* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Promoting resilience is a growing area of interest in development. The UK Government’s Humanitarian Policy ‘Saving Lives, preventing suffering and building resilience’, puts resilience at the heart of their approach. Building on this, DFID have committed to embedding resilience-building in all of its country programmes by 2015 and integrating resilience into all of their work on climate change and conflict prevention.
Practical Action sees resilience as the ability of a system, community or society to resist, absorb, cope with and recover from shocks and stresses. A resilient community is one in which people can manage risk and recover from shocks such as floods, droughts and violent conflict. It also means people have the ability to adapt to long term trends such as climate change in a timely and efficient manner without undermining their wellbeing.
How to operationalise concepts of resilience is a challenge for many organisations. Practical Action has developed an approach called From Vulnerability to Resilience (V2R). This is a framework that analyses the causes of vulnerability and how disaster risk reduction, climate change impacts, governance and livelihoods interact and affect resilient outcomes.
We have now developed a handbook 'From Vulnerability to Resilience: A handbook for programming design based on field experience in Nepal'. It is aimed at practitioners who seek examples of how the V2R framework can be used in practice, based on examples from Nepal. It includes guidance on how to include long-term trends in programming with a focus on climate change.
It is essential that organisations working on poverty reduction take into account the impact of climate change on the communities and sectors where they are working. In so doing, they will be better able to support community members and government officials to adapt to the adverse effects and take advantage of any opportunities presented. This requires a detailed analysis of the impacts of climate change at the local level in order to build adaptive capacity to withstand both sudden shocks and incremental changes in the climate.
To download the handbook: 'From Vulnerability to Resilience: A handbook for programming design based on field experience from Nepal' (click on the link to go to the download page).
Dr. Susan Upton is a researcher for the 'Reducing Vulnerabilities Team' at Practical Action, UK.
