Resilience Measurement and Conceptual Frameworks: A Review of the Literature

The lack of consensus and consistency in measuring resilience undermines the ability of the development aid community to objectively monitor and verify the effects of programs that are intentionally designed to build resilience. In this paper we compare conceptual and analytical models of resilience used by various development organizations, critically evaluating their strengths and weaknesses from a program implementation and measurement point of view. We provide the reader with a clear synthesis of the literature and a classification system for these resilience models. Lastly, we bridge the ‘measurement gap’ by mapping each resilience model to their set of indicators and by building a list of indicators and metrics directly distilled from the literature and classified using SMART filters.