Resilience Measurement for Development

Absorptive capacity is the ability to prepare for, mitigate, and cope with the impact of a shock so that well-being is maintained — for example, drawing on savings, reserves, or insurance to weather a drought. Adaptive capacity is the ability to make proactive and incremental adjustments to livelihoods in response to changing conditions, such as diversifying income sources. Transformative capacity is the ability to make fundamental, structural changes — in institutions, systems, or behaviours — when the existing way of life is no longer viable. Together they describe an escalating set of responses from coping through adjusting to transforming.

RIMA-II treats resilience as a latent (unobserved) variable inferred from observable pillars: Access to Basic Services, Assets, Social Safety Nets, and Adaptive Capacity. It first reduces the variables within each pillar to a score using factor or principal-component analysis, then uses a multiple indicators multiple causes (MIMIC) structural-equation model in which the pillars cause the latent resilience and the latent resilience is reflected in observed outcomes such as food security. This produces a Resilience Capacity Index for each household and shows how strongly each pillar contributes.

Subjective resilience measurement asks people to assess their own ability to anticipate, absorb, and recover from shocks, rather than inferring resilience from external indicators of their assets and services. Using survey questions about perceived coping ability, it captures dimensions — confidence, aspirations, self-assessed capacity — that objective indices may miss, and can be quicker and cheaper to collect. It is increasingly used alongside objective approaches such as RIMA, since the two can diverge and together give a fuller picture of resilience.