Recurrent humanitarian crises have led many development actors to begin thinking differently about development issues. Rather than placing humanitarian assistance, governance, food security and nutrition, economic development, and other topics in separate silos, many are using the concept of...

One and a half billion people still live in fragile, conflict affected areas. People in these countries are about twice as likely to be malnourished and to die during infancy as people in other developing countries.2 This outcome is often a direct consequence of conflict: conflict reduces food...

Resilience is a desirable capability of people to deal with shocks without significant loss of livelihood, health, and nutrition. Resilience is impaired by exclusion and other forms of discrimination. Exclusion is part of a larger set of causal factors that determine marginality, which is a root...

Policymakers, practitioners, and researchers frequently cite an increase in shocks around the world as a reason for focusing on resilience. But have shocks actually increased or become more severe and farâ€reaching? What does the landscape of shocks look like?

As HIV and AIDS simultaneously undermine livelihoods and household and community safety nets, families are especially vulnerable to poverty, food insecurity, and threats to their children’s nutrition, health, and education, with irreversible consequences. With more than 33.3 million people...

The year 2011 highlighted ongoing challenges to global food security, from food price volatility, extreme weather shocks, and famine to unrest and conflicts. On the policy front, major devel­opments at the global and national levels both offered grounds for encouragement and pointed to areas...

Food systems face shocks varying in breadth and duration from a wide array of sources. These shocks can affect all aspects of a country’s food system, threatening the food security of its citizens. Low levels of capacity to address food system shocks are a major development challenge....

Increasingly, resilience is being incorporated into planning and social protection policy. People have been facing shocks, both natural and anthropogenic, forever, devising and innovating a variety of institutional responses to cope with, recover from, and prevent future impacts. Central to...