Making sense of resilience: Using SenseMaker as an innovative method for assessing adaptation to climate shocks and stressors

Brief Description

What actions do households (and communities) take to cope, adapt or transform their systems and structures in order to respond to shocks and stressors like increased variability in climate?
What resilience pathways do households (and individuals) experience and how do these influence development outcomes?
What are the combination of capabilities that make a difference to households (and communities) in responding to different types of shocks and stressors?

In 2015, Catholic Relief Services began using SenseMaker, a tool based around storytelling, to answer questions like these and to measure progress and assess resilience capabilities in agriculture and livelihoods programming. Sensemaker’s methodology asks respondents to share, analyze and give meaning to their own experiences, an activity that builds empathy and respect between narrators and field researchers. Through storytelling, narrators also gain agency, becoming experts of their own situations.

This session explains how the tool works and discusses examples of the type of findings that have been generated and lessons learned from four years’ worth of iterative cycles of testing.

Session Objectives

Participants have a good understanding of the SenseMaker-based method for assessing resilience related to climate change adaptation in CSA project and programs.
Participants are inspired by this innovative method and are willing to test it in their projects/ programs in order to build a broader knowledge base that will improve the CSA project/program design and evaluation.

Chairperson/Moderator

Maria Verónica Gottret, Senior Technical Advisor for Agricultural Livelihoods Research, Catholic Relief Services

Rapporteur

Olaf Westermann, Senior Technical Advisor, Climate Change, Catholic Relief Services

Short Agenda

Day 2 (9 Oct)

This will be a hands-on and iterative session to share with participants an innovative assessment method used by CRS to assess and understand resilience, specifically related to the adaptation to climate-related shocks and stressors in CSA projects. Using this method has allowed CRS to:

Map the different pathways that people have followed in response to different types of shocks and stressors.
Identify coping actions, adaptive responses and transformative strategies that are fostering and/or hindering resilience capabilities.
Discover weak signals on: (a) emergent practices that can be amplified to build resilience, and/or (b) potential threats that need to be addressed before they escalate.

Thus, this will be a practical event that will allow participants to:

Experiment with complexity in the implementation and evaluation of climate-smart agriculture projects.
Read and discuss narratives shared by respondents who followed resilient and vulnerable pathways in response to climate-related shocks and stressors.
Learn about the different type of signifier questions that were designed to allow respondents to reflect and make sense of the experiences shared related to climate shock and stressors.
Visualize response patterns to identify actions, responses and strategies that have fostered or hindered climate change adaptation.
Identify emergent practices that projects or programs can promote to build resilience as well as potential threats that they need to address.

These experiential learning process will include examples from CRS practice where the method was used to conduct baseline studies for refining program design and implementation in Indonesia, Tanzania, DRC Congo, Guatemala and Nicaragua, and as part of final evaluations in Kenya and Uganda.

Making sense of resilience: Using SenseMaker as an innovative method for assessing adaptation to climate shocks and stressorsDay 3 – 10th Oct | 14:00 – 15:30Jasmine room

Brief Description

Session Objectives

Chairperson/Moderator

Rapporteur

Short Agenda

Organizing Partners