New article in Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses

By Søren Vester Haldrup and Frederik Rosén

In a 2012 speech, United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) Administrator Helen Clark argued that resilience must be put ‘… at the heart of the development agenda’. Her statement expresses well how the concept of resilience has grown into an organising concept for international development.

This article examines the rise of resilience thinking in international development. It links the resilience concept to changing ideas of capacity and argues that the entwined concepts of resilience and capacity increasingly frame the ways Western donors address societal fragility in the Global South. The article argues that the use of the concept of resilience in international development is characterised by pragmatism and a retreat from grand planning as a response to a crisis in how fragility is handled. Increasingly, Western donors take on the role of facilitators while responsibility for implementation is put on local partners and the recipient state. The question is whether there may perhaps be a darker side to the popular and desirable concepts of local ownership, bottom-up approaches and south-south cooperation: a wish in the Western donor camp to disengage and evade responsibility.