Evaluating the resilience of forest dependent communities in Central India by combining the sustainable livelihoods framework and the cross scale resilience analysis

Resilience has moved from being a peripheral ecological concept to a central goal, in the development discourse. While the concept has become popular, operationalizing resilience has been difficult. Many frameworks have been proposed to operationalize resilience but no common framework has been agreed upon. The present article demonstrates a step by step method to operationalize livelihood resilience analysis, for communities that are affected by climate change by taking the case of rural household livelihoods in villages around Ratapani Wildlife Sanctuary in Central India. The article combines the Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF) with the Cross Scale Resilience Analysis (CSRA), as a way to operationalize resilience. The CSRA is found to be simple, systematic and applicable in diverse contexts. The systematic and holistic asset, process and institution-based analysis under the SLF, supports the CSRA by defining the system and identifying associated important shocks that affect the system. Through the analysis, it was realized that the impact of shifts in government policies on rural livelihoods is much greater than the impacts of climate change. The livelihood is worst affected when the shift in government policies coincides with impacts of climate change. The article argues that combining the SLF with the CSRA can provide a standardized method for livelihood resilience analysis of poor natural-resource dependent communities in developing countries. Handling the dynamic nature of these complex adaptive social-ecological systems in the resilience analysis should be the next goal to tackle.