Towards Measuring Resilience of Low-Income Settlements in Cities: The Case of Mumbai

Abstract

Different dimensions of resilience are needed to deal with different kinds and severities of risk, shock, stress or environmental change. How resilience can be assessed, measured or mapped has not been explored adequately. This paper is based on a study conducted in five disaster-prone low-income settlements of Mumbai city. It proposes a methodology or an approach to measure resilience using a conceptual framework, which helps identify indicators. The paper also offers a critique of the construct of resilience, which poses several challenges. Variations in extent and patterns of resilience and coping are a function of several factors. While it is generally agreed that a resilient community is one that is able to prepare for, adapt to and live through shocks, while preserving its basic assets, the criteria that make communities resilient differs from place to place. The meaning of the concept has to be adapted at local levels and translated into concrete, specific indicators for each community. Ideally, specific contexts, struggles and choices available to a community or a household must be specified in order to operationalize the concept of resilience. The idea of how resilience may be increased by improving standards of living, social infrastructure, enhancing coping capacities and investments in social protection measures is important especially in poorer settlements of cities. By proposing a methodology for measurement of resilience the paper suggests how areas where investments are needed on an urgent basis may be identified.

Box: Definitions of Resilience

The multiple meanings and uses of the word is illustrated below in various definitions. Overall, evidence on resilience and resilience programming in humanitarianism is thin, fragmented and sometimes problematic. Coaffee and Rogers (2008) point out that it could become an emotive rhetoric, with no analytical and strategic help when resilience is low.

• Generic

  • Resilience is the capacity of material to absorb energy without suffering permanent deformation (Young 1807).

  • Resilience is a tendency to maintain integrity when subject to disturbance (UNDP 2005 in Levina and Tirpak 2006, p. 14).

• Systems Theory

  • In systems sciences and economics, resilience is: “the ability of a system to withstand a major disruption within acceptable degradation parameters and to recover within an acceptable time and composite costs and risks” (Haimes 2009, p. 498).

  • Amount of change a system can undergo without changing state (IPCC, TAR, 2001, p. 383).

  • Resilience is essentially the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and re-organize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks (Walker et al. 2004, p. 4).

• Ecological Resilience

  • Resilience refers to “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables” (Holling 1973, p. 14).

  • Ecosystem resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by different set of processes. Thus, a resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience in social systems has the added capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future (Resilience Alliance 2007).

  • The capacity of the damaged ecosystem or community to absorb negative impacts and recover from these (Cardona 2003).

• Individual Resilience

  • Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or even significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. It means ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences (The American Psychological Association n.d.).

  • Resilience is based on an individual’s motivation to prepare for, and act during a hazard event. This motivation is based on trust in authorities, self-efficacy, risk perceptions and expectances (Paton et al. 2008).

  • “Resilience refers to a class of phenomena characterized by good outcomes in spite of serious threats to [child] adaptation or development” (Masten 2001, p. 228).

• Country or Community Level Resilience

  • “The ability of countries, communities and households to manage change, by maintaining or transforming living standards in the face of shocks or stresses—such as earthquakes, drought or violent conflict—without compromising their long-term prospects” (DFID 2011, p. 6)

  • “The ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management” (UN General Assembly 2016, p. 22).

  • “The ability of individuals, communities and states and their institutions to absorb and recover from shocks, whilst positively adapting and transforming their structures and means for living in the face of long-term changes and uncertainty” (OECD 2013, p. 1).

  • Resilience means when a community can withstand an extreme event without suffering devastating losses, damage, diminished productivity, or quality of life without a large amount of external assistance (Mileti 1999; Buckle et al. 2000).

  • Disaster resilience has been described as both an outcome and a process. Practices focused on outcome have tended to adopt top-down reactive approaches which can favor the status quo and take attention away from inequalities resulting from insecurity and disaster. As a process, building disaster resilience involves supporting the capacity of individuals, communities and states to adapt through assets and resources relevant to their context (Manyena 2006, pp. 436–439).

  • Folke (2006) equates resilience with the ability to use disturbances as occasions for doing “new things, for innovation and for development.

  • Resilience refers to three conditions that enable social or ecological system to bounce back after a shock. The conditions are: ability to self-organize, ability to buffer disturbance and capacity for learning and adapting (Tompkins et al. 2005, p. 100).

  • Resilience building aligns itself to rights based approaches and emphasizes the need to “bounce forward” rather than merely “bounce back” (Manyena 2009, p. 18).

  • A resilient country is one that has the capability to (1) adapt to changing contexts, (2) withstand sudden shocks and (3) recover to a desired equilibrium, either the previous one or a new one, while preserving the continuity of its operations (Howell 2013, p. 5).

  • “Community resilience is the capability to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce back rapidly through survival, adaptability, evolution, and growth in the face of turbulent change” (The Community and Regional Resilience Institute 2013, p. 10)

  • “Ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner, including through ensuring the preservation, restoration, or improvement of its essential basic structures and functions” (IPCC 2012, p. 5)

  • The capacity of a system, community or society potentially exposed to hazards to adapt, by resisting or changing in order to reach and maintain an acceptable level of functioning and structure” (UNISDR 2005, p. 4).

  • Community resilience is “the ability of community members to take meaningful, deliberate, collective action to remedy the effect of a problem, including the ability to interpret the environment, intervene, and move on” (Pfefferbaum et al. 2007, p. 349).

• Economic Resilience

  • The inherent ability and adaptive responses of systems that enable them to avoid potential losses and the speed with which economies revert to normal following a shock (Duval and Vogel 2008; Rose 2007).

  • Macroeconomic resilience is the ability to cope, recover, and reconstruct and therefore to minimize aggregate consumption losses. This resilience has two components: instantaneous resilience, which is the ability to limit the magnitude of immediate production losses for a given amount of asset losses, and dynamic resilience, which is the ability to reconstruct and recover (Hallegatte 2014, p. 3).