World Food Policy
Resilience: A New Assessment
Framework for Public
Policies in the Sahel?
A
far cry from these method-
ological issues, resilience in the
Sahel is currently a categorical
imperative; it is not a matter for discus-
sion; it must simply be researched and
supported. This provides us with a real
opportunity to turn this notion into
something useful: it could become an
essential criterion for assessing nation-
al, regional, and international policies.
It could be used to remind these policy-
makers of their responsibilities: do you
really make a contribution to the resil-
ience to which you so earnestly aspire?
Implement Integration?
T
he aim of integration is insepa-
rable from resilience. This aim
is not without risks or prob-
lems, and is hard to operationalize
(Grünewald 2014). Of course, major
funding bodies attempt to implement it
as part of their own procedures. USAID,
for example, has developed an approach
called the Joint Planning Cell (USAID
2013). This cell is composed of agricul-
tural, climate change, food, health and
food security experts, and its mission
is to produce joint action plans to layer,
sequence, and integrate humanitarian
assistance. At a European level, ECHO
and DEVCO increasingly conduct joint
situation analyses, although each is
keen to protect its prerogatives. In ad-
dition to this internal institutional dia-
log, longer horizons for funding bodies,
and therefore for funding grants, which
would appear to be decisive, are rarely
achieved. This represents another par-
adox, even though resilience consists in
encouraging target populations to im-
plement longer horizons.
In the field, institutions are also
attempting to modify their practices.
This includes the FAO and its “caisses
de resilience” approach, which has been
tested in Mali and Burkina Faso (FAO
2016b, 2017). It combines a technical
component, based on the promotion of
good agricultural practices in “farmer
field schools”; a financial component,
aimed at developing microfinance (sav-
ings, micro-credit, micro-insurance),
and a social component including so-
cial nets and social inclusion tools. By
combining these components, the aim
is to trigger a virtuous dynamic, based
on diversified and resilient livelihoods,
longer horizons and social cohesion.
However, it is mostly NGOs, which are
generally in the front line in West Afri-
can field operations, on which the onus
of implementing integrated approach-
es falls. They are often organized in a
highly sectorial way, because funding
bodies used to assert it as a condition of
their effectiveness (cluster approaches),
and they are now being asked, for the
same reason, to do exactly the opposite.
The same requirements for effectiveness
have also too often led them to neglect
national partners as not “professional”
enough, and to limit in-depth assess-
ments, as too costly; they are now being
asked to better integrate local actors and
to develop less basic assessment frame-
works, based on the complexity of resil-
ience. Another problem is the assump-
tion that all goals could be achieved at
138