World Food Policy
central to this research. Forcing your
daughter into an early marriage in or-
der to clear a debt might enable other
members of the household to “bounce
back”, but at the price of limiting the
young woman’s agency. It raises the
question of the social sustainability of
such a practice. If we make a link be-
tween resilience and sustainability, we
are required to address the risks posed
by household practices. Humanitarian
actors have certainly integrated it into
their analyses, since they usually con-
sider household practices in terms of
three post-crisis impact levels: practic-
es with low impacts (adaptive), which
do not compromise the household’s
future; practices with a moderate im-
pact (distress), which are not sustain-
able but which do not reach irreversible
levels, and high-impact practices (sur-
vival), which may irreversibly damage
a household’s situation (ACF-Interna-
tional 2010).
It is important, however, to un-
derline the ambiguity of some human-
itarian practices when studied from a
resilience perspective. These humanitar-
ian actors have a tendency to focus, for
ethical reasons, on saving lives, whereas
households and communities generally
have a longer term goal that of preserv-
ing the group’s resources to ensure their
livelihoods. This is a source of potential
tension between two types of hardship,
which are also two priorities: lives and
livelihoods (Hampshire et al. 2009).
What is a sustainable practice, from this
point of view? Is it a practice that saves
vulnerable lives, or which saves the fam-
ily’s livelihood? This is a question that a
resilience analysis can help resolve, since
emergency resilience-based responses
are already supposed to take the long
term into consideration. More general-
ly, the resilience approach must, there-
fore, encourage to reduce dependence
on assistance and systematic food aid, as
quickly as possible, and go toward less
visible aid practices aimed at promot-
ing self-reliance. Once again, this is a
long-established debate that resilience
has simply revived.
The “Community”:
Another Relevant Scale
L
inking resilience and sustainabil-
ity also means going beyond the
household and addressing the is-
sues of social interaction and practices
aggregation. First, rather than talking
about “good” or “bad” household resil-
ience, this approach involves establish-
ing if the practices of some households
directly or indirectly harm others. In
this case, if there is resilience, it may not
be socially sustainable. Predation prac-
tices such as looting, for example, may
enable some people to embark on re-
silience trajectories, but at the expense
of destroying livelihoods of many oth-
ers. Less radically, the individualization
of land property or grabbing practices
with regard to a space previously shared
by the community may strengthen its
beneficiaries but weaken others.
Second, an approach applied at a
household level may not be suitable for
a local community, particularly due to
the pressure on natural resources. The
diversification of activities, usually pre-
sented as favorable to resilience, can
have negative impacts on a territorial
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