Is resilience socially constructed? Empirical evidence from Fiji, Ghana, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam
By Christophe Béné, Ramatu M. Al-Hassan, O. Amarasinghe, P. Fong, Joseph Ocran, E. Onumah, R. Ratuniata, T. V. Tuyen, J. McGregor, David Jonathan Mills. 2016
186 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The objective of this paper is to better understand the various individual and household factors that influence resilience, that is, people⬢s ability to respond adequately to shocks and stressors. One of our hypotheses is that resilience does not simply reflect the expected effects of quantifiable factors such as level of assets, or even less quantifiable social processes such as people⬢s experience, but is also determined by more subjective dimensions related to people⬢s perceptions of their ability to cope, adapt or transform in the face of adverse events. Data collected over two years in Fiji, Ghana, Sri Lanka and Vietnam confirms the importance of wealth in the recovery process of households affected by shocks and stressors. However our results challenge the idea that within communities, assets are a systematic differentiator in people⬢s response to adverse events. The findings regarding social capital are mixed and call for more research: social capital had a strong positive influence on resilience at the community level, yet our analysis failed to demonstrate any tangible positive correlation at the household level. Finally, the data confirm that, like vulnerability, resilience is at least in part socially constructed, endogenous to individual and groups, and hence contingent on knowledge, attitudes to risk, culture and subjectivity.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d673a3f4a875784a2271b98fff76310b45b47330
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Sociology and Political Science
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Resilience isn't the same for all: Comparing subjective and objective approaches to resilience measurement (2018, unknown): “More recently, subjective methods of assessing resilience have been advocated (Béné et al., 2016; Claire, Graber, Jones, & Conway, 2017; Jones & Tanner, 2017; Maxwell, Constas, Frankenberger, Klaus, & Mock, 2015).”
- 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, methodology): “…is something that government and development agencies should envisage to strengthen the resilience of local food systems. household or community as their unit of analysis (see e.g. Cutter et al. 2008; Cohen et al. 2013; Smith et al. 2015; Béné et al. 2016b; FAO 2016; D’Errico et al. 2018).”