Coping and Resilience during the Food, Fuel, and Financial Crises

Abstract

This article aggregates qualitative field research from sites in 17 developing countries to describe crisis impacts and analyse how people coped with the food, fuel, and financial crises during 2008–2011. The research uncovered significant hardships behind the apparent resilience, with widespread reports of food insecurity, debt, asset loss, stress, and worsening crime and community cohesion. There were important gender and age differences in the distribution of impacts and coping responses, with women often acting as shock absorbers. The more common sources of assistance were family, friends, community-based and religious organisations with formal social protection and finance less important. The traditional informal safety nets of the poor became depleted as the crisis deepened, pointing to the need for better formal systems for coping with future shocks.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Veronica M. Joffre for helpful comments and to the local researchers who carried out the country studies surveyed here. The research was funded by DfID and the trust Fund for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development housed at the World Bank and funded by the governments of Norway and Finland.

Notes

1. The Voices of the Poor (Narayan, 2000) and Moving out of Poverty (Narayan et al., 2009) studies were larger but not focused on crisis and coping. Some of the underlying country case material has been published in Heltberg et al. (2012).

2. For a more detailed discussion of site selection, see chapter 1 in Heltberg et al., (2012).