Looking at development through a resilience lens
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Recurrent humanitarian crises have led many development actors to begin thinking differently about development issues. Rather than plac-ing humanitarian assistance, governance, food security and nutrition, economic development, and other topics in separate silos, many are using the concept of resilience to join up their myriad activities. Constas, Frankenberger, and Hoddinott (2014) wrote, “In a world where conventional approaches to dealing with humanitarian aid and development assistance have been ques-tioned, resilience has captured the attention of many audiences because it provides a new perspective on how to effectively plan for and analyze the effects of shocks and stressors that threaten the well-being of vulnerable pop-ulations. ” Despite the promise and hype of resilience, or perhaps because of it, a backlash has already begun. Does it really add new and useful understand-ing to development theory and practice, or is it merely more development jargon? This chapter addresses this concern through an overview of what resil-ience means and how it is conceptualized before discussing implications for measurement and for policy. Resilience: Definition and Conceptual Frameworks The word resilience comes from the Latin word resilire, which means “to rebound or recoil. ” Its earliest usage was in 19th-century shipbuilding, and it is used extensively in civil and mechanical engineering. Starting in the 1970s, researchers in the fields of ecology and psychology began to explore the notion of resilience. In ecology, resilience was described as the amount of disturbance a system can absorb before shifting into an alternative state (Holling 1973). Others focused on the speed of return to a preexisting equi-librium following a perturbation or shock. Around the same time, psy-chologists also began exploring the notion of resilience, developing scales of resilience that captured notions such as self-efficacy, attitudes toward
Author: John Hoddinott
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2266831042