A new article in PNAS, by Christopher Barrett and Mark Constas, jumped out at me because the big picture, trying to bridge econ and resilience, sounded a lot like what I talking about a bunch in my dissertation. Once I started reading, I quickly realized it’s not really that similar and pretty far afield of the topics I tend to think about, but too late, I’m already reading.
I find this pretty interesting, albeit a bit beyond my read-in-5-minutes ability to comprehend. Some thoughts I had while reading:
The authors define “development resilience”:
“Development resilience is the capacity over time of a person, household or other aggregate unit to avoid poverty in the face of various stressors and in the wake of myriad shocks. If and only if that capacity is and remains high over time, then the unit is resilient.”
They choose to emphasize a normative aspect in this definition (in contrast to how resilience is used in engineering or ecology, as they point out): “more is better.” I wonder why they decide to diverge from the well-established (and well-embattled) concept, the beauty of which seems to me to be precisely its anormative (is that a word?) foundations. As they later put it:
“The persistence of relationships within a system that is central to ecological resilience is undesirable in development when those relationships embed the constraints that impose persistently poor standards of living on some persons.”
I know embarrassingly little about development economics, but it seems like the very notion of “poverty tracks” begs to be classified as a basin of attraction with resilience; the usefulness of the concept then would be in understanding how to overcome the network of interacting processes that keeps pulling the person back into poverty: the poverty’s resilience. This is opposite of how Barrett and Constas have put it.
That aside, I like the way they use resilience and their simple conditional expectations function model to discuss “three general options for disruptive intervention.”
Interesting article, and if nothing else, it shows how hard it is to take this ‘resilience’ thing and put some actual quantitative, analytical structure on it.
Citation: Barrett, Chris B., and Mark A. Constas (2014). Toward a theory of resilience for international development applications. PNAS 111(40):14625-14630.
ResiliencEcon 