Insights into Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning of Community Resilience

Climate change is an immediate and existential threat for countries across the Pacific region, causing significant adverse impacts on communities. As a result of these impacts, there is an increasing scale of investments aiming to strengthen resilience at community level in the Pacific. However, whilst there is a growing field of literature which defines ‘resilience’, there is limited understanding of how best to assess whether resilience is actually being strengthened through the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) practices.

This research explored ways to assess community resilience investments, and approaches to monitor change from the lens of impacted communities.

Drawing from past work funded from the Australia Pacific Climate Partnership, UTS-ISF and ADRA Fiji co-designed research using UTS-ISF's Community Resilience Framework (Gero et al., 2024) for monitoring, evaluation and learning purposes.

The primary objective was to explore community perspectives of resilience in a selected location where ADRA Fiji had recently implemented a project, using the Community Resilience Framework.

The research took a participatory approach to identify how the Community Resilience Framework could support learning about the outcomes of ADRA Fiji’s Project. Research methods involved interviews with diverse community stakeholders, focus group discussions and a transect walk within community. These methods helped the researchers to capture community’s diverse perception of resilience. A community workshop enabled the research team to validate emerging findings with community members and further clarify community perspectives about what resilience means to them. Analysis of data provided valuable insights and an evidence-base on appropriate processes for learning about community resilience.  

The findings of the research will help to inform NGOs in Australia and the Pacific, regional development partners and donors on how to design monitoring and evaluation approaches for climate and disaster resilience investments. The focus on local definitions of, and indicators for, resilience supports the localisation agenda, putting community voices and perspectives at the forefront of climate justice and action.