The concept of resilience plays an important role in development cooperation, particularly in the context of climate change and disasters as well as in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Resilience can serve to strengthen holistic approaches to development cooperation and promote coherence between different issues. In recent years it has thus created a linking function between humanitarian aid and development cooperation and is now experiencing a strong political resonance about coherence in the achievement of various international agreements.
FAKT has a long history of working with resilience approaches in the context of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (DRR). The risk of climate-induced hazards and damage to natural and human systems has a major impact on their adaptive capacities. Resilience building needs to consider the different dimensions of sustainable livelihoods, such as social norms and capacities, technical capacity, access to finance, physical infrastructure and management of natural resources and participation in political decision making.
In the context of peace and conflict, resilience is considered at different levels and interactions between systems, societies or individuals. These interdependencies between resilience capacities at different levels have a significant impact on overall resilience. It thus needs to invest in resilient institutions, build up trust-based relationships between different actors as well as the individual resilience of the people affected by conflicts.
FAKT offers the following consulting services:
- Participatory climate vulnerability and risk assessments based on the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach as an analytic tool for resilience
- Community mapping for visualizing risks and resources
- Development of indicators for assessing resilience within projects
- Development (online) learning and implementation capacity building on resilience
