Exploring Strategies that Build Resilience: A case from Cambodia

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Exploring Strategies that Build Resilience A
case from Cambodia

• Melissa Marschke
• York University
• Panel
• Using resilience thinking to further an
  understanding of livelihoods

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Introduction
Sketch Rowing during the flood season.

• Linking livelihoods and resilience thinking
• A case study exploring strategies that build
  livelihood resilience
• Overview of stresses and shocks found in rural
  Cambodian fishing communities
• Observed resilience-building strategies
• Well-being
• Implications of findings.

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SL and resilience

• Chambers and Conway (1992 6)
• a livelihood is sustainable when it can cope
  with and recover from stresses and shocks,
  maintain or enhance its capabilities, assests and
  entitlements, while not undermining the natural
  resource base (emphasis added)
• The notion of coping with and recovering from
  stresses and shocks lies at the heart of the SL
  definition this has received less theoretical
  attention than other aspects of livelihoods.

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Areas requiring further analysis

• Capturing the idea that sustainability requires
  both change and continuity.
• Considering household coping and adapting
  strategies in terms of how capacity can be built
  to deal with future change.

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Resilience

• Capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and
  reorganize while undergoing change so as to still
  retain essentially the same function, structure,
  identity and feedbacks.
• Defining characteristics (1) ability to absorb
  stresses shocks (2) self-organize (3) learn
  adapt
• Resilience thinking challenges widely held
  notions about stability and resistance to change

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the figure 8
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Three angles of resilience thinking helpful in a
livelihood analysis

• Change and uncertainty
• Change in the form of renewal and reorganization
  is key in dealing with sustainability in a world
  characterized by rapid transformation
• Scale and linkages
• Resilience thinking focuses on drivers and
  linkages (MEA 2005)
• Learning and adapting
• Learning from experience in an iterative way
  known in the adaptive management literature.
• Building capacity to learn and adapt - a more
  recent notion (Folke et al. 2002)

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Overall goal

• To use the concept of resilience as an analytical
  approach in furthering the understanding of
  livelihoods, specifically considering scale and
  uncertainty.

Map The Two Research Areas, Cambodia.
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Context

• Cambodia ranks 130 of
• 177 countries (UN HDI)
• Complex layers
• Recent trauma (Khmer Rouge 1975-1979)
  post-socialist, post-colonial aid-dependent/influ
  enced nation.
• 70 of the population over 15 pursues
  agricultural activities (including fishing)
• Rural, largely resource dependent population.

Photo Coastal homes.
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Scale and timedecreasing natural resources

• 1990s deforestation and depletion of fisheries
  juxtaposed with an influx in donor funding
• Donor buzz words include local governance
  decentralization
• Community-based natural resource management
  (CBNRM) fits into this dialogue
• Taking place within a particularly authoritarian,
  top-down society.

Photo Mangrove cutting during the 1998 Cambodian
election period (July).
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Overview Livelihood in two villages

• Shocks
• Forest fire
• National border closing
• Extreme government policy shifts
• Khmer Rouge, 1975 - 1979

• Stresses
• Reduced access to common fishing grounds
• Declining resources (less fish and forests near
  villages)
• Loss of fishing gear
• Chronic poor health
• Being at the mercy of markets.

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Observed resilience-building strategies

• A multi-scale analysis (household, village and
  national level) considered
• Learning to live with change and uncertainty
• Nurturing learning and adapting
• Creating opportunities for self-organization

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Photo Norn Kanya with their younger children,
Siem Reap, Cambodia

• It is better that we do more that fish in my
  household. My one daughter cuts clothes and my
  wife sells goods from our home. My other
  daughter helps with fishing and marketing fish
  products. Since there are not so many fish this
  year and we catch less fish during this season, I
  sent my two sons to the city to try to find work
  (Norn, November 2003).

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An example

• SHOCK Forest fire, August 2003
• Elders organized people
• Young men fought fire
• Women cooked, younger women bringing food and
  water
• Nurturing learning and adapting
• Increased education in schools and between homes
  about cooking, smoking and forest fires
• Signposted areas of flooded forest to warn people
  not to cook
• Self-organization
• Village level meetings to discuss a fire
  prevention strategy
• District meetings to share strategy
• Workshops at national forestry department

Photos Kompong Phluk before and after the forest
fire
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Local institutions supporting livelihoods
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An on the ground analysis of resilience
well-being

• Economics related
• Resource related
• Knowledge and relationship related

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Key findings

• While households and community level institutions
  cannot deal with all stresses and shocks, they do
  develop strategies at various scales that may
  enhance livelihood resilience.
• Paying attention to how crisis situations are
  dealt with is particularly illuminating.

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Policy to support rural livelihood

• Development policy may be better understood by
  focusing on the way that individual households
  respond to change, as opposed to assuming that
  all households will respond similarly to generic
  development policies.

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Acknowledgements

• Funding Sources
• International Development Research Center (IDRC
  Research Fellowship)
• SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.
• Research Support
• Households and resource management committees in
  Koh Sralao and Kompong Phluk, Cambodia
• Project teams (IDRC FAO supported) working in
  each area
• Natural Resources Institute, U Manitoba (Fikret
  Berkes).