Who is Resilient? Problematizing the Appropriation of “Resilience” in Humanitarian Action

By: Cecelia Lynch

Humanitarianism is well-known for its buzzwords – sustainability, capacity-building, partnership. One of the newest buzzwords is “resilience.” As a recent report on resilience demonstrates, both faith-based and “secular” NGOs have joined the resilience bandwagon. Whenever such terms become trendy, we at the CIHA Blog ask why this word now? What developing features of humanitarianism does it reflect? How do those who use it employ it to convey meaning, or do they use it at times to obfuscate meaning? Does it, once again, reflect an unequal power relationship between aid-givers and recipients?

My argument about the use of “resilience” is three-fold:

• first, that the term reflects, implicitly if not explicitly, a recognition of the fact that marginalized, poor, and conflict-ridden communities of people manage on their own, sometimes without, sometimes despite and sometimes with the interventions of others;
• second, that humanitarians would do well to position the issue of resilience as one they should learn from, rather than attempt to “teach” others about; and
• third, that the increased use of the term resilience by the humanitarian community may also represent, at least in part, a response to the failures rather than the successes of the humanitarian community: its own, those of governments, those of international organizations.

Resilience has actually been around for several years now. Misha Hussain, in an article in The Guardian (March 5, 2013), provides a good analysis:

Resilience as an idea is not new. It was first used to talk about the ability of an ecosystem to respond to a shock or disturbance by resisting damage and recovering quickly. However, the term began to gain popularity in development after the 2008 food, fuel, and financial crises left people searching for new approaches to tackling poverty.

Resilience, in brief, describes how people in societies cope with the causes of humanitarian action – shocks and disturbances such as conflict, violence, famine, oppression, severe poverty. We have previously discussed the problems involved in treating such shocks and disturbances as sudden occurrences (see Kathy Tran’s piece). The important point to note here, however, is that resilience is a property, capability, or inherent disposition of the recipients of humanitarian aid, rather than the providers of it.  Unlike other buzzwords – capacity-building, training, sustainability – which all denote a particular facet or quality of the relationship between aid providers and recipients, resilience properly belongs only to the long-term citizens in a society that receives aid.

Ironically, however, this quality is something that the humanitarian community is also attempting to appropriate. As Hussain points out,

Now, everybody is building resilience, or at least claiming to be. The term has assumed such political and financial clout, whether you’re working in family planning or disaster management, it seems as if every funding proposal, every programme, every result has to be seen to be contributing to resilience. Your very survival as an organisation may depend upon it. Consequently, some use the term rather disingenuously, as they try to protect or rebrand their work to access funds.

This trend prompts a number of questions. Can resilience be taught, especially by internationals who are known for top-down imposition of aid? Can one be trained to be resilient? Perhaps. But, once again, the idea that outsiders must train people most affected by conflict, climate change, and other disasters is problematic.

Moreover, as it is developing within the humanitarian community, “resilience” appears to have several intersecting (and somewhat unstable) meanings, as a term that attempts to cope with certain specific trends and problems:

• Resilience attempts to bridge the gap between “emergency” relief (displacement from conflict, famine, drought, etc.) and “development” (reduction of poverty, improvement in health, education, “food security”) (More on the debate here.)
• Resilience is used in ways that are not necessarily clearer or more consistent than the use of previous buzzwords such as capacity-building and partnership (which themselves have not gone away)
• Resilience tends to connote “adaptation” – e.g. — it attempts to bring issues such as “climate change” and “the feminization of poverty” to the forefront, to investigate how people respond to the ongoing nature of these issues, but it does so in a way that implicitly acknowledges the intractability of these problems

The frequent use of resilience acknowledges that humanitarianism is at a crossroads – that populations and ecosystems are in danger of major changes. Indeed, the idea of “building” resilience appears to mask a fear that progress is out of range, or at least out of range of the programs and solutions proffered by development and aid groups.

As other recent posts note (for example this post on local agency) people in communities affected by drought, violence, and other major problems themselves devise ways to cope. We reported last year that UNHCR is trying to find ways to learn from affected communities themselves. But we remain concerned that the general mindset of humanitarian groups, plus their need to demonstrate their value-added to donor communities, perpetuates paternalism precisely in the crucial domains where affected communities need to be the teachers and trainers.

Featured image source: https://www.weadapt.org/knowledge-base/transforming-development-and-disaster-risk/climate-extremes-and-resilient-poverty-reduction