A group of ABC members met in Addis Ababa on 12-17 November 2015 for a resilience dialogue and to test the Communities Self-Assessing Resilience (CSAR) tool that the Resilient Communities subgroup has been developing.

The formal Resilience Dialogue was jointly hosted by SwedBio, MELCA Ethiopia and UNDP with more than 65 participants representing government, international organisations, scientists, practitioners, communities and farmers. The aim of this dialogue was to bring together a wide variety of actors from policy, practice and science who are working on resilience at different levels in order to explore key concepts and principles, multiple approaches for assessing resilience, and to identify specific steps in integrating social-ecological resilience principles and resilience thinking into development and biodiversity planning frameworks. The overall goal and expected outcomes of the multi-actor dialogue on resilience was to identify a range of approaches to resilience thinking, assessments and mainstreaming, and to find common ground on key concepts and approaches.

It was recognised that co-production of knowledge and learning is essential and more effort is needed in deliberative communication of resilience in a way that people understand it adapted to different actors, situations and contexts through story-telling and indicators. Various different approaches to measuring and assessing resilience in agricultural landscapes were presented, including: The Resilience, Adaptation Pathways and Transformation Assessment Framework (RAPTA), the Toolkit for the Indicators of Resilience in Socio-Ecological Productions Landscapes and Seascapes, the Resilience Alliance Workbook, and ABC’s own Communities Self-Assessing Resilience (CSAR) process. Resource links for each of the approaches can be found here. A recommendation which emerged from the dialogue was to synthesise complementary assessment approaches to make them more accessible to practitioners, scientists, communities and policymakers.

Many of the existing approaches to measuring and assessing resilience are very top-down and extractive. The ABC working group on Resilience Communities has been working to develop the CSAR process in which communities define the process of assessing resilience through five steps: (1) Why?, (2) Community representation, (3) Narrative, (4) Self-identified attributes and (5) Action. Aadhi Narayanan presented his experience with Dhan Foundation using the CSAR approach with communities in Madurai.

ABC members stayed on for two days following the dialogue to test the CSAR with communities that have long-time engagement with MELCA and also to exchange knowledge with Ethiopian farmers.

Aadhi Narayanan (Dhan Foundation India), Kanya Duchi and Mathana Aphaimool (Earthnet Thailand), Million Belay (Melca) and Jamila Haider (SwedBio) visited the Telecho community, approximately 2 hours from Addis. They spent the day cooking with two farming families, discovering recipes and uses of various varieties of barley and wheat, particularly.