Resilience means that states can better withstand environmental, political, economic and social shocks and stresses. Bangladesh has become more resilient against floods as the government’s ability to warn and evacuate people and control infectious diseases has improved. The recent peaceful democratic transitions in El Salvador, Malawi and Indonesia are signs of stronger societies. Angola, Ghana, Mozambique and others have set up natural resource stabilization funds and are less vulnerable to oil price shocks. Social capital, and the fact that host families support displaced families, have shown to help protect people from shocks and stresses in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Resilience has been a key focus of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since the financial crisis of 2008. The development and humanitarian communities also picked up on the concept, prompted by a ground-breaking 2011 review of the United Kingdom’s humanitarian programme, and later as a better way to respond to major food emergencies in the Horn of Africa, and then in the Sahel.
However, great ideas and political commitments mean little unless they have a real impact in the real world. A major scoping study by the OECD showed that numerous obstacles were preventing the concept of resilience from translating into better development and humanitarian programming on the ground. The study found that field staff were cynical about the added value of resilience. Some even saw resilience as just a term to insert into proposals to help attract new funding. People also found it difficult to understand what resilience actually meant. Some narrowly interpreted resilience as ‘better’ food security and livelihoods planning, or just another way to look at disaster risk reduction. Such cynicism and confusion reinforced a feeling that resilience was just another ‘buzzword’ or ‘fad’, devoid of real meaning for programming.
To counter this, OECD Development Assistance Committee members, together with other members of the Experts Group on Resilience, asked for specific technical guidance – a simple “how to” guide – that would allow people in the field to analyse what is needed to boost the resilience of specific groups, specific systems, and specific programmes, to the risks people face every day. The results of this analysis are then used to design new programmes to boost resilience, or to modify ongoing plans and actions.
This guidance is the end result of that work.