GRAID

There is a rising recognition of the need to integrate resilience as a core strategy of development actions across multiple sectors, scales and regions. This recognition stems from the dual challenge of increased social and environmental turbulence in an increasingly globalized world. As we grapple with the urgency of meeting the development needs of the poor and vulnerable while maintaining our planetary life support systems – a critical foundation for human wellbeing – resilience emerges as a key approach towards sustainability.

To enhance the integration between development and resilience thinking, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) granted 107 million SEK to the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2015. This funding is expected to strengthen the centre’s efforts to locate potentials, synergies and barriers between resilience and international development policies and practices. The money is sanctioned under GRAID. This programme will generate the latest knowledge on resilience thinking, synthesize and employ insights to assess and build resilience in the context of development across Global South.

A strategic knowledge partner
GRAID is designed as a place-based research around the world, building on the SRC-hosted Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS), and its priority regions include the Sahel, Horn of Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. The project is in partnership with Stellenbosch University, South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Researchers and Southern African Program on Ecosystem Change and Society (SAPECS).

GRAID will act as a strategic knowledge partner to the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP), convened jointly by The Rockefeller Foundation, USAID and SIDA. In 2014, the three organisations created the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP), with aims to identify and scale locally driven, high-impact, innovative solutions in order to build resilience for hundreds of millions of people in the Sahel, Horn of Africa, and South and Southeast Asia.

Belinda Reyers, a long-time affiliate of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and an extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, is the director of the GRAID programme.

Goals and modules
GRAID has three strategic goals, which contribute to the GRP and beyond:
1. To provide strategic support, build capacity and operate as a knowledge contributor to the GRP
2. To develop methods, practice and actionable tools for integrating resilience into development at the local as well as global scales.
3. To further develop a resilience framework, including its underlying principles, theories, practices and offer empirical evidence, based on ground-level experiences and insights from the GRP and its implementing partners.

GRAID supports the GRP through three modules:
Module 1 develops a resilience framework by generating knowledge and synthesizing it, with a focus on different approaches, metrics, models, and data.

Module 2 provides methodologies and training for assessing and building resilience in the targeted regions of the Sahel, Horn of Africa and South and Southeast Asia.

Module 3 focuses on policy and communication to increase the awareness of how to incorporate resilience thinking into development investments.