22 RESILIENCE PROGRAMMING AMONG NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS
Competition among NGOs
Limited financial resources can result in competi- tion between NGOs and other actors, a situation only made worse by existing difficulties linking humanitarian and development funding mechanisms and activities (Frankenberger et al. 2012). Tus, joint donor action in program analysis, planning, and implementation will be required in order to push forward a “resilience agenda that promotes a holistic vision of risk management implemented by actions linked across sectors working in partnership” (Mitchell 2013). Only through coordi- nated effort—particularly at the donor level—to build and strengthen resilience capacity can the global need for external humanitarian aid aſter a shock be substantially reduced. By using resilience as a competitive edge against each other, NGOs and other stakeholders that promote individual interventions as a resilience “carrot” for donors undermine the need for truly integrated and synergistic interventions whose effects are felt across sectors.
Top-down processes
NGO efforts to enhance resilience capacity are, at times, constrained by inflexible donor templates that mandate various elements of project design. Tese prescriptive templates assume a menu of key development leverage points that are appropriate in all contexts. Donor-pre- scribed project proposal templates, oſten dictated by an organization’s desire to distribute specific commodities (such as food), can limit an NGO’s ability to include stra- tegic resilience-building activities. Additionally, prescrip- tive templates may promote the inclusion of shocks as assumptions or risks, rather than as an integrated element of the project’s theory of change. As mentioned, effective programming to enhance
resilience requires in-depth, cross-sectoral assessments that consider all contextual factors affecting resilience for a target population. Tese comprehensive assessments inform a theory of change that is adaptive, iterative, and nonlinear in its hypothesis of what is needed for resilience goals to be achieved. When donors box in acceptable responses and predetermine the types of initiatives they will fund, they undermine the utility of using a resilience framework to assess current vulnerability and to map out an integrated approach to improved resilience.
Opportunities to mitigate this top-down template
challenge exist, as modeled by BRCED, DFID’s new program to build the resilience of vulnerable popula- tions to natural hazards. By funding in two phases, DFID purposefully promotes comprehensive risk analysis prior to any proposed initiatives. Te first funding tranche is specifically allocated to holistic assessment and a respon- sive program design; the second is for program implemen- tation. Also notable is the intentional emphasis BRCED places on funding NGO consortia, alliances, and partner- ships. Tis focus opens up opportunities for stakeholders to combine their various areas of expertise (food security, peace building, natural resource management, climate change, finance, and so on) in order to design and imple- ment integrated resilience programs.
Donor-Government relationships
One of the challenges NGOs face in implementing programs for enhancing the resilience capacity of the chronically vulnerable is that such programs are typically shaped by donor-government relationships. According to Mitchell, “the relationship between international donors/ investors and government” (2013) has a critical impact on programming and can undermine the impacts of develop- ment initiatives in addressing root causes of vulnerability (poverty, food and nutrition security, conflict, and the like). Donors may perceive that they have limited influ- ence on government development agendas and that as a result, governments are simply “chasing money” rather than proposing initiatives based on comprehensive risk and problem analyses. Not surprisingly, donor support is oſten geographically
biased according to government priorities, which can limit programming efforts by NGOs. Te separation of hu- manitarian and development efforts into non-overlapping geographic regions means that recurrent humanitarian crises are more likely to occur in highly vulnerable areas, which in turn makes it less likely for needed private-sector investment to occur. Governments may also be hesitant to publicly acknowledge crises (and thereby admit the need to invest in infrastructure, policies, and systems to prevent them) because doing so essentially confirms that their economic growth and poverty reduction policies are not working (Gubbels 2011).
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