Final Report: Expert Consultation on Measuring Resilience in the Face of Shocks and Stresses

The main value of using a resilience concept lies in integrating approaches and communities of practice rather than as a novel approach to addressing poverty and food insecurity. Despite the relatively recent emergence of the concept of resilience within the wider development community, there is an understandable scarcity of robust, verifiable evidence of impact among programmes seeking to build resilience. A major milestone in achieving resilience at a significant scale will be the ability to measure resilience outcomes at the household, community, and national levels. Empirical evidence is needed that illustrates what factors consistently contribute to resilience, to what types of shocks, and in what contexts. Such evidence can be used both for planning and programming purposes as well as for assessing programme impact. Various models for measuring resilience are currently under development, but few have been field-tested and adopted as "standard." The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) hosted an Expert Consultation on measuring resilience in Rome, February 19-21, 2013. The consultation brought together stakeholders, donors, and practitioners to promote a common understanding of the key issues regarding resilience measurement and best approaches for going forward. Presentations during the three-day consultation were organized in a manner that elicited the measurement needs of donors and implementing agencies first, followed by a summary of key metric and methodological approaches and issues derived from a review of recent literature. Several models for measuring resilience were presented, each with their own strengths and limitations. FAO's model involves development of a suite of latent variable indices that are derived from a number of observable indicators. These indices are then used to derive a single resilience index that is a weighted sum of the factors generated using Bartlett's scoring method and the weights are the proportions of variance explained by each factor. The University of Florence's study expands on the FAO approach by applying it to a specific shock event, measuring food security resilience of rural households affected by Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua in 1999. Tulane University's Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy (DRLA) and the State University of Haiti (UEH) employ a multi-dimensional approach for analyzing resilience and the effects of humanitarian assistance on resilience outcomes in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. USAID's multi-dimensional approach to measuring resilience in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel seeks to identify resilience factors contributing to food security in the face of droughts. The model focuses on creating indices around six domains of resilience, each of which "contribute to and collectively constitute" resilience. Other approaches attempt to measure resilience by assessing household coping/adaptive strategies used in response to shocks. CRS's Sahelian Resiliency Study analyzed not only exposure to specific types of shocks, but also the types of risk management strategies households adopt in order to deal with them, including coping responses and adaptive responses. The Mercy Corps study examines household resilience factors most closely associated with the conflict, drought, and governance shocks that resulted in the 2011 famine in Somalia.