Expert Consultation on Measuring Resilience
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Transcript Expert Consultation on Measuring Resilience
SUMMARY OF THE EXPERT
CONSULTATION ON MEASURING
RESILIENCE
ROME FEBRUARY 19-21, 2013
TANGO International, April 2013
WHY AN EXPERT CONSULTATION?
Given:
• Heavy focus on resilience in development sector
• Lack of consensus on measurement approach
Goals of consultation:
• Determine what types of data need to be
collected, at what scale, how often
• Determine appropriate types of analysis
WHY AN EXPERT CONSULTATION?
Participants:
• international NGOs (CRS, CARE, WV, Mercy Corps,
Oxfam)
• UN organizations (UNICEF, WFP, FAO, IFAD)
• donors (USAID, WB, EU, German government, Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation)
• universities (Tulane, University of Florence, Cornell)
• research institutes (IDS, CGIAR, ILRI)
WHY MEASURE RESILIENCE?
• Recurring crises underscored need for new
approach, combining humanitarian emergency
response and development goals
• Need for verifiable measures to support evidence of
program impact and to inform planning/
programming
Need empirical evidence of what factors contribute
to resilience, under what contexts, and for what
types of shocks.
Defining Resilience
The ability of countries, communities and households to
anticipate, adapt to and /or recover from the effects of
potentially hazardous occurrences (natural disasters,
economic instability, conflict) in a manner that protects
livelihoods, accelerates and sustains recovery, and
supports economic and social development
RESILIENCE PRINCIPLES
General principles for measuring resilience:
Context-specific
measures resilience of a specific target (who) to a
specific shock/stress (what);
context changes over time (is affected by previous
conditions/affects future conditions)
Temporal considerations
panel data collected from same households over
time
RESILIENCE PRINCIPLES
Thresholds/tipping points
point(s) at which changes in behavior and
performance lead to shifts (transitions) from one
response trajectory to another; can be structural or
transitory
Technical capacity
resilience measurement should reflect inherent
complexity of concept
sophisticated methods of analysis
match methods to available human/financial
resources (factor analysis vs. qualitative methods)
RESILIENCE PRINCIPLES
Cultural relevance
engage local stakeholders and affected
communities
benchmarks for success that are locally/culturally
meaningful
Community/higher level measurement
formal/informal governance and institutional
processes and systems enhance/limit individual and
household resilience
policies, knowledge/ information management,
laws, programming
RESILIENCE PRINCIPLES
Inter-scalar relationships
inter-related hierarchy of dependencies (individual,
household, community, regional)
take into account functional connections and
interactions that cause one level to influence another
Aspirations/motivations
Influences preferences, choices, and behaviors of
individual, households and communities
shaped by socio-cultural, gender-based and religious
attitudes and norms
affects willingness to take risks (leading to improved
outcomes)
RESILIENCE PRINCIPLES
Natural resources/ecosystem health
livelihoods depend on natural resources
health of ecosystems important for long-term
sustainability
need to measure state of health, not just physical
access
CURRENT PRACTICES
Current efforts in measuring resilience include
those by:
FAO
WFP
USAID
Tufts University
Tulane University
CRS
University of Florence
Mercy Corps
Oxfam GB
ACCRA
Food Economy Group
Kimetrica
IFAD
SUMMARY OF SIMILARITIES/DIFFERENCES IN
APPROACH
• Focus on household and community characteristics
of resilience regardless of the nature of the shock
(e.g., Oxfam, ACCRA)
• Focus on capturing changes over time by
monitoring coping/adaptive strategies in response
to specific shocks (e.g., CRS, Mercy Corps)
• Focus on outcome monitoring; are well-being
indicators stable/changing in relationship to shocks
(e.g., HEA, WFP)
SUMMARY OF SIMILARITIES/DIFFERENCES IN
APPROACH
• Use existing data (e.g., USAID, FAO, HEA, WFP)
• Few approaches include psychosocial components
of resilience (e.g., Tulane, Mercy Corps)
• Very few approaches are measuring resilience at
the community level or at multiple levels (e.g., IFAD,
Oxfam, Mercy Corps)
• Limited use of participatory approaches to
measuring resilience (e.g., Tulane)
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Focus of measurement
Value for money, planning/programming, impact
Need more analytical work on relative
costs/benefits of different interventions within
different contexts
What works in one situation may not work in
another; or provide the same value for money
Unit of analysis
Household, community, higher systems level
Household-level measurements may not capture
certain indicators (e.g., social capital)
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Types of measurement
Subjective/objective
Consultative/participatory processes
Shed light on higher level factors difficult to capture
through objective measures
Data collection
Assessment fatigue: too many household surveys,
too lengthy
Piggy-back on on-going efforts; core set of
questions
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Timing/frequency of data collection
Appropriateness of development timeline (3-5
years)
Needs to account for longer-term processes (e.g.,
institutional, governance)
Use of “lighter” questionnaires, applied more often
Qualitative approaches
Enhance understanding of resilience – drivers,
constraints
Use iteratively with collection of quantitative data
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Technical standards
Need to ensure validity and reliability of resilience
measurements
Care in assigning weights, identifying factors of
resilience
Harmonization of indicators
Standard measures
measurement principles
New ways of assessing/analyzing existing indicators
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Analytical framework
General enough to be applied in different contexts
Flexible enough to be contextualized
Measures include:
Initial well-being/basic conditions measures
Disturbance measures
Resilience measures
End-line well-being/basic conditions measures
Proposed Analytical Framework for
Measuring Food Security Resilience
Frequency,
duration,
intensity of:
Covariate
shocks/
stressors
• Drought
• Flood
• Health shocks
• Political crises
• Market prices
• Trade/policy
shocks
Idiosyncratic
shocks/stressors
• Illness/death
• Loss of
income
• Crop failure
• Livestock
losses
Absorptive Capacity
• Coping behavior
• Risk management
• Informal safety nets
• Conflict mitigation
• Disaster mitigation &
EWS
• Savings groups
Adaptive Capacity
• Human capital
• Debt and credit
• Use of assets & info
• Psychosocial
• Dependency ratio
• Livelihood
diversification
Transformative Capacity
• Governance
mechanisms
• Community networks
• Protection and
security
• Use of basic services
• Use of formal safety
nets
• Use of markets
• Use of Infrastructure
• Policies/regulations
Indicators
End-line Well-being and Basic Conditions Measures
Indicators
Resilience Response Measures
• Food security
• Health/
nutrition
index
• Asset index
• Social
capital index
• Access to
services
index
• Infrastructure
• Ecological/
ecosystem
services
index
• Psychosocial
measure
• Poverty
measures
Indicators
Disturbance Measures (shocks/stresses)
Baseline Well-being and Basic Conditions Measures
Indicators
• Food security
• Health/
nutrition
index
• Asset index
• Social
capital index
• Access to
services
index
• Infrastructure
• Ecological/
ecosystem
services
index
• Psychosocial
measure
• Poverty
measure
KEY POINTS FOR
MEASURING RESILIENCE
Resilience learning
Identification of what constitutes resilience within
various contexts
Establishment of “resilience hubs”
Tulane currently working with 20 universities across
Africa to contextualize drivers of household/
community resilience within different environments
NEXT STEPS:
FACILITATED THROUGH FOOD SECURITY
INFORMATION NETWORK
Short-term (within 6 months)
Establish Community of Practice and Technical
Working Group
Prepare and distribute workshop proceedings
Agree on common analytical framework
Map who is doing what and where
Initiate data mining/meta-analysis
Begin online consultation/facilitated dialogue
between programming and decision-makers
Produce publications, briefs, etc. on results of work
Call for papers as incentive to Community of
Practice
NEXT STEPS:
FACILITATED THROUGH FSIN
Medium-term (within 1 year)
Technical Working Group to review papers and
publish
Case studies, pilots, further testing of approaches in
different contexts
Identification of good practices
Develop guidelines for resilience measurement
(e.g., data collection, risk/trend analysis)
NEXT STEPS:
FACILITATED THROUGH FSIN
Longer-term
Identify set of common indicators to measure
resilience in food and nutrition security
Identify new indicators to better measure resilience
Use Community of Practice to identify and share
best practices