Economic emergency affecting crisis resilience

Islamabad: Any projection of crisis resilience is Pakistan is foregrounded by the ongoing economic emergency, which has reversed human development gains and compounded vulnerability.

This was stated by experts at Jinnah Institute’s roundtable discussion on ‘Building Resilience Amidst a Poly-crisis.’ They discussed ways in which resilience can be programmed through interventions in human rights, social protection and climate adaptation.

They observed that ‘resilience’ ran the risk of being turned into a development catch-phrase, added to a long list of redundant approaches that are not backed by evidence. While it is clear that Pakistan’s poly-crisis needs composite overhauls across several policy domains, including the economy and governance, the approaches at work are still coursing path dependent sectoral interventions that address each challenge separately.

There is a dire need for political repositioning of resilience and its translation into action from a mere ‘buzzword’ in party manifestos and understanding the inter-sectionality of each policy action. They argued that discussing resilience without addressing vulnerability creates a false impression that communities “bounced back” from disaster, whereas many never return to their flawed origin. Resilience assessments in post-disaster scenarios struggles to answer how much time and resource it takes for vulnerable households to overcome their challenges and demonstrate rehabilitation. Too many households are pushed to the point of no return, and never make it back. Mere survival should not be confused with resilience, they added.

Resilience is a common agenda between the state and civil society. However, the state’s preoccupations with foreign policy comes at the cost of genuine development and minority rights, participants stated. The state has never undertaken meaningful reform that benefits its citizens, nor given the full measure of citizenship to many marginalised cohorts. In this respect, building resilience is also a political project that must “heal and reconcile” society before embarking on social cohesion. The struggle for reform must not get sidetracked by short-term resilience frameworks that can serve as artificial constructs, to the detriment of overturning deep set exclusions. A major domain for building resilience is new-age skills among young professionals. Analysis of Pakistan’s skills profile reveals that contemporary professional skills are not being developed for domestic or international markets.

Participants felt that the opportunity to reap demographic dividends has largely passed due to untapped youth bulge that is under-skilled and unemployed.

Given the current challenges the country faces, urgent investment in human capital is needed to address this situation, a bottom-up approach of working with local governance and designing localised youth development projects as well as consistent monitoring and evaluation, can yield results. They pointed out that youth development provides an intersection that combines support for vulnerable social groups, such as ethnic and religious minorities, climate and refugee migrants and other marginalised groups.