Rights for resilience: food sovereignty, power, and resilience in development practice

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Even as resilience thinking becomes evermore popular as part of strategic programming among development and humanitarian organizations, uncertainty about how to define, operationalize, measure, and evaluate resilience for development goals prevails. As a result, many organizations and institutions have undertaken individual, collective, and simultaneous efforts toward clarification and definition. This has opened up a unique opportunity for a rethinking of development practices. The emergent consensus about what resilience means within development practice will have important consequences both for development practitioners and the communities in which they work. Incorporating resilience thinking into development practice has the potential to radically transform this arena in favor of social and environmental justice, but it could also flounder as a way to dress old ideas in new clothes or, at worst, to further exploit, disempower, and marginalize the world's most vulnerable populations. We seek to make an intervention into the definitional debates surrounding resilience that supports the former and helps prevent the latter. We argue that resilience thinking as it has been developed in social-ecological systems and allied literatures has a lot in common with the concept of food sovereignty and that paying attention to some of the lessons and claims of food sovereignty movements could contribute toward building a consensus around resilience that supports social and environmental justice. In particular, the food sovereignty movement relies on a strategy that elevates rights. We suggest that a rights-based approach to resilience-oriented development practice could contribute to its application in just and equitable ways.

Smallholder telecoupling and potential sustainability

“…The telecoupling of smallholders also impacts social justice issues involving these populations (Walsh-Dilley et al 2016). This concern is increasingly recognized as a centerpiece for actionable research on social-ecological systems (Challies et al 2014, Rudel et al 2016.…”

Bringing rights into resilience: revealing complexities of climate risks and social conflict

“…This study proposes a rights‐based analysis to investigate power relations and to expose the social‐structural and institutional factors that contribute to the outcomes of resilience interventions (Ensor et al, , Walsh‐Dilley, Wolford, and McCarthy, ). This analytical approach draws on the theory and practice of rights‐based approaches to development, where human rights are deployed in struggles for social justice.…”

“…The persistence of critiques of the treatment of power and social relations in the socio‐ecological resilience framing of these interventions is, therefore, a pressing concern (see, for example, Cote and Nightingale, ; Fainstein, ). Particular risks follow for policy and practitioners if a failure to address power and social relations allows shifts in focus away from the vulnerability of individuals and groups and towards the vulnerability of the system, or away from those ‘least able to marshal the resources necessary for developing resilient trajectories’ (Walsh‐Dilley, Wolford, and McCarthy, , p. 4).…”

“…Multiple literatures converge in underlining the importance of this focus: in studies of climate and environmental change, for instance, 'vulnerability does not fall from the sky' (Ribot, 2009). Social, cultural, and power relations shape how local risks are understood, prioritised, and managed in adaptation decisionmaking processes (Artur and Hilhorst, 2012;Yates, 2012;Granderson, 2014) and how organisations, structures, politics, and power shape adaptive capacity (and thereby resilience) through their influence on access to and control of resources and decisionmaking (Dodman and Mitlin, 2011;Ensor et al, 2015;Walsh-Dilley, Wolford, and McCarthy, 2016). This in turn has led to a growing body of literature concerned with identifying the specific economic and social dimensions of adaptive capacity (Marshall et al, 2013;Wise et al, 2014).…”

“Like a Second Home”: Conceptualizing Experiences within the Fox River Watershed through a Framework of Emplacement

“…The purpose of the project was to broadly explore the relationships between Hmong people and the Fox River Watershed (FRW), between a particular culture and a particular landscape, in the Oshkosh, Appleton, and Green Bay areas of northeastern Wisconsin. Social inclusion is a key but often overlooked consideration in the discourses surrounding sustainability, conservation, and ecosystem management. Exclusion of the voices and perspectives of racial and ethnic minorities often results in incomplete understanding of socio-spatial landscapes (land + practices + meanings [1]), and missed opportunities to address threats to water quality and discover new vectors for environmental stewardship [2,3].…”