Measuring livelihood resilience: The Household Livelihood Resilience Approach (HLRA)
By A. Quandt. World Development, 2018
314 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract The concept of resilience, and livelihood resilience more specifically, is growing in prominence with international development and humanitarian organizations that aim to measure and build resilience to specific disturbances such as floods or droughts. However, measuring livelihood resilience is a difficult task, and practical methods to measure livelihood resilience, as well as analyze and visualize the data are needed. In this paper, I introduce the Household Livelihood Resilience Approach (HLRA), which draws from the sustainable livelihoods approach and it’s five capital assets to measure resilience. However, unlike other approaches that use the five capital assets such as utilized by Zurich Insurance Group, Ltd and the IFRC, the HLRA goes farther to help visualize the results and identify specific actions to build resilience. This paper illustrates the effectiveness of the HLRA through an empirical case study where this approach was used to measure livelihood resilience in Isiolo County, Kenya, and the effectiveness of agroforestry in building livelihood resilience for agricultural households. Drawing from this case study, I suggest five ways that the HLRA improves upon previous frameworks, including 1) providing practical methods and tools, not just a theoretical framework, 2) integrating ‘subjective’ measures of livelihood resilience, 3) focusing on the household-scale instead of community-scale or larger, 4) providing methods to analyze, visualize, and interpret results of livelihood resilience measures, and 5) highlighting the importance of human agency, power, and access to assets. The HLRA has the potential to help organizations identify specific interventions that could help build livelihood resilience for the most vulnerable groups of people within a community.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/768b106797a0f4de1da53d0c0ea44fa4edf7e7ce
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Resilience of local food systems and links to food security – A review of some important concepts in the context of COVID-19 and other shocks (2020, background): “…natural, physical, social, and human) as a proxy for resilience would be contributing to this conceptual confusion (see e.g. Thulstrup 2015; Quandt 2018).6 For those amongst academics, practitioners and policy makers interested in better understanding the dynamic of food 4 Note however…”
- Exploring Livelihood Resilience and Its Impact on Livelihood Strategy in Rural China (2020, background): “…rs a ffe ct in g liv el ih oo d re si lie nc e In di vi du al s/ ho us eh ol ds , l oc al c om m un iti es , l iv el iho od re co ve ry a ge nc ie s Si na e t a l. (2 01 9b ) 1 3 However, there is no benchmark for designating indicators of resilience, nor should one be necessary (Quandt 2018).”