Interview with LOURDES BENAVIDES / The work on resilience of civil society organizations: "The concept of resilience is very useful to face a new reality but the risk of being used politically"

Abstract

The concept of resilience has become enormously popular in recent years. Coming from physics, ecology and psychology, it has been incorporated into the fields of development and humanitarian action in the last fifteen years, especially as a result of the adoption of the Hyogo framework for action, a document signed and approved in 2005 in this Japanese city by 168 countries, with the aim of increasing the resilience of nations and communities to disasters. In these years, international organizations, national cooperation agencies, as well as different national, regional and local governments, have assumed the concept in their discourse and their intervention on the ground. To cite some manifestations of this, the concept of resilience appears eighteen times in a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly that approved the 2030 Agenda in 2015 and twenty-one times in the declaration of the European Union that established in 2017 the new European consensus on the subject. developmental. Civil society organizations have also joined this process. In this interview, we spoke with Lourdes Benavides about Oxfam's work in the field of resilience and about some criticisms that have been made of this concept.