Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: This paper describes subjective understandings of resilience among residents of a community in southern Ethiopia. It also considers the implications of using this term as a mobilising concept for research and practice in a highly resource-constrained context. Understandings of resilience among ultra-poor households highlight a tension between meeting short-term subsistence needs and taking actions that contribute to building resilience against future shocks and stresses. Responses also underline the need to think beyond resilience-building at the individual or household level, and consider the structural conditions that limit the efficacy of micro-level interventions and contribute to the shocks and stresses that resilience is to be built against. The need to think critically about the spatial and temporal scales at which resilience is enhanced or constrained was also manifest in a brief analysis of a development intervention taking place in Kejima. This intervention addressed a number of the household-level needs identified by respondents from the community, but failed to address major structural constraints and sources of risk, likely reflecting both epistemic positions and practical concerns among development practitioners.
Source: Resilience
Author: Brian Thiede
Institution: Louisiana State University
Language: English
Subfield: Soil Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2340104245