4 RESILIENCE PROGRAMMING AMONG NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS


the importance of access to productive assets; institutional structures and processes; household livelihood strategies; and preparedness, prevention, response, and recovery activities formulated in response to shocks and climate- related changes. Tinking on resilience has also evolved from a char-


acteristics approach to a capacity-focused approach. Promoted by Oxfam GB (Hughes 2012) and the African Climate Change Resilience Alliance (ACCR 2012), the characteristics approach atempts to identify reliable deter- minants of household and community-level resilience that can be assessed prior to the occurrence of shocks. It also focuses on asset-based approaches as well as intangible processes and functions that support adaptive capacity. A significant limitation to the characteristics approach, how- ever, is that it does not address whether the characteristics identified are actually relevant when a shock eventually occurs (Frankenberger and Nelson 2013). As the work of Béné and colleagues (2012) highlighted, resilience is a process rather than a static state, and as such, its deter- minants are constantly changing as the social, economic, and environmental landscapes within which households and communities operate also change. Building resilience of individuals, households, communities, or higher-level systems to deal with disturbance requires improving three distinct but interrelated capacities (absorptive, adaptive, and transformative), which are mutually reinforcing and exist at multiple levels (Figure 1).


Although a resilience approach can bridge the gap be-


tween humanitarian aid and development activities, it must also provide clear guidance on resilience programming that is different from existing sector-specific approaches (Mitchell 2013). Mitchell suggested that the added value of a resilience approach combines core programming with risk management approaches that build absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities. Tus, resilience is not the primary program objective (the what) but rather defines how programming for achieving the primary objective is implemented. Tis view is consistent with the resilience framework presented in Figure 1 in that the success of the intervention is measured not by resilience per se but by atainment of certain positive livelihood outcomes (for example, food security, adequate nutrition). It also under- scores another shiſt in resilience thinking over the past few years: that measuring improved resilience capacity is best done with multiple types of indicators, including those that measure the shock(s) and stresses that occur, rather than with single outcome indexes. Many resilience indexes are not defined for different types of shocks and stresses. Guid- ance from the Resilience Measurement Technical Working Group of the Food Security Information Network (RM- TWG) suggests that resilience is a “normatively indexed capacity”; that is, it can be measured as a capacity that en- ables households and communities to maintain a minimum threshold condition when exposed to shocks and stresses (Constas, Frankenberger, and Hoddinot 2014).


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