Islands of innovation in protracted crises: a new approach to building equitable resilience from below

There are a number of countries which have been suffering from multiple humanitarian disasters, ranging from civil wars, floods and volcanoes and epidemics such as Ebola. The epicentre of these disasters, usually borderland remote regions, have struggled to meet the global development goals and targets, showing that the international community and the governments of these countries are not finding adequate solutions to deal with these protracted crises. The solution therefore may reside with the affected population and individuals themselves. Studying these bottom-up approaches will provide an entry point to discuss synergies and tensions between individual and collective forms of resilience in humanitarian situations and the 'Leave No One Behind' agenda behind the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular the goals around Poverty, Health, Gender, Inequalities, Climate, and Peace.

The two countries we are examining, Côte d'Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo, have had tumultuous histories since the end of the 20th century. Our first case study is the western region of Côte d'Ivoire at the border with Liberia. This region has been the epicentre of violence during the civil war between 2000 and 2010. The war has created many forced displacement and humanitarian issues around food and health security. The region was also exposed to the threat of the Ebola virus via the Liberian border, although the virus was contained. A major flood, in 2018, also affected the whole country and agricultural production. Finally, climate change prediction around rising temperatures could seriously disrupt the region with its reliance on cocoa production.

Our second case study is the north Kivu region in the DRC. Decades of fighting have ravaged the economy of north Kivu, with the latest humanitarian catastrophe a toxic mix of renewed conflict and a major Ebola epidemic. Conflict in the Kivu has its origins in the Rwanda genocide and the breakdown of the authoritarian state created by Mobutu. Well-organised elites both inside and outside the country manipulate the conflict for economic gain (such as illegal mineral extraction) and political gain (especially around major elections). Despite one of the world's largest UN peacekeeping forces, dozens of large-scale militia forces act with impunity across the region. The region is also home to a volcano, Nyamuragira, which has had multiple eruptions (2002, 2010, 2011 and 2014) creating important damages in terms of local livelihoods. Over the medium-term, climate change has already affected the choice of staple crops for peasant farmers, and has affected the choices of large-scale plantation owners, often with negative consequences for their dependants.

Yet despite these challenges, communities in both regions find innovative ways to manage economically and socially, forced to adapt against a backdrop of constant change and insecurity. Learning how survivors organise to recover from major shocks, crisis and stressors, and how aid actors can best support these efforts, is therefore a central question to address one of the greatest global challenges of our time. Sharing this knowledge could help build resilience more widely but needs to be done through media and methods that resonate. Often this is about those who have experienced such adaptations telling stories; and about identifying with the storyteller or the common experience.

Our methodology will combine approaches from anthropology, history, political economy, participatory research and story-telling. Our interdisciplinary, international team will bring together social science, arts and humanities researchers with diverse thematic and regional experience essential to the project.

This research aims to improve the social learning processes of local communities faced with multiple shocks. There is a particular trauma in these communities as a result of conflict and wars, epidemics, and natural hazard disasters that is often misinterpreted as despair. They are also frequently ignored or misunderstood by humanitarian workers, national governments and global policy makers. However, their experiences and practices are an opportunity to learn from and about them and bring about positive changes, which this research will actively contribute to.

Beneficiaries of this research are:

a) local communities faced with multiple shocks;
b) humanitarian aid workers working in West and Central Africa;
c) national governments implementing the SDGs;
d) global humanitarian policy makers; and
e) researchers in humanitarian studies.

Local communities exposed to humanitarian hazards and risks will benefit from the research by sharing and learning from each other's experiences and ways of developing individual and community forms of resilience. The research will produce practical insights of repertoires of stories of individual and community forms of resilience. These repertoires will be shared and diffused through storytellers, including arts, music and drama to make it more accessible and entertaining for these communities.

Humanitarian aid workers will benefit from the research, by getting practical insights and workable ideas on the types of community strategies that effectively build resilience. The project's participatory methods will provide a platform to co-produce improvements in humanitarian thinking between the three local communities in each country, the country advisory board and the research consortium. Broader lessons will be derived from the research that will benefit other countries and decision makers facing similar multiple humanitarian challenges.

The national governments in each country will also benefit on the neglected issue between the links of community forms of resilience and survivor-led humanitarian response and reconstruction on the one hand and the implementation of the SDGs, in particular SDGs - 1 (Poverty), 3 (Health), 5 (Gender), 10 (inequalities), 13 (Climate) and 16 (Peace) on the other.

Members of the wider global humanitarian community and researchers will benefit from new interdisciplinary networks and collaborations across the fields of disaster risk reduction, health pandemics preparedness and response, peacebuilding and new methodologies across art/humanities/social sciences to capture bottom-up responses to protracted humanitarian crises.

Our participatory methodology will enable each community to clarify their priorities and perspectives, which, in addition to the activities set out in the pathways to impact, will result in enhanced understandings and integration of diverse perspectives on survivor-led humanitarian response and reconstruction. This will enable more nuanced and locally sensitive policies to address humanitarian shocks and challenges.

This new approach, which will be rooted in ethnographic understandings of social, political and cultural histories, processes and practices, will deepen systems and resilience thinking. It will contribute practically to approaches to humanitarian systems strengthening policies and to ensuring that positive lessons are learned and supported from these multiple shocks.