How Program‐ and Community‐Led Design Settings Affect Resilience Approaches to Sustainable Development Projects

ABSTRACT Sustainable Development interventions must deal with rapid and novel changes affecting complex social‐ecological systems, calling for design based on a resilience approach. However, limited analytical attention has been paid to the design settings in which such approaches are deployed. Through two intensive applications of an exemplar resilience tool, we explore its effectiveness in different design settings : a national food security project designed under a Global Environment Facility program and a community‐led project designed locally for agricultural livelihoods. Both cases affirmed the benefits of a resilience approach, opening the eyes of participants to impact pathways and response options that might otherwise be missed. However, the design setting affected the consequences for action systematically: for example, one case was constrained by donor programmatic objectives, whilst the other was not so constrained but lacked assured funding. Four key lessons indicate that donors need a systematic analysis of project design settings to achieve resilience.