LIVELIHOOD RESILIENCE AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE: TOWARD INTEGRATION OF OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE APPROACHES OF ANALYSIS

ABSTRACT

Resilience thinking is a common component in the planning and implementation of interventions in humanitarian activities, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and food security. Attention to the concept of livelihood resilience specifically has grown in these sectors in order to improve households’ resilience to the impacts of climate change and other shocks. However, resilience is difficult to empirically measure and commonly-used approaches are top-down, expert-driven, and suffer from measurement-bias. To address these issues, in this paper we explore the contributions of geographers to this research, critique top-down objective measurements of resilience, highlight the benefits of employing subjective conceptualizations of resilience, and outline methods for measuring subjective resilience with participatory methods. By drawing from both objective and subjective methods of analysis we can expand upon the normative questions of “resilience of what, to what, and for whom” to include “resilience as defined and measured by whom” in future research and policy-making.

Keywords::

• climate change adaptation
• disaster risk reduction
• global environmental change
• livelihood resilience
• subjective analysis

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge San Diego State University’s Department of Geography for supporting this work. We would also like to acknowledge colleagues J. Terrence McCabe and Paul Leslie, who provided insight into novel methods for measuring subjective resilience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.