Disasters journal special edition: Building resilience from the ground up

This special issue of Disasters reflects on resilience-building supported via BRACED and Action on Climate Today (ACT) in some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries and contexts. These two programmes have focused on scaling up action to build resilience, principally through the expansion and replication of good practices by influencing government policies, plans and investments. The papers provide insights that are each grounded in different contexts and understandings of local realities and the factors that support and under-mine people’s resilience.

The BRACED articles emphasise the importance of this ground-level engagement. They also highlight a range of different opportunities for intervening in the broader social structures and decision-making processes that shape these local realities. The focus of the ACT article is explicitly and exclusively concerned with national and local government policy-making and how this can be influenced.

Each of the seven papers selected for this special issue was written by teams of researchers and practitioners engaged in the BRACED and ACT programmes, based in the Global South and North in a range of country contexts from the Sahel to Southeast Asia. Each brings a different perspective on the significance and operationalisation of efforts to build resilience to climate extremes and disasters. The contributing authors describe resilience-building at different scales, for different types of projects and interventions: from gender-differentiated perspectives within households in Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and Chad (Le Masson et al., 2019; McOmber et al., 2019), to devolved community planning and financing in Mali and Senegal (Beauchamp et al., 2019); from sector-wide agricultural extension support in Sudan (Young and Ismail, 2019), to early warning systems in Ethiopia and Nicaragua (Ewbank et al., 2019), national social protection programmes in Ethiopia (Ulrichs et al., 2019) and advocacy for mainstreaming into government policy in South Asia (Tanner et al., 2019).