This project was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation through the Windward Fund, which established and nurtured a community of practice (CoP) focused on advancing measurement, evidence, and learning for resilience programming between 2017-2018. Recognizing that resilience had become a popular concept in development but remained challenging to measure and demonstrate, this CoP brought together practitioners, researchers, evaluators, and policymakers to collectively address measurement challenges and build the evidence base for resilience interventions. The CoP employed a multi-dimensional approach to community building: regular virtual knowledge sharing sessions featuring robust research and case studies; in-person workshops; working groups tackling priority topics such as proxy indicators for resilience, mixed-methods approaches, longitudinal measurement strategies, and cost-effectiveness analysis for resilience programming.
The community engaged diverse stakeholders including humanitarian organizations, development partners, academic researchers, and donors seeking to demonstrate impact of resilience investments. The project resulted in the development of a practical guidance and framework on resilience measurement. This included considerations for selecting context-appropriate indicators, tools for participatory resilience assessment with communities, protocols for tracking resilience outcomes over time, and approaches to attributing changes to specific interventions within complex systems.
The CoP also advanced methodological innovation, exploring approaches such as systems mapping to understand resilience dynamics, network analysis to measure social capital aspects of resilience, and scenario testing to assess anticipatory capacity. Case studies from diverse contexts provided rich learnings about what worked in resilience measurement and where challenges persisted. The community paid particular attention to equity dimensions of resilience, developing approaches to measure differential resilience across population groups and ensure that resilience-building did not exacerbate existing inequalities. Another focus was the intersection of humanitarian and development measurement approaches, seeking to bridge the often-separate measurement traditions of these communities toward more integrated approaches for addressing protracted crises and recurrent shocks. The CoP also facilitated south-south learning, connecting resilience measurement practitioners across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to share approaches and adapt lessons across contexts.
