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The Resilience Paradigm: Facts for Transformation, Resilience Specificity

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Introduction

Development work has traditionally been centered on poverty reduction/ alleviation strategies, with attention on developing livelihood opportunities at the community level for the most disadvantaged. With climate change and the increasing frequency of natural hazards - including typhoons, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions - the progress of poverty alleviation strategies has been severely compromised.

The rise of disasters and number of people affected has tripled over the past three decades. Costs of disaster relief and recovery are draining away resources that should have been invested in development.

The devastating impact of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013 has become a constant reminder of how human life is at high risk to hazards, and also of the disproportionate effect they have on poor people. Unless more determined efforts address the loss of lives, livelihoods, deterioration of environment, and infrastructure, such human incapacity will become an increasingly serious obstacle to the achievement of any form of sustainable development.

This book provides a paradigm shift from poverty reduction to building resilience of each element at risk in the community. This will offer a new thinking of framing our work from the specific hazard perspective, how we will address the hazard and how to build resilience of the specific element at risk that would be hit by the specific hazard. It will introduce the resilience framework as the starting point to organize our work so that disasters will be avoided.

Understanding Humanitarian Aid & Development

A disaster only happens when specific individuals and communities are unable to cope with their own resources during a hazard event. However, many humanitarian workers have centered their attention on how they will immediately address the situation without engaging hazard affected communities to determine if indeed they could not cope on their own by assessing their capacity to survive and bounce back. Or even to consider what transformative system and structures will ensure community resilience.

The present-day, donor-driven reality is that humanitarian aid work respond to immediate emergency needs while situations that require work over a longer timescale lie in the domain of development. Such a division of response and resources does not exist at the community level, where members respond to an emergency situation or a long-term need in real time. The artificial, donor-driven divide has created discord between humanitarian and development workers, and also resulted in high-impact malpractices in the communities. The development worker will address the problem of dependence to external aid, dole out syndrome and civic inertia, etc. after the humanitarian worker pulls out from the area. The humanitarian worker’s goal of speedy delivery of basic services to address the immediate needs for survivability of the people sometimes leads to shortcuts in the social process towards sustainable development. The development worker on the other hand may employ long-term social processes that sometimes hamper the survival of the affected people. The divide has also resulted in community dependence on external agencies because they provide an “easy way out”, instead of empowering people to harness their own potential to successfully navigate through their crisis situation.

From the survivor perspective the timeline continues from survival mode, bouncing back and being part of the transformative system and structure of the society. Thus the divide only comes from the funding system for emergency, which is associated to humanitarian aid, and development, which is associated to long term social transformation to address the development issues such as civic inertia, illiteracy, chronic diseases and poverty. While there have been many initiatives to link relief, rehabilitation and development as a response to funding gaps subsequent to disasters its implementation has remained a challenge.