No man is an Island: A spatially explicit approach to measure development resilience

Abstract

Building resilience is paramount in the development and humanitarian agenda, yet existing resilience measures “are all, at best, imperfect, and at worst, deeply flawed” (Upton, Constenla-Villoslada and Barrett, 2022). This study contributes to improving the conceptualization and the measurement of resilience. Conceptually, it builds on the notion of systemic resilience. Operationally, it explicitly models the spatial structureunderlying human-system interactions and locational effects. To do so, a generalization of the conditional moments of well-being approach (Cissé and Barrett, 2018) is proposed. Our method has relatively low data requirements and is reasonably straightforward to implement. It largely preserves the desirable in-sample features of the parent method while significantly increasing the targeting accuracy. From a policy perspective, incorporating spatial elements into measuring resilience has the potential to improve resource allocation efficiency for development and humanitarian interventions. It also emphasizes the importance of synergizing community-based interventions to complement household-level ones in building resilience.