Opinion: Measuring development resilience in the world's poorest countries.

The dangerous nexus of climate change, rapid population growth, and conflict has pushed several poor regions of the world— notably in rural areas of the Sahel, the Horn, and the Great Lakes regions of Africa—into states of seemingly permanent crisis (Fig. 1). The distinction between short-run humanitarian response and development assistance aimed at longer-run outcomes has grown increasingly blurred in such places. This disturbing state of affairs, along with social scientists’ expanded knowledge of the intimate interactions between short-term shocks and long-run economic development, has catalyzed widespread interest in building “development resilience,” which has quickly become a centerpiece of many humanitarian and development organizations’ programming. But whereas a social science theory of development resilience and related measurement methods have recently emerged (1, 2), our empirical understanding of development resilience in developing countries remains remarkably limited, primarily because of data shortcomings. Given the hundreds of millions of dollars now being allocated to humanitarian assistance and development programs aimed expressly at building resilience, the time has come to invest in a more systematic approach to collecting data through a multicountry system of high-frequency, long-term sentinel sites in the world’s most vulnerable (and largely rural) regions. The benefits of such a system would be substantial. At an operational level, it would offer the first truly rigorous means of monitoring development resilience in the world’s most volatile places. Better data would also improve the targeting of resources to achieve greatest impact (3). On a scientific level, such a system would establish a platform for rigorous diagnosis of the underlying determinants of development resilience, for groundbreaking interdisciplinary and comparative research on a wide range of topics, and for designing and evaluating appropriate resilience-building interventions and strategies.