The doctrine of resilience
RESILIENCE IS a word that Prime Minister Andrew Holness often uses. He picked that expression in a November 2017 climate change speech. He used it again in June 2018 when he spoke at the Outreach Session of the G7 Summit in Quebec, Canada.
“Building resilience,” he said, “is not optional; it is an imperative for our survival. Creative and innovative solutions must be found to design appropriate risk mitigation, risk transfer, and risk financing tools while ensuring wide participation in solutions.”
That message, though directed at an audience of world leaders, also had implications for persons in the local public and private sectors.
Little did Prime Minister Holness or members of his audience know then how prophetic his words would turn out to be given the emerging threat that engulfed the world 18 months later and put resilience to the test. A once-in-a-century event, in the form of a pandemic, occurred and disrupted lives, the operations of countries, businesses, and all kinds of institutions around the globe – big, medium, and small.
Minister of Finance and the Public Service Dr Nigel Clarke got the message. He spoke about resilience in his 2021-22 Budget Speech. He continued the discussion last month in the context of the country’s fiscal risk of natural disasters in a newspaper article.
“Natural disasters generate the need for governments to engage in emergency public expenditure. The layers of Jamaica’s (current) strategy collectively provide fiscal buffers for the fiscal shocks that natural disasters inevitably cause,” he wrote. “These buffers increase Jamaica’s resilience and strengthen our ability to recover … without too much impairment to our economic trajectory.”
The buffers to which he referred are new. None of them existed 30 years ago.
The Jamaica Information Service reported last week that resilience was once more the subject of another speech that the PM delivered about COVID-19.
“There will always be adverse events outside of our control, and the Government must be deliberate and systematic in building our resilience and investing in our capacity to understand future shocks, and this is exactly what we are doing,” said the PM. He was speaking about the “national capacity to conduct tests for not only new variants that cause COVID-19, but for other viruses that may emerge in the future”.
What does resilience mean in these ongoing discussions? The US Economic Development Administration provides an answer. It says on its website that “economic prosperity is linked to an area’s (or country’s) ability to prevent, withstand, and quickly recover from major disruptions (that is, ‘shocks’) to its economic base. Many definitions of economic resilience limit their focus on the ability to quickly recover from a disruption. However, in the context of economic development, economic resilience becomes inclusive of three primary attributes: the ability to recover quickly from a shock, the ability to withstand a shock, and the ability to avoid the shock altogether. Establishing economic resilience in a local or regional economy requires the ability to anticipate risk, evaluate how that risk can impact key economic assets, and build a responsive capacity”.
The resilience message is gaining traction locally and regionally. Surprisingly, insurance providers do not appear to be among the early adopters of the doctrine. Below are five examples that show resilience is on the agenda.
• The Barbados-based Caribbean Tourism Organization has developed a multihazard risk-management guide for its members. The guide will assist practitioners in the public and private sectors to prepare for and manage hazards that pose a risk to the tourist industry.
• The Ministry of Industry & Investment is leading a process to improve the resilience in the business process outsourcing sector to address, among other things, disaster and disaster outbreaks. The fact that the ministry has sought funding to undertake this task for the benefit of private sector enterprises emphasises the importance of the project.
• Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett is a firm believer in the gospel of resilience. The pandemic, he argued in an April 2021 article in this newspaper, presented the greatest challenge to the sector. Recovery, he said, has become “almost synonymous with resilience building. The sector needs to become more adaptable, resilient, sustainable, inclusive, and competitive.”
• Sangster International Airport is a critical national infrastructure. The airport operators announced before the start of the 2021 Hurricane
Season that the institution was strengthening its disaster preparedness and response plans. One of the co-sponsors, The United Nations Development Programme, said that it was keen to build capacity and resilience to ensure efficient and effective responses to crises.
• A recent Ministry of Finance audit of the Auditor General’s Department found that the department operated without a business continuity plan. Business continuity planning is the process a company undergoes to create a prevention and recovery system from potential threats such as natural disasters or cyberattacks.
Dr Clarke spoke about resilience again last week, this time at the micro level. The Government plans to fast-track the development of micro insurance as part of its financial- inclusion strategy. He was speaking at the Jamaican segment of the Munich Re-Foundation’s International Conference on Inclusive Insurance 2021, digital edition.
Microinsurance products offer coverage to low-income households or to individuals who have little savings and who are excluded from the traditional insurance system. Microinsurance products, to use words attributed to the prime minister, ease the difficult transitions that this segment of the population faces from time to time.