Household resilience capacity and food security: evidence from Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

Commonly, resilience against external shocks is treated as a household or community capacity. Resiliency against food insecurity is of particular importance for rural household under the impression of recent price surges and supply chain disruptions. The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of household resilience capacity on food security outcomes in Kyrgyzstan, using individual, household and community datasets of the “Life in Kyrgyzstan” panel survey for several waves from 2011 to 2016. Firstly, a resilience capacity index to food insecurity was estimated through key determinants or pillars under the Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) II methodology, while latent analysis was used to classify shocks. The effect of resilience capacity on food security outcomes was estimated along an instrumental variable approach. Our results suggest that resilience capacity serves to improve food security status and decrease the proneness of households to suffering from food insecurity in the presence of shocks. Furthermore, the interaction between resilience capacity and shocks was included to explain whether the negative effect of the shocks is weakened by resilience. The findings confirm that resilience capacity is able to mitigate the adverse effects of shocks on food security outcomes; moreover, it is sufficient to resist a decline in food security. Following the large contributions of social safety nets and adaptive capacity to the resilience capacity index, policy efforts should be focused on increasing income generating capacity, networking, migration, and education level of households to strengthen resilience to food insecurity.

Trajectories of resilience to acute malnutrition in the Kenyan drylands

“…It follows that acute malnutrition trajectories can effectively be conceptualized in terms of dynamic latent classes, modeling the dependency between longitudinal markers, event time and covariates. Cross-sectional studies and definition-driven conceptualizations of resilience, such as the FAO Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) (FAO, 2016;Egamberdiev et al, 2023) and the "PEOPLES" tools (Cimellaro et al, 2016) effectively overlook or conflate these distinct trajectories. Chronic acute malnutrition, for example, may be conflated with decreasing resilience depending on when it is assessed.…”

“…Case studies on household coping behavior are difficult to validate (Corbett, 1988;Watts and Bohle, 1993). Index-based measures of resilience (Browne et al, 2014;Boukary et al, 2016;FAO, 2016;Berg and Emran, 2020) represent a step forward in this regard, yet they do not account for sequential behavior over time (see Egamberdiev et al, 2023 for an exception). In a similar vein, scholarship that examines household behavior in the aftermath of natural disasters, specifically droughts or floods (Park et al, 2011;Alexander et al, 2013;Desai et al, 2015), tends to rely on cross-sectional surveys.…”

Social capital effects on resilience to food insecurity: Evidence from Kyrgyzstan

“…Looking at the sources of resilience within a system, social capital makes substantial inroads into the conceptualisation of household resilience and food security outcomes (Alinovi et al, 2008;Alinovi et al, 2010;Atara et al, 2020;Egamberdiev et al, 2023). Following this, Constas et al (2020) have provided harmonised metrics under the core indicators for resilience analysis approach, in which social capital gained prominence as an enabling capacity to minimise the effect of shocks.…”