Abstract
Promoting household resilience to climate extremes has emerged as a key development priority. Yet tracking and evaluating resilience at this level remains a critical challenge. Most quantitative approaches rely on objective indicators and assessment frameworks, but these are not fully satisfactory. Much of the difficulty arises from a combination of conceptual ambiguities, challenges in selecting appropriate indicators, and in measuring the many intangible aspects that contribute to household resilience. More recently, subjective measures of resilience have been advocated in helping to overcome some of the limitations of traditional objective characterizations. However, few large-scale studies of quantitative subjective approaches to resilience measurement have been conducted. In this study, we address this gap by exploring perceived levels of household resilience to climate extremes in Tanzania and the utility of standardized subjective methods for its assessment. A nationally representative cross-sectional survey involving 1294 individuals was carried out by mobile phone in June 2015 among randomly selected adult respondents aged 18 and above. Factors that are most associated with resilience-related capacities are having had advance knowledge of a previous flood, and to a lesser extent, believing flooding to be a serious community problem. Somewhat surprisingly, though a small number of weak relationships are apparent, most socio-demographic variables do not exhibit statistically significant differences with regards to perceived resilience-related capacities. These findings may challenge traditional assumptions about what factors characterize household resilience, offering a motivation for studying both subjective and objective perspectives, and understanding better their relationship to one another. If further validated, subjective measures may offer potential as both a complement and alternative to traditional objective methods of resilience measurement, each with their own merits and limitations.
Highlights
Resilience measurement has soared to the top of the development agenda (Frankenberger et al 2014)
Few large-scale studies of quantitative subjective approaches to resilience measurement have been conducted. We address this gap by exploring perceived levels of household resilience to climate extremes in Tanzania and the utility of standardized subjective methods for its assessment
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 closeended questions to a nationally representative longitudinal telephone survey in Tanzania
Summary
Resilience measurement has soared to the top of the development agenda (Frankenberger et al 2014). The advantages of subjective approaches to measuring social systems have been advocated (Marshall and Marshall 2007, Jones and Tanner 2015, Lockwood et al 2015, Maxwell et al 2015, Béné et al 2016a,b). These methods may offer the opportunity to address many weaknesses that beset traditional objective approaches, such as difficulties with indicator selection, a lack of attention to context specificity, and an inability to take people’s knowledge of their own resilience into account. It is argued that the complete transformation of a system may be a necessary component of a resilience process (Kates et al 2012, Aldunce et al 2015)
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