Resilience from the ground up: how are local resilience perceptions and global frameworks aligned?

Area of Science:

• Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Science
• Development Studies
• Food Security Analysis

Background:

• Numerous frameworks exist to measure climate resilience, but evidence on the validity and practical application of proxies, like subjective perception data, is limited.
• The Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) programme's Decentralising Climate Funds project in Mali and Senegal provides a case study for exploring resilience from a community-led perspective.
• Understanding resilience is crucial for effective climate adaptation policy and practice, yet its measurement and relationship with well-being remain areas of active research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore community-defined attributes of climate resilience from a bottom-up perspective.
• To assess the predictors of resilience and its alignment with food security as a proxy for well-being in Mali and Senegal.
• To investigate the implications of contextualized resilience findings for aggregating results across different programs.

Main Methods:

• Qualitative and quantitative research methods were employed within the Decentralising Climate Funds project.
• Exploration of resilience attributes through a bottom-up, community-centered approach.
• Analysis of resilience predictors and their correlation with food security indicators.

Main Results:

• Distinct patterns emerged when comparing community resilience and food security (a well-being proxy), indicating an unclear interplay between the two concepts.
• The study underscores the critical importance of context-specific factors in understanding and measuring resilience.
• Findings suggest that aggregating resilience results across diverse local contexts may oversimplify complex realities and reduce policy relevance.

Conclusions:

• Bottom-up perspectives offer valuable insights into climate resilience, revealing complexities not captured by top-down frameworks.
• The relationship between resilience and well-being (proxied by food security) is nuanced and context-dependent, requiring further investigation.
• Future efforts in climate resilience measurement should prioritize context-specific assessments and carefully consider the limitations of aggregating data to avoid misleading policy recommendations.