Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

121 SubjectiveMeasures of HouseholdResilience to ClimateVariability and Change: Insights from a Nationally Representative Survey of Tanzania by Lindsey Jones, Emma Samman and Patrick Vinck This article was originally published in Ecology & Society , 23(1), 2018. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09840-230109 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. ABSTRACT Promoting household resilience to climate extremes has emerged as a key development priority. Yet tracking and evaluating resilience at this level remains a critical challenge. Most quantitative approaches rely on objective indicators and assessment frameworks, but these are not fully satisfactory. Much of the difficulty arises from a combination of conceptual ambiguities, challenges in selecting appropriate indicators, and in measuring the many intangible aspects that contribute to household resilience. More recently, subjective measures of resilience have been advocated in helping to overcome some of the limitations of traditional objective characterizations. However, few large-scale studies of quantitative subjective approaches to resilience measurement have been conducted. In this study, we address this gap by exploring perceived levels of household resilience to climate extremes in Tanzania and the utility of standardized subjective methods for its assessment. A nationally representative cross-sectional survey involving 1294 individuals was carried out by mobile phone in June 2015 among randomly selected adult respondents aged 18 and above. Factors that are most associated with resilience-related capacities are having had advance knowledge of a previous flood, and to a lesser extent, believing flooding to be a serious community problem. Somewhat surprisingly, though a small number of weak relationships are apparent, most socio-demographic variables do not exhibit statistically significant differences with regards to perceived resilience-related capacities. These findings may challenge traditional assumptions about what factors characterize household resilience, offering a motivation for studying both subjective and objective perspectives, and understanding better their relationship to one another. If further validated, subjective measures may offer potential as both a complement and alternative to traditional objective methods of resilience measurement, each with their own merits and limitations. Keywords: measurement; perceptions; resilience; subjective INTRODUCTION Resilience measurement has soared to the top of the development agenda (Frankenberger et al. 2014). As a result, researchers have proposed many frameworks and methods seeking to quantify the resilience of different social systems, whether at household, community, or national levels (Elasha et al. 2005, Twigg 2009, USAID 2009, Constas and Barrett 2013, Nguyen and James 2013, D’Errico and Giuseppe 2014). To date, most of these methods have focused on objective indicators and approaches, often centered on observing key socioeconomic variables and other types of capital that support people’s livelihoods (Bahadur and Pichon 2017). More recently, the advantages of subjective approaches to measuring social systems have been advocated (Marshall and Marshall 2007, Jones and Tanner 2015, Lockwood et al. 2015, Maxwell et al. 2015, Béné et al. 2016a,b). These methods may offer the opportunity to address many weaknesses that beset traditional objective approaches, such as difficulties with indicator selection, a lack of attention to context specificity, and an inability to take people’s knowledge of their own resilience into account. However, few quantitative standardized assessments of subjective resilience have taken place (Marshall 2010). As such, little is known about their feasibility as a resilience measurement tool and how they compare with traditional objective methods, particularly when applied at scale. Accordingly, in this study, we propose a simple tool that seeks to measure ‘subjective resilience’ at a household level alongside numerous characteristics that often form part of objective assessments of resilience. We subsequently apply this tool to investigate the following research question: Is subjective resilience connected to particular socio-demographic characteristics of households, and if so, which ones? In doing so, we seek to analyze the relationship between objective indicators generally used to signal resilience (or a lack thereof) and subjective assessments. If the relationship is weak, this has several potential implications. It could suggest that a more comprehensive assessment of resilience requires accounting for a broader range of objective characteristics, which may in turn suggest additional policy levers that could enhance resilience. Alternatively, it could suggest that intangible characteristics that are difficult to quantify shape resilience-related perceptions or indeed that subjective measures may not reflect overall resilience well. If the relationship is strong, then this could indicate that subjective measures, which require far fewer resources to administer, could be a useful proxy for