Resilience Measurement and Conceptual Frameworks: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

The lack of consensus and consistency in measuring resilience undermines the ability of the development aid community to objectively monitor and verify the effects of programs that are intentionally designed to build resilience. In this paper we compare conceptual and analytical models of resilience used by various development organizations, critically evaluating their strengths and weaknesses from a program implementation and measurement point of view. We provide the reader with a clear synthesis of the literature and a classification system for these resilience models. Lastly, we bridge the 'measurement gap' by mapping each resilience model to their set of indicators and by building a list of indicators and metrics directly distilled from the literature and classified using SMART filters.

Resilience and household food security: a review of concepts, methodological approaches and empirical evidence

“…Empirical studies published in recent years diverge on the operationalization and methodological measurement of resilience, thus yielding outcomes which are hardly comparable. Such heterogeneity challenges scientific progress and does little help to properly inform policy and investment decisions (Serfilippi and Ramnath 2018). The heterogeneous results also raise the question of whether these studies measure the same concept with different methods or measure different things and refer to it as resilience.…”

“…Third, we assess whether the studies identified indeed operationalize and measure the relationship between resilience and food security. Serfilippi and Ramnath (2018) provide a literature review of the research on resilience in general as applied by humanitarian organizations. Our paper extends their work in two main respects.…”

Coffee in crisis offers a lesson in resilience: evidence from Guatemala

“…In this paper, we embrace the capacity approach initiated by Béné (2012Béné ( , 2015, and followed by Frankenberg and Smith (2018), Serfilippi and Ramnath (2017); Knippenberg et al (2019). In this approach, absorptive capacity is a household's ability to absorb the impacts of shocks in the short-run.…”

“…The interaction between these capacities guarantees the stability, flexibility, and change of a system after a large covariate shock (Serfilippi and Ramnath, 2017). The ideal outcome of the absorptive capacity is to offer resistance to a shock.…”

“…As mentioned before, the difference between these capacities lies in the temporal dimension. The absorptive capacity represents the "ability to reduce both risks of exposure to shocks and stressors (preparedness) and to absorb the impacts of shocks in the short term (mitigation)" (Serfilippi and Ramnath, 2017). On the other hand, the adaptive and transformative capacities represent longer-term responses to changes caused by large covariate shocks, being the transformational response represented by structural changes in the system originated when the adaptive capacities are not enough to overcome the magnitude of the shocks.…”