Background
This study arrives at a moment when conflicts are becoming more frequent and severe, impacting countries across all income levels. Globally, one in six people is exposed to conflict. And nearly 60 percent of the world’s extreme poor are projected to be living in FCV countries by 2030. Success in FCV contexts is essential to achieving the WBG’s development mandate. Understanding FCV Resilience and its challenges provides a realistic expectation of what development can aspire to support instead of merely seeking to identify deficits and fill gaps or only reacting to acute moments of shock and distress. This study offers a clear way forward for understanding the full potential of FCV Resilience but also its risks.
FCV Resilience is the capacity of actors within complex social systems to respond to conflict and violence or its risks. It is a dynamic process with mixed outcomes and must be adapted to each situation for long-term stability, development, and inclusive growth. It is about strengthening the capacity to manage change and avoid violence through incremental reforms and ongoing adjustments.
- Resilience is crucial in FCV settings, but it’s a complex concept that requires context-specific application, especially where resilience may perpetuate harmful systems or simply reflect coping and survival. Handle with Care: Resilience to Fragility, Conflict and Violence draws from a rich body of knowledge to offer a practical analytical framework to guide practitioners to conduct nuanced and context specific analysis to identify resilience to FCV.
- There is an important distinction between resilience in FCV contexts, which describes resilience to all types of shocks and stressors and resilience to FCV, the specific challenges posed by conflict and violence. This study introduces the concept of FCV Resilience, which focuses on the latter, and makes the case for why this framing of resilience is necessary for more responsible and effective analytics and programming.
- Effective support for FCV Resilience requires connecting directly to the needs and aspirations of affected communities, acknowledging that resilience can be exhausting and that the goal should be to address the drivers of fragility, rather than forcing communities to endure adversity and just helping them cope with it.
This publication was prepared by the Fragility, Conflict and Violence (FCV) Group at the World Bank with the support of the State and Peacebuilding Fund (SPF) and Agence française de développement (AFD).
- While FCV Resilience is compatible with other sectoral interpretations of resilience, the study builds the case for why and how it demands a specific approach in light of its explicit focus on conflict and violence. In fact, FCV Resilience encourages moving away from understanding resilience solely through a sectoral lens since FCV itself is inherently multisectoral and affects people’s daily lives in a multitude of ways.
- The versatility of FCV Resilience as a concept provides many entry points for strengthened analytics and the operations informed by such analytics. As FCV countries will most likely be working with several different resilience frameworks simultaneously, FCV Resilience can serve as a useful umbrella for reflection on where these intersect, what impact they might have on FCV dynamics, and any potential trade-offs.
- This study cautions that real caveats and concerns such as how people who are presumed to be resilient perceive FCV Resilience, unrealistic expectations of the impact resilience can have on FCV and the trade-offs that are often inherent in supporting resilience, must be taken seriously and addressed. The study also highlights principles for engagement as well as practical entry points to guide and refine development approaches to FCV Resilience.
The ABCD Framework for FCV Resilience
Handle with Care presents the ABCD Framework which helps break down FCV Resilience into more comprehensible and actionable components. It focuses on key features of resilience: Actions and Actors, Behaviors and Beliefs, Contextual Characteristics as well as how these interconnect through Dependencies. It also identifies three possible outcomes that can result from resilience, noting that not all outcomes are desirable.
The ABCD Framework encourages practitioners to move beyond generic models, aiming to support locally owned solutions and recognizing the ethical and practical challenges inherent in FCV contexts. This understanding can then be applied to any sectoral programming or framing of resilience to either see how the implementation of certain policies might strengthen—or inadvertently undermine—existing resilience or to monitor how resilience might be eroding over time.
Chapter 1 explores the evolution of the concept of resilience across multiple disciplines and distills key features of resilience from the existing body of knowledge that are particularly salient for understanding FCV Resilience.
Chapter 2 discusses the various ways in which the World Bank in particular and the development community more generally have engaged with resilience, including different sectoral framings.
Chapter 3 focuses on where the takeaways from the broader resilience literature intersect with specific FCV considerations and introduces the concept of FCV Resilience.
Chapter 4 introduces the ABCD Framework for FCV Resilience, pulling together the concepts, caveats, and ideas from the first three chapters.
Chapter 5 applies the ABCD Framework as an analytic lens for synthesized findings from across the six country case studies conducted as background for this study.
Chapter 6 presents strategic recommendations and entry points for how and where a strengthened approach, including but not limited to the ABCD Framework, can be applied to analytics and operations.
Chapter 7 concludes and offers suggestions for ways forward on key research questions, ideas for measurement, and more appropriate methodologies for FCV Resilience.