Abstract
Poor people are especially vulnerable to shocks and uncertainty driven by climate change, and in particular the increasing frequency and severity of extreme climate events like flooding and droughts. Such shocks exacerbate existing inequalities of power and wealth. This chapter explores whether poor households with greater resilience capacities also enjoy a higher quality of life. Baseline data from two ongoing Oxfam projects with local counterparts provide a rich and novel dataset for exploring these relationships in four distinct geographic and social (socio-spatial) contexts in Bangladesh, Chad, India and Nepal. These different project datasets share a number of common quality of life indicators, as well as proxies for absorptive, adaptive, and transformative resilience capacities. We constructed models with the survey data to explore which factors are associated with better quality of life outcomes and whether resilience capacities are significant explanatory factors. The role of gender is specifically explored in the models. The findings show that even amongst survey respondents who live in communities characterized by high levels of poverty and marginalization, levels of resilience, and most clearly transformative resilience, do have a positive association with quality of life indicators. Older age tends to be associated with lower quality of life indicators. The role of gender is found to be important but the results diverge depending on the project. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relevance of the findings for development practitioners engaged in resilience work with people living in poverty.
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Acknowledgements
Data used in this chapter came from interviews with community members in Bangladesh, Chad, India, and Nepal who kindly took the time to answer our questions. The authors thank all the respondents, as well as those who organized and carried out the data collection. Thanks also to Yahaya Awaiss, Nimul Chun, Elsa Febles, Nynke Kuperus, Valerie Minne, Jyotiraj Patra, Enamul Mazid Khan Siddique, Gerard Steehouwer, Rajan Subedi and Jaynie Vonk.
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Guyer, P., van Koot – Hodges, C., Weijermars, B. (2021). Are Expanded Resilience Capacities Associated with Better Quality-of-Life Outcomes? Evidence from Poor Households Grappling with Climate Change in Bangladesh, Chad, India and Nepal. In: Martinez, J., Mikkelsen, C.A., Phillips, R. (eds) Handbook of Quality of Life and Sustainability. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50540-0_9
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