Social Vulnerability and Resilience

Abstract

Resilience has become a new “buzz” word and inspires practitioners and researchers in a world of rapid global change and transformations. Understanding and enhancing local resilience to risks is not only regarded as an academic exercise but as a responsibility for all actors in the aid community. Many see resilience as a precondition for sustainability. Like sustainability, it invokes a positive and prospective view. It directs attention to people’s capacities to cope with, recover from and adapt to various risks and adversities, and to the ways in which the state and the civil society can enhance or erode their strength. In this sense resilience presents a new conceptual approach for pathways to sustainable development and mitigation research, two essential components of the National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) “North-South” framework.

Our knowledge of what constitutes resilience, how it can be described and analyzed, and especially, how it can be fostered is still limited compared to our understanding of what makes up need, hazard, risk or vulnerability. Scholars agree that resilience only exists in the context of potentially harmful change and refers to risk and vulnerability. All three concepts are relational and refer to one another, and most theoretical models and approaches try to take this into account, whether they are people- or system centered or whether they examine the complex human-environment relations. Up to now, however, our mindsets have been geared towards the risk-vulnerability dimensions. This is also mirrored in the concepts of core problems and syndromes which have informed Phase 1 of the NCCR “North-South”.

The new Transversal Package Project (TPP) now shifts the focus from vulnerability to resilience and assesses the potential and limitation of this concept with regard to health, well-being and sustainable livelihoods. It uses a four step approach:

1. Evidence from Phase 1 of the NCCR North-South on vulnerability to urban environmental risk (Bolivia Team), economic, institutional and political change (Pakistan Team), ill-health (Tanzania Team) and global change (Swiss Team) will be analyzed in comparative perspective to come up with generalizations; 
2. New empirical research will be conducted with a focus on resilience; 
3. Based on findings of Steps 1 and 2, assessment tools will be developed for different levels of society; 
4. An effort will be made to Get Research into Policy and Practice (GRIPP).

Emphasis in Phase 2 is on four research fields: 

1. Governance issues concerning the management of natural hazards in cities (Bolivia Team) 
2. Livelihood, gender and migration (Pakistan Team), 
3. Access and innovative management to foster health (Tanzania Team); and
4. The development of methodological approaches to human-environment systems (Swiss Team).

Special attention will be given to the urban syndrome context and questions about the specificity of “the urban syndrome” identified in Phase 1. Other patterns may emerge if we shift the focus from problems to potentials, and the mobility of ideas, people and goods between urban and rural areas lead to flexible and dynamic networks linking people and places.

While we favor a people-centered approach, we are fully aware that people and communities are embedded in larger webs of relationships, where actions by different actor categories on different levels of society can hinder or foster resilience of their livelihoods, and power plays an important role. This calls for a multiscale analysis and complex systems’ approaches. It also means that interventions and programs based on the aspirations and capacities of people at risk have to be scaled up, and this remains the greatest challenge. New methodologies have to be developed and brought to the attention of policy- and decision makers on various levels of society. Building resilience by fostering people’s strength offers a promising perspective and a focus for concerted efforts as well as critical reflection that contributes to the transdisciplinary mitigation approach of the NCCR North-South and to international debates about sustainable development.