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The resilience concept requires greater attention to human livelihoods if it is to address the limits to adaptation strategies and the development needs of the planet's poorest and most vulnerable people. Although the concept of resilience is increasingly informing research and policy, its transfer from ecological theory to social systems leads to weak engagement with normative, social and political dimensions of climate change adaptation. A livelihood perspective helps to strengthen resilience thinking by placing greater emphasis on human needs and their agency, empowerment and human rights, and considering adaptive livelihood systems in the context of wider transformational changes.

Resilience has become a popular research and policy concept within climate change adaptation and development contexts¹. Emerging from a wide range of disciplines², resilience in policy-making has often been based on the ability of systems to bounce back to normality, drawing on engineering concepts³. This implies the return of the functions of an individual, household, community or ecosystem to previous conditions, with as little damage and disruption as possible following shocks and stresses. This stable-equilibrium view has been challenged by research on linked social–ecological systems, which emphasizes nonlinear change, the inevitability of uncertainty and surprise (which may destabilize attempts to manage the capacity of systems to cope with change), and interrelationships and dynamism of multiple cross-scale systems⁴. Crucially, resilience is increasingly providing an integrative 'boundary concept' that brings together those interested in tackling a range of shocks and stresses, including food security, social protection, conflict and disasters⁵.

This Perspective argues that linking aspects of human agency, rights and transformation with livelihood approaches can help to overcome the challenges of using resilience thinking in order to inform improved climate change adaptation research on the issue of highest normative priority — human livelihoods.

Applying the concept of resilience to climate change adaptation raises complex challenges. Climate change is not exclusively an environmental problem that can be addressed purely in scientific, managerial or technical ways. Climate change is also crucially a conundrum of politics and justice, with unequal contributions to the problem globally, disproportionate impacts on future generations, marginalized groups and poorer citizens (whose poverty may itself be the result of historical inequities) and asymmetries in decision-making power to determine appropriate responses⁶.

The concept of resilience requires strengthening in three main ways. First, we need to recognize its contested nature. When considering resilience as an 'end', it cannot be assumed that there is consensus around the nature of 'desired states'. Resilience is contingent on social values regarding what we deem important and how we ought to allocate resources to foster it⁷. People may be perpetually locked into resilient but undesirable states of poverty and marginality. Instead, we need to ask, “Resilience of what type, and for whom?” and then consider who decides, and on the basis of what value systems^{8, 9}.

Second, we need to understand how values and ideologies translate into the activities and institutions that characterize the political economy of climate change resilience^{10, 11}. For example, resilience studies concerned with ecosystem services for human well-being need to focus more on whose needs are being met, and on the politics of ecosystem management and distribution of benefits¹². This enables us to engage directly with power relations, differentiated access to resources, and issues of inequality that might otherwise be lost in resilience approaches¹³. In particular, there are trade-offs in which the resilience of some people's livelihoods may result in the increased vulnerability of others' (for example, through downstream impacts of flood protection measures¹⁴). These questions help to bring normative issues to the fore, and emphasize the distributional and political dimensions of the response options available to different actors⁹.

Third, although climate change impacts manifest through local ecosystems, the focus of resilience thinking on 'natural' systems may lose sight of the people inhabiting these ecosystems, and their differentiated vulnerability and capacities to adapt to change. Both disturbances and responses are determined by levels of on-the-ground social inequality, rights and unequal access to resources, poverty, poor infrastructure, lack of representation, and inadequate systems of social protection, planning and risk management. The unevenness of these factors translates climatic fluctuations into disproportionate concentrations of suffering and loss¹⁵.

Much work on resilience therefore pays insufficient attention to fundamental issues of human agency and empowerment, including politics and power relations, ideologies, risk perception and the diversity of cultural values, as well as capacities for human (rather than environmental) transformation that lie at the heart of adaptation¹⁶. We argue that livelihood perspectives can usefully address some of these challenges. In doing so, we move resilience approaches beyond the predominantly scientific and technical discourses that lack resonance with the daily practices of ordinary people¹⁷.

In responding to recent calls for a social and political turn in resilience thinking^{18, 19, 20, 21}, we define livelihood resilience as the capacity of all people across generations to sustain and improve their livelihood opportunities and well-being despite environmental, economic, social and political disturbances. Such resilience is underpinned by human agency and empowerment, by individual and collective action, and by human rights, set within dynamic processes of social transformation. This approach takes the additional step of integrating livelihoods and resilience^{22, 23} with a normative framing, centred on people as the main actors within adaptation policy and practice, underpinned by rights and justice, and engaged with wider development processes.

Climate change and associated stressors influence human development through their support or destabilization of the livelihood systems of the poorest and most vulnerable people. Consequently, there is a human imperative to frame research and practice on climate change around livelihoods. A livelihood is understood to comprise “the capabilities, assets (stores, resources, claims and access) and activities required for a means of living”²⁴. Within the field of development, the concept of livelihoods has drawn from diverse origins to evolve into a more coherent set of ideas during the past two decades. The development of a 'sustainable livelihoods framework' accelerated the extension of livelihoods research into the worlds of policy and practice. This framework was developed for use by international agencies to guide programmes for poverty alleviation by situating household livelihood assets within wider sets of ecosystems, cultural contexts and policies that promote or hinder access to these diverse resource inputs^{25, 26}. Crucially, a livelihood perspective places people at the centre of the analysis, located within, rather than dominated by, ecosystems, technologies, political contexts, markets and resource networks.

Livelihood resilience therefore highlights the role of human agency, and our individual and collective capacity to respond to stressors. People and their lives are too often reduced to homogenized vulnerable communities or countries, becoming merely 'resilient pixels'²¹. Even in discussions of agency, human responses to environmental change are too often expressed as generalized inputs within prescriptions for resilience^{27, 28}. In contrast, a livelihood resilience approach emphasizes people's capacity for, and differences in, perceiving risk and taking anticipatory actions, either individually or collectively. Information and resource flows through social networks (as understood in theories of social capital) are vital inputs to resilience, providing informal insurance, and delivering accessible financial, physical and logistical support in the midst of environmental disturbances²⁹. Modelling such agency and behaviour remains a critical challenge³⁰.

A livelihood resilience lens also incorporates a human rights perspective into resilience thinking. Human rights principles are based on the fundamental freedoms inherent in human dignity. These rights are translated into entitlements that transcend the sovereignty of nation state governments³¹. Articulating universal principles guaranteeing the right to food, housing, health and property — all critical to human dignity — and incorporating these into a resilience approach establishes a normative and legal basis for defining, measuring and promoting 'desirable states' in livelihood systems. A human rights framework also prioritizes the harm caused by climate-induced environmental change and creates a moral and legal obligation to respond, including through anticipatory adaptive measures.

By prioritizing the freedoms and entitlements explicitly outlined in human rights as a foundation for adaptation, livelihood resilience also emphasizes the fundamental obligation of governments to protect and support their citizens' development. Reframing resilience in terms of rights places a duty on nation states to improve the living conditions of poor people living in vulnerable situations. Where nation states do not have the resources or capacities to protect the rights of their citizens, then a human rights perspective requires a focus on building the capacity of a nation state to meet its obligations to its citizens³². This includes the enactment of legislation to regulate and control private sector and other actors from committing human rights violations, and also to define access to basic necessities, such as housing and healthcare.

Rights-based approaches to development popularized in recent decades have drawn on these rights framings, but have also emphasized advocacy activities to secure wider popular participation in formal and informal decision-making processes, and the deepening of democratic engagements with governmental processes. They have focused on empowerment of the most marginalized people and given greater attention to diversity and difference in relation to gender, ethnicity, culture and age³³. Such approaches have linked individual and community empowerment with advocacy for human rights protections.

The right to self-determination provides an opportunity for the qualities and dimensions of resilience to be informed or determined by individuals and communities themselves (see Box 1 for examples in practice). Linking livelihoods and self-determination in this way also highlights the importance of empowering people so that they can develop political influence and relationships with local government in order to access the resources they need to adapt to climate change impacts³⁴. This cross-scale incorporation of human rights protections into the concept of livelihood resilience can thus challenge longstanding power structures and weak governance that reproduce vulnerability, rather than conceptualizing resilience as absolving states and the international community from duties around environmental impacts^{35, 36, 37}.

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