From defining to assessing social-ecological resilience in development cooperation: lessons learned
Sustainable development has been the main paradigm driving international cooperation and development projects for the past decades. It has helped greatly in recognizing that long-term and inclusive positive change can only occur by adopting an integrated and multi-sectoral approach. Yet, the general development paradigm often falls short in addressing global risks associated with the carrying capacity of our planet and their social and ecological impacts. In addition, we need a framework that takes disruptive events into account and actively enhances the resilience of the planet and its inhabitants.
Social-ecological resilience (SER) offers this highly needed holistic paradigm. Putting SER at the centre of international cooperation projects will allow for a more holistic
understanding of the context, which in turn will enable more effective results contributing to human well-being in harmony with nature. However, while SER offers a theoretical framework to guide international cooperation projects in a context of climatic and social changes and increased occurrence of extreme
events, it remains challenging to disseminate and popularise the concept and to translate it in practical tools and approaches.
It is this knowledge gap that SECORES aims to address. From 2022 onwards, SECORES has engaged in reviewing, testing and disseminating tools and insights around understanding and assessing social-ecological resilience in international cooperation. This publication aims to share these insights and inspire practitioners and other actors in international cooperation to learn with us about the added value of using a SER framework to develop, implement and evaluate development projects.
In this publication we present four lessons:
- defining the added value of SER;
- from measuring to assessing SER;
- incorporating SER in programme monitoring;
- finding a common language on SER.
Study on the relationship between gender & inclusion and social-ecological resilience
This study, done by HUMANYA on behalf of SECORES, analyzed how the relation between gender/inclusion and social-ecological resilience (SER) can be explained and if it is important to strengthen it. It also looked
how to strengthen the relationship between gender/inclusion and resilience within a social-ecological system. An overview and summarized description of existing tools is available in annex.
The study gives 7 recommendations to work on gender/inclusion and social-ecological resilience.
- Develop an organizational vision or principles on inclusion. From there and based on your own and partners’ practices, explore the meaning of this vision while working together on strengthening resilience within social-ecological systems.
- Achieving social-ecological resilience requires a systemic and integrated (non-fragmented) approach.
- Link nature and people more strongly within strategies, programs and systems, put in place to monitor and adjust SER-oriented projects and programs.
- Be(come) aware/create openness for awareness of existing ‘dominant narratives’ that unconsciously shape our ways of thinking and creation of solutions.
- Integrating the gender and inclusion perspective to strengthen resilience in a social-ecological perspective should best start from before the beginning of a project or program cycle and needs to be implemented throughout the whole cycle.
- Learn from and with each other about (gender) inclusive practices within projects that want to strengthen social-ecological resilience. This also allows to look beyond the own reference frame and to develop new insights that can strengthen or broaden this frame.
- The study provides a number of leads and pointers that members of SECORES, its partners and SECORES itself can use to integrate gender and inclusion more strongly within their vision, strategy and practices. In line with this, further exploration of the available literature sources and tools is recommended, which have been brought together in the annexes of this report.
SECORES 4-pager on the added value of the Social-Ecological Resilience approach in international cooperation
This 4-pager discusses the link between Social-Ecological Resilience (SER) and the sustainable development paradigm and describes what the added value of the SER-approach is in international cooperation offering strategic guidance at organisational or project level. To put SER into practice, we consider 5 key questions:
- Scope (resilience of what?)
- Objective (resilience to what end?)
- Target audience (resilience for whom?)
- Disturbances (resilience to what?)
- Approach (resilience through what?)
Two hypothetical examples describe how the SER approach could look like.
Click here for the French translation of this 4-pager.
Thematic Joint Strategic Framework
In 2021, the 6 core members of SECORES elaborated their thematic Joint Strategic Framework (JSF) on the resilience of social-ecological systems. A JSF is a framework (thematic or country based) where participating Belgian non-governmental cooperation actors describe the context of their theme or country, the strategic goals and how synergy will be stimulated. The individual programs of each actor will then be linked to the strategic goals of the JSF.
In the thematic JSF on resilience, you will find an analysis of different elements of resilience, the theory of change and its underlying conceptual framework, the 4 strategic goals and the foreseen approaches, the possible synergies between members of the thematic JSF and with other external actors, and the way how learning on the theme can be put into practice.
A shorter version of the concepts is also available in a 10-pager document.