Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

123 2014). Given that RIMA is centered around a predefined framework primarily based on wider resilience literature, has a list of expert- derived indicators for each characteristic, and relies on extensive surveys to collect externally verified information on household socioeconomic conditions (FAO 2016), the approach can be readily classified within the objective camp of measurement tools. Objective measurement approaches such as RIMA have many strengths, including the ability to generate composite scores of resilience that can be readily compared across households. However, they also present several clear limitations. Most notably, they rely heavily on predefined resilience characteristics and standardized indicators. This renders it challenging to capture the context-specific nature of resilience: factors that make a coastal fisher in coastal Kenya resilient are unlikely to be the same as those for a pastoralist in the northeastern drylands of Kenya. In addition, objective approaches operate on the basis that resilience can be externally determined. Such approaches favor structural determinants at the expense of those based on human agency, which may be harder to understand and measure (Tanner et al. 2015). Crucially, they do not take into account people’s knowledge of their own resilience and how they evaluate their lives. Thus, objective evaluations often require value judgements in generalizing the factors that are assumed to make others resilient and simplifying the complex nature of resilience across differing contexts. Ironically, these value judgements mean that many so-called “objective” approaches to resilience fall short on their own terms. Despite the limitations, objective approaches to resilience measurement remain the norm and dictate to a large degree our understanding of resilience processes at all scales. Though yet to be fully explored in both conceptual and practical terms, subjective methods may offer an alternative and complementary approach to objective assessments of resilience (Marshall andMarshall 2007, Nguyen and James 2013, Jones and Tanner 2015, Maxwell et al. 2015, Béné et al. 2016a,b, Seara et al. 2016). Subjective evaluations are often used to gain bottom up and grounded insights into people’s own understandings of resilience and its components. A significant body of literature has sought to understand subjective elements of household resilience (Twigg 2009, Buikstra et al. 2010, Gaillard 2010, Miller et al. 2010). The vast majority of this work is based on qualitative assessments, typically based on ethnographic case studies, interviews, and focus groups or participatory rural appraisals (PRA). Although these approaches provide tremendous value, particularly in allowing for depth and nuance, they are difficult to use as a basis for measuring resilience at scale or across contexts. We are concerned with a branch of subjective resilience consisting of standardized and quantifiable methods for evaluating perceived resilience. At its simplest, subjective household resilience relates to an individual’s cognitive and affective self-evaluation of the capabilities and capacities of their household, community, or any other social system to respond to risk (Jones and Tanner 2015). If care is taken to design suitable methodologies and survey questions, then a household’s subjective resilience can, in theory, be readily quantified. Standardized subjective indicators can be measured in many ways. Perhaps the most evident and practical way of collecting standardized data is through large household surveys. Although open-ended questions might provide rich qualitative detail, closed-ended questions are more likely to enable the aggregation of scorings of resilience capacities and to facilitate comparison across social groups or time (OECD 2013). Indeed, insights and research from related fields, such as subjective well-being, risk perception, and psychological resilience suggest that that standardized subjective evaluations may help to capture many “softer” elements of resilience-related capacities; allow comparison across different contexts; and permit individuals’ knowledge of the factors that contribute to their own resilience to be incorporated (Jones and Tanner 2015). Despite its clear potential, relatively little is known about how people evaluate their own resilience using standardized subjective measures, nor whether factors traditionally associatedwith objective household resiliencematch those fromsubjective self-evaluations when assessed at scale. For this reason, in this article we seek insights into these research gaps. We focus on a subset of resilience: household resilience to climate extremes. Multiple epistemological entry points for climate resilience exist, though most objective measurement frameworks break the concept down into a common series of distinct yet interrelated characteristics (Schipper and Langston 2015). Properties such as the capacity of a household to prepare for and reduce the impact of climate extremes (Bahadur et al. 2015); absorb and cope with disturbances; and modify and adapt structures in accordance with changing climatic stimuli (Jones et al. 2010) each commonly feature within the literature. However, myriad other properties and combinations thereof surface in each framework, and each also relies on different interpretations of resilience and its constituent processes and indicators (Schipper and Langston 2015). Identifying a common set of observable indicators that relate to a household’s capacity to recover from climate extremes, or their ability to adapt to ever-increasing climate risk has so far proven difficult (Cutter et al. 2008). This is not least because many factors that contribute to resilience-related capacities are process driven and relatively intangible (Jones et al. 2010). For example, self-efficacy, social networks and cohesion, power and marginalization, and risk tolerance each help to determine a household’s resilience (Adger et al. 2013, Béné et al. 2016b). For this reason, we believe that a subjective approach may have value in assessing resilience in this specific context. METHODOLOGY Conceptual approach To explore the feasibility of assessing subjective resilience quantitatively and its links to objective characteristics that often feature in resilience measurement, we added a module of close-ended questions to a nationally representative longitudinal telephone survey in