Paper short abstract:

Resilience narratives have emerged across specific sectors in ASEAN policy. However, the spread of resilience as a comprehensive policy narrative warrants a reconsideration of a holistic ASEAN approach to regional resilience—particularly amidst present preparation for a post-2025 ASEAN vision.

Paper long abstract:

Resilience policy has emerged across specific sectors within ASEAN policy. However, the spread of resilience as a comprehensive policy narrative warrants a reconsideration of a holistic ASEAN approach to regional resilience. Set amidst preparations for the ASEAN post-2025 agenda, this paper contributes a case study on the present and potential future use of resilience in regional governance. Based on policy documentation and present initiatives in preparation for its post-2025 agenda, this study examines the consistency or compatibility of key policy directions within and beyond ASEAN. Highlighting both internal and external challenges faced by the region, this case adds a regional perspective to complement a prevailing focus on national arenas/actors in resilience policy.

Paper short abstract:

This study examines how the concept of resilience appears in South Korea's policy discourse through the lens of the policy transfer continuum. It also explores how resilience can be used for regional cooperation on sustainability issues amid global dynamics of sustainable development.

Paper long abstract:

The notion of ‘resilience’ has become increasingly important in global policy discourse, particularly in the context of addressing sustainability in development. In this regard, South Korea’s recent adoption of the term in its Indo-Pacific strategy earlier this year is notable, as it specifies the term resilience in its vision. The term appeared in the context of the country’s aim to reduce the global digital divide and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with a focus on climate change and health. In addition, the strategy highlights South Korea’s commitment to regional cooperation on climate and energy security through minilateral cooperation, with an emphasis on enhancing resilience. Witnessing such adoption of the term, this study explores the ways in which the notion of resilience has been translated and incorporated into South Korea’s policy discourse and aims to trace how its semantic understanding has evolved over time. By applying the case through the lens of the policy transfer continuum (voluntary-coercive transfer spectrum) by Dolowitz and Marsh (2000), the study seeks to shed new light on the country’s approach to resilience to better understand its unique characteristics. The study also expects to contribute by exploring how the resilience concept can be leveraged for regional cooperation amid the complex and politicized global dynamics of sustainable development.

Paper short abstract:

Timely interventions to build resilience can prevent an overwhelming cascade in the face of natural disasters. Policy framing that focuses on such interventions as a necessary part of policy making to prevent growing risks which make regions and communities more exposed to climate change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes the adoption of a multi-dimensional resilience approach to enable the development of a problem analysis for identifying threats and opportunities of a range of possible scenarios of climate change. Examining the threats and opportunities in each scenario, can pinpoint weaknesses in existing processes in a production or delivery systems and investigate the most effective way for undertaking an ex-ante improvement in absorptive capacity to contend with natural disasters. In the case where there is a persistence in weak processes, there is a distinct possibility that systemic risks can cascade into an endogenous shock.

Undertaking resilience scanning exercises could provide a valuable way to bring together a range of stakeholders who can they more explicitly share the values of openness and market-based incentivisation to improve system level functionality. By ensuring corporate, national and civil society stakeholders all have a clear view of resilience considerations: particularly the implications of risks in the face of increased vulnerabilities can improve consensus regarding the need for climate action. By an explicit examination of the priority that should be accorded to those systemic changes that needed to increase resilience to natural disasters that are in the pipeline over the next thirty to fifty years, such as improving supply chains to reduce logistic challenges and undergirding infrastructure to overcome the increased severity and frequency of extreme weather events, will all work to reduce vulnerability, making resilience and sustainability more achievable in future years.

Paper short abstract:

Diversifying crop portfolio to include horticulture in the mix, is a strategy promoted to enhance farm income and build climate resilience among dryland farmers. The study analyses the interaction between farm incomes and rising cost of irrigation, on groundwater management in watershed villages.

Paper long abstract:

Dryland agricultural regions constitute nearly two-thirds of the total cultivated land in India. These regions contribute to 40% of food production, are home to 40% of the rural poor and are characterised by a very high share of smallholding farmers (60% have less than 2.5 acres of land). The farming communities here are increasingly vulnerable to climate risks, specifically to high volatility in seasonal rainfall. A key development action in building climate-resilient agricultural livelihood is to enable farmers to include a high-value horticultural crop in their portfolio. To this end, irrigation potential is built by implementing watershed development projects, encouraging private ownership of wells, adopting farm-level irrigation efficient technologies, and following a water budget prepared at the community level. Data from the field (a sample of five villages) suggests that though the gross farm incomes in the village did increase, the cost of irrigation skyrocketed, water imports from nearby regions increased, and the community-level water management tools such as the water budget are less relevant/effective to the groundwater management needs. Therefore, the central objective of this study is to understand the new constructs of sustainability emerging from the changing scenarios in agricultural development. To articulate the emerging phenomenon, we empirically analyse scale neutrality in horticultural farming (stochastic frontier analysis) and trace the policy incentives shaping agricultural development and groundwater regulation in Maharashtra.

Paper short abstract:

We present a comparative analysis of how crisis in agriculture emerged, the resulting vulnerability and resilience that played out due to the environmental and institutional factors in the colonial era and the late 20th Century in the cotton growing tracts of Vidarbha.

Paper long abstract:

The cotton-growing tracts of Vidarbha have been in spotlight over the last two decades for the persistent agrarian crisis and resultant farmer suicides. The debates around the crisis have focussed on various aspects of agriculture in the region and many causes have been attributed to the persistent distress. Predominant arguments have focussed on the withdrawal of state in the neo-liberal era and the adoption of Bt cotton seeds, which have been dubbed by some as suicide seeds. These arguments seem to ignore the fact that cotton cultivation has existed for many years in the region and recurrent crises have struck these cotton farmers over these years. A study of the region using a long-durée approach which considers these historical aspects allows us to understand the current situation better (Gaurav and Ranganathan, 2023). In this paper, we focus on comparative aspects of two major crises in Vidarbha - one during the colonial era during the American Civil War in the 19th Century and the other more recent crisis starting from the 1990s. Both these crises have some common factors - lack of robust formal risk management institutions for the farmers, changes in credit uptake, environmental degradation, and changes in global economy affecting cotton prices. There have also been differences in these crises, particularly related to how farmers have responded to them. Cotton cultivation by farmers, though, has remained resilient to these and other crises in the region. We look into possible reasons for such a phenomenon while we compare these crises.

Paper short abstract:

The paper challenges critiques of climate-resilient development as a necessarily reactionary techno-managerial exercise. It adopts a generative approach to engage with a grassroots network in India as a site where resilient policies for rainfed regions are reimagined beyond a paradigm of irrigation.

Paper long abstract:

In the rainfed drylands of India, climate-resilient policies are often reduced to a package of practices to tackle water scarcity by increasing irrigation and transition towards commercial agriculture. While the reactionary character of these policy techno-fixes has been widely discussed, this paper takes a generative approach to reimagine what more equitable and plural resilient socioecologies could look like when approached from a different standpoint.

Advancing a socionatural interpretation of resilience as a practice enacted within different more-than-human assemblages, the paper reframes resilience as a process that is done through everyday makings, rather than the property of a socio-ecological system. Suggesting that multiple articulations of resilience exist as equally valid and real, I bring this frame to bear upon ethnographic research with an Indian-based grassroots Network that works reimagine rainfed regions beyond the current paradigm of irrigation. Exploring the tools the Network mobilizes to inflect change in the policy realm, this account illuminates their strategy to infuse within instituted metrics and indicators alternative parameters that make visible those practices, relations and values discarded by a metrology of resilience as irrigation.

The paper suggests that rethinking plural resilience policies requires reframing investigations from the standpoint of socio-ecological movements and their practices of mobilization. While not necessarily talking the language of resilience nor that of climate change, they situate their vision of a resilient rural life within a deeper understanding of a regions’ agrarian economy and ecology, collectively indicating ways to expand and deepen what effective climate action could look like.

Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights the complexity and conflicting priorities surrounding the concept of resilience in cocoa farming, such as the tension between short-term profitability for farmers and long-term sustainable practices as well as the lack of alignment between policies and practices.

Paper long abstract:

Using specific interventions, this research will interrogate the use of the concept of resilience as it applies to cocoa farming in West Africa. Resilience in cocoa farming in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana is a complex and multifaceted concept that is considered essential for the long-term viability of the industry and the livelihoods of farmers and rural communities. However, the pursuit of resilience in this context has been plagued by contradictions and conflicting priorities. There is a contradiction between the need for short-term profitability which is good for farmers livelihood and the long-term sustainable farming practices necessary for resilience. Additionally, there is often a conflict between the needs of farmers and the interests of other stakeholders, such as chocolate companies and international buyers, who prioritize their own goals in the resilience discourse. Some of the policies and practices deemed resilient are not aligned with the livelihood needs and priorities of farmers, reducing their ability to adapt to future changing conditions. Addressing these contradictions and finding solutions that balance the competing priorities is impossible due to the power imbalance and the ability of certain stakeholders to shape the discourse.

Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates the resilience frames in the management of urban flood risks in Malawi’s cities. Using Lilongwe and Mzuzu cities as cases, it foregrounds how resilience to floods is framed, what is accentuated or obscured, and how such frames influence resilience practices and their outcomes

Paper long abstract:

Sustainable development goal 11 focuses on achieving sustainable cities and communities. One of the targets of this goal is to significantly reduce the effects of disasters including water related disasters such as floods. To make sense of and achieve this goal, the resilience concept has often been used by different actors including state and non-state actors. This paper interrogates the resilience narrative employed in the management of urban flood risks in Malawi, southern Africa. This paper draws from PhD research conducted between 2019 and 2021 employing key informant interviews, focus group discussions and document review as key data collection methods. Thus, the paper foregrounds how resilience to floods is framed, what is accentuated and what is obscured in the process. Specifically, it assesses how resilience is discursively produced in national and local policy frameworks addressing disaster and climate-related policies in Malawi, using Mzuzu and Lilongwe cities as cases. Further, it assesses how these particular resilience frames affect the resilience practices and their outcomes employed in the two cities. Ultimately, the paper questions the adoption and transfer of the resilience frames and their relevance to cities in Malawi.

Paper short abstract:

The study question conceptions of water in/security and the hazy definitions of resilience practices in developing sustainable water services, especially in moments of crisis. I explore bottom-up community resilience across diverse contexts, as well as mapping water governance innovations.

Paper long abstract:

With regional temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius, states have engaged in megaprojects designed to improve water security in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, such as investing in new water technologies for irrigation (Egypt), desalination (Saudi Arabia), and cloud seeding (UAE). Yet, while adopted technologies and state-led development struggle to catch up with the lack, and in some cases abundance, of water, urban communities have developed their own methods of resilience and sustainable access to water, especially in times of crisis like the COVID 19 Pandemic. Across marginalized communities, water governance has operated as part of regimes of self-built networks in urban milieus; where water flow is constructed through grassroots efforts, social capital, and heterogeneous configurations of socio-technical relations. Despite the centralization and in some cases corporatization of water governance in the region, communities lie at the crux of daily negotiations of water supply, maintenance, and quality. My study explores how communities come together (or compete) to create networks of sustainable and localized efforts that work to guarantee access, supply, and repair of natural resources and the impact of crisis. Since the pandemic and under International Monetary Fund conditionalities, the Egyptian state has steadily removing water and energy subsidies, leading communities to depend on self-help networks to provide basic needs. I employ qualitative research methods across neighborhoods to study grassroots resilience practices to analyze pathways for development and scaling in a post-pandemic environment.