Forum global sur la sécurité alimentaire et la nutrition (Forum FSN)

Hello, 

A person’s resilience starts from conception. A pregnant mother needs to have access to vital nutrients, foods and (time to) care in a healthy environment for her and her child, to best shield her baby from malnutrition and debilitating illnesses during the first years of life. Malnutrition permanently undermines a person’s, its community and country’s resilience and any potential to develop and thrive in a highly dynamic, changing world. 

This is about what I proposed almost 4 years ago on this forum, regarding resilience in the context of humanitarian and development aid. That ‘resilience’ efforts may be pretty much a non-starter if vital personal growth and development opportunities are missed out of very early on in life. Has the approach to resilience since changed, what may ‘resilience’ usefully add today, are there any risks?

Pragmatism is one reason, from my point of view, because prevention is better, and cheaper, than cure, and because it often makes sense to - from the beginning of a response -also keep an eye on a longer-term perspective with a broader view of different sectors and how they link together - if one can, when in the midst of messy and chaotic emergencies - to try better connect back to governance and longer term responsibilities - if applicable … - when the acute phase subsides. 

Equity, rights and power are other reasons I believe, to affirm the central place that affected persons and their autonomy - even though in need - must always have in the response (and in general), to avoid the risk of substitution for the responsibilities of governance and development (as one colleague once observed: ‘there is a real risk that resilience, quickly and easily, becomes a cheap cop-out for decent comprehensive development efforts’), and to possibly benefit from change and opportunities that may be brought about by emergencies too. 

This may raise some questions: for whom may a ‘resilience’ concept be useful or true; should the so called resilient persons not be the first ones to be asked? And would it be right to assume that all people are equally ‘equipped’ from the outset with a set of intrinsic personal capacities and resources to help themselves cope with adversity? 

Some approaches to resilience seem to ignore a whole ‘non resilient’ part of the population and rather only focus on those who may ‘bounce back’ after a shock and pursue their ‘development’, thus excluding a large number of other people who actually had nothing left to ‘bounce back from’ from the beginning. In those situations, shouldn’t one stop any hair-splitting about the meaning of resilience and first focus on emergency needs? 

Instead, those who are living in perpetual crisis often appear to be gradually forgotten, because their ‘chronic needs’ are not, or not anymore, considered to be emergency needs because ‘not caused by a sudden shock’, regardless of the severity of their predicament. Chronic malnutrition can be placed in that category too and the socio-economic destitution and gender-based inequities that often surround it, and the list goes on, of people who don’t stand a real chance, who’ve at times even been denied a fair chance before birth. 

In response to “… whether or not a minimum time frame exists in which an individual, community or system should remain resilient to actually qualify as “resilient” …”, isn’t this first of all rather a question for people and communities directly concerned? 

When it comes to chronic needs and their irreversible adverse consequences on personal development, power and rights, these have a rather permanent character. Certainly here the question should also be put to those persons and institution with responsibilities to prevent or address fundamental underlying causes of these condition and inequities in a comprehensive and ultimately political way. 

If ‘resilience’ is strong enough an approach to openly and pro-actively expose and address the inherent questions of power that underlie these permanent chronic states, be it chronic malnutrition, food insecurity, gender inequities or else, then perhaps the temporal outlook may positively change and my friend will be proven wrong, that ‘resilience’ it isn’t a poor ‘technical’ surrogate for fundamental just cooperation and comprehensive governance. I hope so! 

Best greetings, Jan.