UNDERSTANDING RESILIENCE FOR FOOD AND NUTRITION SECURITY
Several decades ago, short-term shocks were only of peripheral con- cern to most development experts. Helping people survive natural disasters, like floods and droughts, or manmade ones like civil unrest, was considered the responsibility of humanitarian aid organizations. Conversely, humanitarian agencies have historically focused mainly on relief rather than on the kinds of longer-term development-orient- ed interventions that might reduce exposure or vulnerability to shocks.
Since then our understanding of the role of short-term shocks
has evolved substantially. Even temporary shocks and stressors can have long-term consequences. A poor harvest that reduces a child’s food intake, even temporarily, can have serious effects on her longer- term cognitive and physical development and therefore future earning capacity. A severe drought that leads a family to sell off its most pro- ductive assets, such as its land or livestock, can plunge that family into permanent poverty. It is therefore now widely recognized that a central reason why it is so difficult for poor people to escape poverty is their sheer inability to avoid or cope with shocks and stressors. Yet, at the same time, relief efforts, important though they are, do not typically address the underlying structural vulnerabilities of a population. Rec- ognizing these realities, both the humanitarian and development com- munities have arrived at a common conclusion: Poor and vulnerable populations need greater resilience, and in order to achieve it, these communities need to work together. A critical part of building resilience involves boosting food
and nutrition security. Poor people have always been vulnerable to “hunger seasons,” droughts, floods, and other natural and man- made disasters (Box 3.1). In recent years, this perennial vulnerabil- ity has been exacerbated by food price and financial crises, and large-scale humanitarian crises such as the recurring droughts and famines in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. Several recent crises have even spurred the creation of large-scale programs that explic- itly aim to build resilience, including the Global Alliance for Action for Drought Resilience and Growth in the Horn of Africa backed by USAID and the Global Alliance for Resilience in the Sahel (AGIR- Sahel) funded by the European Union (EU). Dozens of other inter- national development projects are being created all over the world to strengthen people’s resilience to shocks and improve their food and nutrition security. While there is no consensus on the best ingredients for resil-
ience or even its definition, the development and relief communities are clearly moving toward a loosely defined resilience framework that offers the potential for traditionally compartmentalized sectors to design and implement more effective and more integrated interven- tions. Nevertheless, this emerging resilience framework presents chal- lenges—conceptually, empirically, and practically.
The Concept of Resilience Resilience has roots in the Latin word resilio, meaning “to jump back” (Klein, Nicholls, and Thomalla 2003). Much of the resilience literature broadly defines the term as a return to an original state. In ecology, resilience has long been concerned with a system’s ability to absorb changes and still persist (Holling 1973). Other resilience studies have focused on the gap between original states and less than ideal condi- tions. In the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, psychologists studied the negative effects of exclusion, poverty, and traumatic stressors on vul- nerable individuals, especially children (Glantz and Johnson 1999). The concept was later adopted in other disciplines, including physics and disaster risk management, with a similar focus on recovery from shocks, or even adverse trends such as rapid population growth. In the development community, the concept of resilience has
been further adapted and elaborated. When applied to complex adaptive systems, resilience is not just about resistance to change and going back to how things were (Folke 2006). It can involve making adjustments to respond to new stresses or even making considerable changes to a sys- tem, be it a household, community, or country. Resilience here consists of three capacities that respond to different degrees of change or shocks (Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2003; Walker et al. 2004):
1. Absorptive capacity covers the coping strategies individuals, house- holds, or communities use to moderate or buffer the impacts of shocks on their livelihoods and basic needs.
2. Adaptive capacity is the ability to learn from experience and adjust responses to changing external conditions, yet continue operating.
3. Transformative capacity is the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable.
According to this broader definition, resilience is the result of not just one, but all three capacities. Each capacity leads to a different out- come: (1) absorptive capacity leads to endurance (or continuity); (2) adaptive capacity leads to incremental adjustments or changes; and (3) transformative capacity leads to transformational, system-changing responses (Figure 3.1). These three different responses can be linked to different inten-
sities of shock or change in a broadly hierarchical manner. The lower the intensity of the shock, the more likely the household, community, or system will be able to resist it effectively, absorbing its impacts with- out changing its function, status, or state. For example, a family would be better able to deal with a short-term food price hike—without mak- ing drastic changes—than a tsunami that levels its village.
2013 Global Hunger Index | Chapter 03 | Understanding Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security 19
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