Resilience has been the word on everyone’s lips over the last year. We’ve probably all felt our resilience tested or reaffirmed in different ways. For those of us who have been directly responding to the impacts of the pandemic on people and planet, resilience has been a helpful concept to frame the individual and collective human capacity to adapt, to learn, to withstand future shocks better.
As with any buzzword (remember “empowerment”?), it is important to engage in critical discourse, demystify and challenge our understanding of the underlying concepts. As part of a learning cohort convened by PSJP over the last couple of years, Global Greengrants Fund was fortunate enough to do just that, and the resulting publication Building Resilience in International Development is a first attempt to share the learnings from this process, which we hope to continue. It is therefore welcome to see a critical discourse emerge in response to sharing our experience in resilience-building, including through Andrew Milner’s recent blog on the limits of resilience here.
Reading this blog, and in particular, Neal Lawson’s views on resilience, made me realise what has been missing in our framing of resilience to date – being explicit about the inherent political nature of resilience. Is resilience really only a narrow, individualised experience; and is a focus on resilience therefore “giving up” on the bigger debates, the systemic challenges we need to address, as Lawson stipulates?
With almost 30 years of experience supporting grassroots communities and movements engaged in challenging systems that are destroying our planet and violating human rights, Global Greengrants Fund has learned a lot about the importance of resilience-building for systems change. We understand that the big picture shifts we seek to achieve will not be realised without resilience at the community and ecosystem levels.
We understand that the big picture shifts we seek to achieve will not be realised without resilience at the community and ecosystem levels.
Why Resilience is Political
Why does this matter, and why does this make resilience “political”? Lawson creates a false dichotomy between the individual and the system, as if either can exist without the other. What are systems other than people connected through processes and moments of coordination? At Global Greengrants, our overall goal is to support social and environmental justice movements in shifting social, political, and economic systems from ones that are vulnerable, unsustainable, and unjust, to ones that are resilient, sustainable, and equitable. At the same time, we understand that to build resilience in individuals and communities, we need a just transition to systems of common ownership of land and natural resources; strong local governance institutions; localised economies; decentralised, renewable, locally-produced energy; sustainable local food systems; and restoration and long-term stewardship of natural ecosystems.
This holistic approach sees the connection between big picture changes and the individual ability to respond better to future shocks. This helps build the kind of systems that are better able to respond to and serve communities and their members in all their diverse and intersecting identities. For example, fostering strong local leadership, a key tenet of resilience-building, will ensure that the ability to learn, adjust, and incorporate risk and changing environments into decisions about the future are led by communities themselves, not any outside actor.
Resilience is not solely the “capacity to endure”, but rather the capacity to push for political change over the long-term and against a chaotic world that constantly presents new challenges. Lawson posits that new paradigms are impossible “without states supporting and facilitating it.” Yet, this misses the crucial point that the state is, by design, built to ensure the continuity of the current paradigm – regardless of the form of government. Of course, civil society will not be able to shift the paradigm in continuous opposition to political powers. But this is the very need to have a multi-faceted approach to change – one built around resilience in strategy as well as endurance.
Resilience is not solely the “capacity to endure”, but rather the capacity to push for political change over the long-term and against a chaotic world that constantly presents new challenges.
Resilience as a Strategy for Systems Change
In our support to grassroots movements, we have seen this emerge over and over: Strong community networks and a sense of dignity and common identity, key aspects of resilience, are critical to setting the stage for the articulation of strong visions for social and environmental change, and the ability to organise and advocate for these agendas. Take a resilience lens in looking at local livelihoods: This inevitably leads to addressing food systems and centres the concept of food sovereignty – the ability for people to sustainably control their access to food over time means greater resilience and less vulnerability in times of crises, and an approach of regeneration ensures that we are not depleting natural resources to the point of collapse.
For example, with funding from the Autonomy and Resilience Fund of the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action, we recently supported Ligue Financiere des Femmes in the Democratic Republic of Congo to improve community systems of autonomy and resilience through the cultivation of indigenous seeds, as well as promoting spaces for indigenous women to share information on indigenous seed protection and sovereignty. This is resilience-building with a side of systems change: not only will the women address the dominant food system, which is marginalising their knowledge, depleting their soils and leaving their community hungry. As women in a highly patriarchal society, they are challenging male supremacy in decision-making on natural resource management, and by focusing on recovering native knowledge, they are also pushing back against predominantly extractive economic agendas.
This example shows how community resilience is key to challenging and changing vulnerable, unsustainable and unjust systems. Resilience is thinking outside the box – it is about the ability to change perspective, about creating space not just to survive, but to strategise for a better future. Resilience is a pathway to the world we want to live in. That is why resilience-building is inherently political. It is the opposite of “giving up”, of defeat: Resilience is a central strategy to achieve the big picture changes we so desperately need.
Eva Rehse is the Executive Director of Global Greengrants Fund UK. She is a member of the Board of the EDGE Funders Alliance, the Alliance Magazine editorial advisory board, and co-convenor of the international funders network of the Association of Charitable Foundations.