World Bank Fragility Forum: Unseen Forces: Realizing Resilience through Behaviors and Connections

This session, hosted by Busara, explores the frontier edges of resilience research and thinking (particularly as it relates to peacebuilding) through a conceptually stimulating discussion that explicitly challenges our mental and institutional models.  Resilience to conflict and violence has become a prominent concept in programming. Yet is often unseen, contextually- and culturally specific, and difficult to accurately measure. Resilience in situations of fragility emerges through what people actually do: how they interact, the choices they make based on the resources they have at their disposal, and the behaviors those choices and relationships create. In addition, resilience is aided or hindered by societies’ functioning, and by the trust that exists between different groups and communities.  Understanding this relational and ‘doing’ aspect of resilience is fundamental to operationalising more targeted approaches to support it, and to prevent undermining it. Throughout this session, speakers will address some of the principles of a relational and processual approach to resilience and what the implications of this are for development actors who seek to support resilience in complex environments.

Moderator:

Michael Woolcock, World Bank and Harvard University

Speakers:

• Patrick Barron, Global Lead for Social Cohesion and Resilience, World Bank
• Sara Batmanglich, Senior Operations Officer – Strategy & Analytics, Resilience and FCV, World Bank
• Lucy Rist, University of Southern Denmark
• Mareike Schomerus, Vice President, Busara; author of Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (2023).