Measuring Development Resilience in Northern Kenya
1. Measuring Development Process Resilience:
A Test from Northern Kenya
Lance W. Robinson, Jonathan Davies,
Polly J. Ericksen, and Simon Mugatha
Building Resilience for
Food Nutrition and Security
Addis Ababa
May 2014
2. Social-Ecological Resilience
“The capacity of a system to absorb
disturbance and reorganize while undergoing
change so as to still retain essentially the same
function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.”
(Walker et al., 2004, p. 5).
Not necessarily desirable.
(e.g., poverty traps)
3. Development Resilience
“The ability of a household to keep with a
certain level of well-being (i.e. being food
secure) by withstanding shocks and stresses”
(FAO, 2010).
“The capacity to cope with adverse
stressors/shocks without adverse development
consequences .” (Resilience Measurement Technical Working Group)
4. Development Resilience
In the face of recurring drought:
• The DRR community focuses on maintaining
well-being in the short-term, and
• The development community focuses on
interested in improving well-being in the longer
term.
6. Some Key Principles for Resilience
Measurement
Distinguish outcomes of resilience from
determinants of resilience
Development resilience is not simply
o The inverse of vulnerability
o Coping with shocks
More and better data vs. economy and realism --
need for a balance
7. Resilience Measurement:
Three Main Types of Data
We need measures of:
• The state of human development
(indicators of well-being, and their changes
over time),
• Shocks (measures of the extent and
severity of shocks such as droughts), and
• Broader social and ecological conditions
(indicators of determinants of resilience).
10. Incidence-% Marsabit, Kenya
Global Acute Malnutrition Among Children
Moderate Drought
Severe Drought
Extreme Drought
Based on SMART Nutrition Survey Data
12. Some final thoughts
• A local-level HDI would have great value
• Resilience thinking (system resilience)
has much to offer – let’s not lose sight of
its insights
13. This work contributes to the CGIAR Research Program on
Dryland Systems.
It is supported by the Technical Consortium (TC) for
Ending Drought Emergencies and Building Resilience
to Drought1 in the Horn of Africa.
Acknowledgements
14. The presentation has a Creative Commons license. You are free to re-use or distribute this work, provided credit is given to ILRI.
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