Advancing Resilience for Sustainable Development: A Capacity Development Approach

While Africa is one of the most promising continents in the world, it is facing mounting challenges to sustainable development in terms of disaster risk, climate change, environmental degradation and demographic and socioeconomic processes. Societies are thus increasingly conceived as having to be resilient to safeguard what they value over time. However, for resilience to have any practical meaning in relation to sustainable development requires further operationalization to facilitate both conceptual understanding and practical action. This chapter suggests such an operationalization, approaching resilience as an emergent property of a society’s ability to perform different essential functions—anticipation, recognition, adaptation, and learning—and contends that advancing resilience is about developing the capacity to perform these functions. Sustainable development can therefore be pursued through deliberate capacity development efforts explicitly targeting these functions and their interconnections.