors, but this is a new progression
and requires further research going forward.
Concern’s learning from projects in Niger includes, the importance of combining cash
transfers and malnutrition interventions with interventions in other sectors that
address the causes of malnutrition and food insecurity, and the need to consider
making cash transfer programmes conditional on certain health behaviours, or
combining it with food aid or vouchers. To account for the diverse uses of cash
transfers, it is also important to develop and monitor nutrition and food security
indicators as a measure of the success of the programme.
In 2010, USAID’s Famine Early Warning System Network indicated that Moyale
District was at risk of becoming ‘highly food insecure’. This warning led Concern, in
collaboration with the government and local partners, to begin an early scale up of
High Impact Nutritional Interventions across Moyale District. This included recruiting
and training health workers, supporting the Ministry of Health to open six new health
facilities, the distribution of water purification tablets and a food voucher scheme for
3,000 poor households.
The result was that between December 2010 and July 2011, the rate of severe
malnutrition fell in Moyale (from 3% to 1.5%) whereas in the two neighbouring
districts it increased dramatically. In Moyale, the general acute malnutrition rate
increased only slightly whereas in the other two districts it increased substantially;
the rate in Moyale was half that in the other districts. Several factors combined to
enable Moyale to fare better than neighbouring districts:
 Resilience was promoted over time through contextually appropriate, multisectoral interventions
 Government capacity to respond was strengthened
 There was an early, multi-sectoral scale up of food, nutrition and livelihood
interventions
 There was coordination among agencies, with Concern working with local
government services, the World Food Programme and another NGO, World
Vision.
In Concern’s opinion it is important to build resilience to specific types of shocks. The
shocks to which people are highly vulnerable vary across contexts: for instance, in
the Sahel and Horn of Africa regions it is drought, in the DRC it is conflict. However,
people’s vulnerability to shock is not only determined by the types of shocks they
face, but by the rate of change and the interconnectedness of factors affecting
change. It is the interaction of shocks and stresses that erode people’s options and
ability to cope – and that contribute to creating full-blown crises.
In the Sahel region for example, it took only a 3% dip of food production in 2012 to
trigger a massive food and nutrition crisis. This is due to recurring drought cycles,
price rises and disease. Therefore, efforts to build resilience must not only take into
account the defining ‘shock’ but also the wider shocks, stresses, their pace and
interaction.
2.
What programming has improved food security in protracted crises?
In the first place, it is important to stress that food and nutrition security must be
addressed together. In turn, the causal framework that links food and nutrition
security to a crisis must be understood from the outset. Although lessons learned
from programming are context specific, there is evidence to support the following
programmatic interventions to improve food and nutrition security in times of crisis:
 Smallholder productive capacity: in order to have most impact on local
food security, especially for the poorest
 Agro-ecological practices: in order to restore degraded lands, boost yields,
livelihoods and resilience
 Climate smart programming: in agriculture and livestock to build and
maintain people’s returns on assets in the face of climate change
 Integrated programming: addressing all the underlying causes of food and
nutrition security has greatest impact
 Social protection and cash transfers: in order to ensure access to food for
the poorest when food is available on the market and when access to food is
a challenge
 Early response to early warning: to scale up preventative activities in a
timely manner so as to avert a crisis
 Address the policy landscape: to build an enabling environment that
supports the poor and marginalized and contributes towards their efforts to
build their resilience to shocks.
3.
How will we know we are on the right track to produce resilience?
The question of how to measure resilience is a work in progress. Concern Worldwide
is committed to contributing towards the growing global evidence base on resilience.
Concern is working in collaboration with Tufts University to assess the impact of
programmatic work on community resilience in Chad. Our measures of impact and
success are based on evidence of reduced inequality, risk and vulnerability.
Better nourishment can be evidence of improved returns on assets, reduced
inequality, and reduced vulnerability since a well-nourished individual will be more
resilient. We are also using livelihood, diversification and coping strategies indices to
measure success. The real test will be to assess how indicators fare during crisis
years.
4.
Can we predict and quantify the effects of action across a number of
sectors in advance? Do we need to?
In the context of climate change, population growth, and natural resource scarcity,
programming for resilience will not take place in a static environment where impacts
can be accurately predicted in advance. Thus, taking stock of external factors that
shape resilience will have to occur on a regular basis.
5.
Why have we not done better to date?
Despite sophisticated systems to detect the onset of hazards, governments (both
national and international) can lack political will to take preventative action. The
costs of this failure, both in human life and financially, can be colossal. Mitigating
other factors that cause delayed reactions (agency decision making, accountability
etc) can only be effective if political constraints can be resolved. Foreign
governments will weigh up a response with their own political agendas their decision
may not be determined by the humanitarian imperative. National governments may
not want to tarnish their image, or perhaps show less interest if marginalised
communities are most affected. This means agencies must be more effective in their
advocacy efforts.
Early response also falls through the cracks between the remit of the humanitarian
and development sectors. This occurs in donor governments and other funding
institutions, as well as within agency’s own approaches to programming and how aid
workers even understand their job specs. There is bifurcation throughout the
system! When early warnings are sounded the system is ill equipped to respond
appropriately. There is a call for a new paradigm, a fundamental shift in the aid
architecture, that moves out of silos towards more integrated programming in order
to build resilience and manage risk. At a minimum DRR approaches need to be
taken up by the development sector whereby long-term programming can respond to
early warning triggers and adapt according to needs. As mentioned previously,
social protection will be vital to this.
The key question is “how” to create more holistic programming that integrates
disciplines and communities of practice necessary to affect synergies for impact. So
far, DRR, CCA, Social Protection have worked in isolation, and are all fairly new
disciplines. Continued separation leads to policy incoherence, ineffective use of
resources, inefficiencies, duplication, and competition.
Communication, coordination and collaboration between institutions and government
departments that deal with climate change, DRR, development etc pose serious
challenges to tackling issues through a resilience lens. Often governments own
disaster management bodies and their climate change departments do not talk to
one another, let alone do joined up planning. At institutional level, the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change only very scantily incorporates DRR
strategies (due to political push back), and the Hyogo Framework for Action, as nonlegally binding, struggles to be taken on board by non DRR bodies. More functional
ways of operating and connecting need to be established, something that needs to
be taken up and addressed by the planners and budget holders.
The close association between DRR and humanitarian actors (responsible for relief
response) is preventing this work being taken up by development and climate actors.
The perception of DRR as primarily a humanitarian concern is “an anachronism” that
must be overcome.
Linked to this is the funding issue, whereby DRR interventions are largely funded by
humanitarian aid. This reinforces DRR as a humanitarian responsibility, rather than
supporting it being taken up the development agenda. Conversely taking on DRR
with its more development style norms, can be seen to impact upon the humanitarian
imperative and the ability of actors to carry out interventions based on humanitarian
principles. The funding of CCA initiatives from environmental budgets can also be
seen to keep CCA from being taken up by development actors and keeps this
climate work separate and isolated. Funding through multilaterals only acts to
enforce these divides and does not support integration.
The international aid architecture is not set up to promote resilience approaches.
Humanitarian actors specialise in response not prevention, and do not have long
term sources of funding, yet they are now moving into longer term programming
covering an ever increasing array of duties that stretch their mandate, principles and
skills base. Development actors on the other hand are still reluctant to see preparing
for and mitigating shocks as part of their remit and generally wish to continue with
business as usual, whilst also lacking the flexible funding needed to scale up
activities to avert disaster.
Long term flexible funding is needed in order to strengthen resilience of communities.
Programming needs to be integrated, and a body of evidence built up that examines
the ins and outs, pros and cons of this approach. Established best practice will
support donors to put their money in the right places.
There is little interaction between the fields of expertise, practice and policy, of all
these areas identified as necessary for resilience to develop. There exist inherent
scepticisms of one another’s fields as well as differing perspectives, tools and
methods that all contribute to difficulties in building synergies between the
approaches. Demands from field applications for more joined up approaches will be
necessary to bring together the thinking and planning for resilience, with back up
given by bilateral and multilateral donors.
However, contrasts and conflicts do exist between the domains, and these cannot be
ignored or left unaddressed. To move forward in a constructive and effective manner
a deep examination of the tensions and stressors in trying to align the approaches in
a more coherent fashion needs to occur. Resilience cannot afford to be pure rhetoric
but must be underpinned by thorough analysis and research. The pitfalls and tradeoffs for moving these domains closer together in a more systematic manner must be
determined and taken on board e.g. operating at different levels, short or long term
perspectives, programmatic overload. Unfavourable conditions for such a merger
need to be identified immediately.
As well as identifying the political implications, costs, benefits and pay-offs of
promoting a resilience agenda, strong leadership will also be required if it is to
advance in a systematic way. This is somewhat of a catch 22 as resilience cannot
be led separately under a separate department or body as its very aim and strength
lies in bridging and uniting all the different sectors that need to work collaboratively to
ensure that development is sustainable and manages risk.
In many countries experiencing protracted crises the national and local government
capacity is often too challenged to integrate different approaches to build resilience.
This can also be said to be true of development agencies and NGOs. Not only can
institutional capacity be weak, but the capacity of individual staff also needs
reassessing and people need to be able to wear several hats to be able to manage
integrated programming. If donors continue to promote resilience as the way
forward, they will also need to put their money into building the capacity to do so.
Designing resilient programming will require cross-disciplinary learning, planning and
implementation, requiring new innovative ways of working. Evidence for this way of
working being more cost efficient, as well as effective, needs to be generated.
Scaling up such innovative programmes also poses challenges which must be
tackled if significant impact is to be achieved.
Countries faced with food and nutrition challenges in a context of protracted crisis are
also amongst the fastest growing in the world. However, often economic growth at
the national level has not served the poorest groups in societies and has instead
resulted in increased equality gaps between the poorest and the richest. Addressing
inequalities at the national level is crucial, but global inequalities will also need to be
addressed.
6.
Is it just about scale? Do we just need bigger programmes? Is this
affordable?
It is about scale as well as coherent and integrated policy planning, not just about
bigger programmes. Political will is necessary to achieve impact and scale, beyond
resilience programming. In order to improve resilience, country governments cannot
stop at producing a resilience strategy for example, they must commit to work on
policies and investments that aim at reducing inequality and vulnerability. In the
same way, donors cannot just fund resilience programmes without ensuring that their
domestic and international policies are conducive to enhancing resilience in
developing countries, and at the global level. In terms of funding, long-term
commitments are required so that the life span of resilience programmes is longer
than the typical 3-5 year projects currently being supported.
7.
Demographic and ecological changes are probably the most
predictable causal factors that will have a major impact on resilience
in the future --‐ how should we plan for this? Can we predict the
consequences of inadequate action? Should we try to?
There is a wealth of evidence regarding the expected costs of inaction, trade-offs and
lowest hanging fruits that take climate change and resource scarcity into account.
However, there is a lack of decision-making or prioritization of tools that can enable
countries to go from policy planning to action. In this sense, incentives and barriers to
implementation of specific policies must be identified, and decision-making tools that
can help policy-makers prioritize actions are needed.