Gina Ziervogel Lorena Pasquini

RESILIENCE is a word that is thrown around a lot these days. It means different things to different people, but generally alludes to the ability of people or systems to bounce back from shocks and increasingly find ways to emerge stronger than before.

Shocks might be acute – like floods or cholera outbreaks – or chronic – like stress because of poverty or insecurity. The term, that emerged from ecological literature, is concerned with how systems work. It is used in many fields including engineering, psychology, development studies and geography.

The popular concept of building resilience is touted as a positive one. It’s seen as a way to find new opportunities and innovations to help people deal with stresses that affect their lives. But the popular push for resilience can bring its own set of problems.

Resilience is gaining increasing popularity at an international policy level. It’s in the 2015 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement, in the 2015 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and most notably, in the new Sustainable Development Goals.

In the development goals the language of resilience is used in multiple ways, alongside well-being and poverty alleviation. Resilience is invoked in five goals.

But pushing a resilience agenda can have unintended consequences. Do efforts to build resilience automatically address injustices and inequality? We argue they don’t. A focus on justice is lacking in resilience responses, particularly in the African context, where there’s high inequality, high poverty and significant injustices.

There are concrete attempts to translate the global frameworks into actions on the ground. For instance, the Rockefeller Foundation has been supporting cities since 2013 to put the concept of resilience into practice. Seven of Rockefeller’s 100 Resilient Cities are located in Africa.

They are Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Accra, Dakar, Lagos, Cape Town and Durban. And many other cities and towns across Africa are involved in finding ways to increase their resilience.

This seems perfectly logical. African cities have high levels of vulnerability. This is because of rapid in-migration, old infrastructure, limited capacity to manage the city, and high levels of poverty and informality, among other things. African cities are also places where innovation and growth are taking place.

Potentially, the development pathways of urban areas in Africa could be leapfrogged to more sustainable pathways.

Pushing for resilience in urban Africa is central to helping build liveable and thriving cities.

PICTURE: DAVID RITCHIE Victims of an Imizamo Yethu fire rebuild their homes. Decision makers and communities will have to work together to discuss threats to justice whenever ‘resilience-building’ efforts are involved.