How does resilience change over time? Tracking post-disaster recovery using mobile phone surveys

Knowing how climate hazards affect people’s resilience over time is crucial in designing more effective development and humanitarian interventions. This is particularly important in postdisaster contexts, where people’s livelihood opportunities and wellbeing changes rapidly during the long road to recovery. Yet, to date, our knowledge of resilience is largely guided by snapshots: one-off surveys taken at a single point in time. This in turn guides how resilience-building interventions are designed and risks neglecting important temporal dimensions of resilience. Greater insights into the evolving nature of resilience are therefore desperately needed. In this paper, we track post-disaster recovery and changes in levels of resilience over time using a number of methodological innovations. Drawing on BRACED’s Rapid Response Research (RRR) project, we collect information on how households in eastern Myanmar recover from a series of extensive flood events using a mobile phone panel survey of 1,200 individuals. The paper also makes use of new ways of measuring resilience using people’s perceptions of their own risk, repeated collecting Subjectively Evaluated Resilience Scores (SERS) roughly every two months. Importantly, we use the flexibility of the SERS approach to measure the impact of the flooding on households’ resilience to a range of overlapping threats (not just a single hazard), which we term ‘overall resilience’.

Author:	Overseas Development Institute; BRACED
Language:	English
Pubished By:	The Overseas Development Institute
Pubished date:	August 2018