1. Strengthening Climate Resilience Workshop Notes
9th-11th February, Institute of Development Studies
Summary of Discussions
The workshop began with a presentation by Ms. Maggie Ibrahim from the Institute of Development
Studies who gave an overview of the current level of conceptual development of the Strengthening
Climate Resilience project. A number of interesting points were raised during this, including one
on an inherent contradiction in the resilience concept about whether it refers to the persistence of
systems (or relations within it) or the complete transition of systems. It was also felt that the current
ambiguity within the term ‘resilience’, leads a number of different concepts such as DRR, CCA,
coping, vulnerability etc. to be subsumed within it. Therefore, there is a case to be made for
thinking through the trade-offs that will need to be made between the advantages/disadvantages
of these various ideas as they are included in (be it partially) and replaced by ‘resilience.’
Stemming partly from this point, it was felt that a general sense of ambiguity existed about whether
‘resilience’ was a property of a system acquired and expressed over the long term or whether it
was simply the short term ‘bounce back-ability’ of a system after a perturbation. At the beginning
of the session it seemed that ‘resilience’, due to its numerous interpretations, may not be a useful
concept but by the end of the session it emerged that there was a certain degree of convergence
on the participants’ conceptualisations of its characteristics. During the conceptual discussion of
resilience, a participant contributed his own work where he analysed resilience in the context of
coastal communities. Here it was seen as a sum of three parts-shock absorption, bounce back-
ability and learning/ adaptation which correlates to a certain degree with the IDS understanding of
resilience being composed of anticipation, preparation, response, learning and recovery in the
context of changes in a system.
The second session of the day began with a presentation by Ms. Susanne Jaspar of the Overseas
Development Institute and by Dr. Tom Mitchell’s presentation on the ‘adaptive social protection’
concept who provided an overview work that aimed to understand the conceptual similarities
between Climate Change Adaptation, Disaster Risk Reduction, Social Protection and Livelihoods
approaches and to see how these might contribute to resilience. Several strains of discussion
stemmed from this presentation including one that underlined a paucity of examples of how the
concept of climate change adaptation has been applied at scale. Another comment addressed the

2. point that while Social Protection carried the potential to be transformative sometimes it fails to
reach the poorest of the poor. Another set of comments centred around the need for
frameworks, one participant argued that there is a requirement for a framework such as the HFA
for CCA too but another said that this already exists but is not employed due to its complexity. The
need for any framework emerging from the workshop to contribute to the HFA was underlined. It
was also felt that any such framework should be aimed to assist those implementing programmes
at the field level. From this the discussion moved onto the conflict between process and outcome
indicators. It was felt that outcome indicators would be much too context specific and difficult to
develop and therefore it may be more valuable to concentrate on the process, two comments
suggested that it may be possible to develop a mix of both process and outcome indicators. One
more comment dealt with the need to develop indicators that were general as more than a
rigid/binding roadmap, they are meant to guide people. A comment also dealt with a tension
between characteristics and indicators as the former are more dynamic and the latter seem to be
more static. Following Ms. Jaspars’ presentation was.
The day ended with the division of participants into teams, each of which were asked develop
indicators for a set of characteristics of resilient systems.
On the second day, the teams displayed the results of their efforts to develop indicators. Overall,
the workshop participants found it to be an extremely challenging exercise and while a number of
difficulties were discussed, each team went onto to present their thoughts. Group 1 felt that
developing indicators led to resilience becoming a more static concept and that it was difficult to
develop generic indicators that would be applicable across specific contexts. They also underlined
the importance of clear guidance accompanying any such framework which would help individuals
to deduce timescales and governance scales that are most appropriate to them. The group tried to
circumvent this problem in part by supplying a list of ‘interlocutors’ or institutions that would help
define the scale at which specific resilience building interventions are undertaken. They also had
two critiques of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach and said that it fails to adequately address
political issues and also fails to acknowledge that more of a particular capital is not always a
positive attribute of a system. Group 2 began with defining resilience to be interchangeable with
‘bouncing back’ and decided to develop three sets of indicators-those based on risk management,
vulnerability reduction and long term sustainable vision with the idea that an ideal resilience

3. building programme would work with all three indicators. In terms of trade-offs during the
framework construction process, the group noticed that issues of politics and power get sidelined
as they are complex and time consuming. The group also observed that adaptation needed to be
‘transformative’. Group 3 did not develop a set of indicators but instead presented a set of issues
that needed to be resolved before this could happen, these included questions such as the
difference between CCA and resilience, the correlation of indicators with scales of governance and
whether mitigation was a part of approaches that aimed to build resilience. The third group also
identified four principles of resilience which included access and entitlements, diversity and
spreading of risk, flexible infrastructure and adaptive management, knowledge and adaptive
capacity. Overall, in this session there was a discussion on the appropriateness of the asset
based approaches for the task at hand and certain alternatives were listed these included
approaches that were founded on temporal scales, stemmed from processes rather than assets
and approaches where characteristics of resilience defined the interventions rather than the
assets.
After the groups made their presentations it was evident that the participants were dissatisfied with
the approach taken for developing indicators as a means of operationalising the resilience concept
and therefore, the discussion went ‘back to the basics’ to try and understand what it was that the
framework was trying to achieve. The answers to this included the idea that the framework being
developed at the workshop aimed to analyse whether CSDRM could promote resilience;
decompose the concept of resilience into its constituent parts; understand how social protection
and disaster risk reduction could promote resilience; to provide a standard of judging whether
existing projects/interventions were promoting resilience and a means of identifying gaps in current
practice. Overall, at the end of the day it was felt that tables based on indicators and characteristics
were not the most useful instrument for achieving these aims and another idea based on a
continuum of knowledge was discussed.
On day 3 further discussions on alternative concepts continued and another framework template
was developed (see table). The framework essentially appropriates concepts from the fields of
disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and sustainable development to work towards a
normative ideal of resilient communities.

4. While a certain amount of progress was made, field work is needed to work out whether it is useful
as both a progamming and evaluation tool. The table also works with the assumption that those
working with this framework will work across the three rows but further investigation is needed the
optimal mix needed between these for effective programming.
Normative Current Where we How to Barriers and
situation want to get get opportunities
to there
1. Addressing Safe housing
unsafe conditions
2. Enhancing Experienced,
adaptive capacity knowledgeable
communities
3. Addressing and Inclusive,
Tackling Drivers of equitable
Poverty decision making
Participant List
Name Organisation
External Experts
Richard Ewbank Christian Aid
Jack Campbell Department for International Development
Marcus Oxley Global Network for Disaster Reduction
John Twigg Independent Consultant
Aditya V. Bahadur Institute of Development Studies
Linsey Jones Overseas Development Institute
Sara Pavanello Overseas Development Institute
Susanne Jaspars Overseas Development Institute
Catherine Pettengell Oxfam GB
Jon Ensor Practical Action
Silvi Llosa UN ISDR
Emma Tompkins University of Leeds
Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance (ACCRA)1 & Strengthening Climate Resilience
(SCR)2 Members
Christina Ruiz Christian Aid
Maurice Onyango Christian Aid
Sajjad Mohammad Sajid Christian Aid
Katie Harries Institute of Development Studies
Maggie Ibrahim Institute of Development Studies
Tom Mitchell Institute of Development Studies
Chris Anderson Oxfam GB
Jo Lofthouse Oxfam GB
Atiq Ahmed Plan International
Kelly Hawrylyshyn Plan International

5. For further information please contact –
Katie Harris, SCR Programme Manager - Institute of Development Studies
k.harris@ids.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0) 1273 915633