Resources & Approaches

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ActionAid's Resilience Framework is a core starting point for climate justice programming, bringing three elements together: absorptive capacity (the ability to prevent, prepare for or mitigate the effects of negative events, through coping mechanisms), adaptive capacity (the ability for longer-term change e.g. to diversify livelihoods, adopt new farming techniques or adapt curriculums for health professionals) and transformative capacity (when the change needed goes beyond people’s absorptive and adaptive abilities and system change is required. There is a related Resilience Handbook to tools and resources to help people to think, plan and implement work in a way that supports the reduction of people’s vulnerability, and contributes to the building of their resilience to a range of hazards, shocks, stresses and threats.

This resource guides communities to do a participatory assessment of economic and non-economic losses and damages caused by the climate crisis. It includes participatory guidance on understanding climate change trends, mapping risks, using calendars to track seasonal changes, identifying vulnerable households, tracking wider impacts, calculating loss and damage and taking action to avoid or reduce future disasters and losses. It also shows how communities can provide clear information and advocate to local and national authorities to demand relief, support or compensation based on the local assessments – and how this can contribute to demands from the international community.

The handbook has been developed to serve as a guide for designing and implementing sustainable agriculture programmes on the ground. It includes detail for doing a participatory appraisal of present agriculture, to identify the challenges that the community is facing, the alternatives they have been building, and potentialities. This leads to community prioritisation of actions and alternatives they want to test. It also offers guidance on processes to document local knowledge around sustainable practices / alternatives and processes to monitor and evaluate local testing of alternatives.

This resource provides resilience programming frameworks for the four most common hazards: flood, cyclone, earthquake and drought. Various participatory tools help communities to: identify disaster risks through hazard mapping; understand and document the nature of their impact on the community; analyse the drivers of risk and their vulnerability; identify critical gaps in local infrastructure; and demand equitable rights

They are useful for practitioners to implement more effective and integrated resilience programmes, that cut across different fields of work like livelihoods, education, health, whilst promoting work at different levels: individuals, household, community and national.

This toolkit aims to support ActionAid Country Programmes and Local Rights Programmes (LRPs) to score people’s resilience, at the local level. It measures both women’s and men’s resilience, so that we can identify any differences that exist in terms of resilience to disaster risks.  This includes guidance on doing a household survey to collect data against 36 indicators under 4 categories: Economic, Infrastructure, Social, Institutional. This is followed by interviews with key informants and separate focus group discussions with women and men. The outcomes can be used to identify areas that need to be strengthened and to support advocacy for positive change to build women’s and community resilience at the local level

Tool to assist assessments of the public financing for agriculture, with a focus on identifying the current levels of support, investment and commitment to agroecological transitions and climate resilient and gender-responsive agricultural practices which benefit smallholder farmers. Produced by the ActionAid-convened Partnership for Social Accountability the tool helps analysts and activists answer the question: to what extent is current public financing for agriculture supportive of a transition to agroecology?

This resource highlights how participatory methods and a feminist perspective are important for how we conduct research. It stresses that ‘People-centred evidence gathering with womxn and young people at the core, collectively analysed with knowledge from in and outside the organisation, can enable multiple power shifts’. This is usually achieved through the consistent use of empowering feminist methodologies, approaches and processes; the application of ActionAid’s brand; and an ideological feminist foundation and analysis.

This provides useful guidelines and methods to have research at local level actively led by girls – with some practical examples of Building Power Together.

These modules help to build understanding on how we can build evidence and action on unpaid care and domestic work – arguing for recognition, reduction, redistribution and representation. There are many participatory tools that have been developed to track and analyse unpaid care – to ‘make care visible’ – including for example by using time use diaries.  There are also some useful Guiding principles and minimum standards on unpaid care and domestic work.

There are four volumes of resources on advancing feminist economic alternatives to secure rights, justice and autonomy for women and a fair, green, gender-equal world. These resources shines a light on some of the multitude of feminist economic alternatives that exist demonstrating their huge value and providing inspiration and practical examples. 

A series of resources and tools available online for deepening analysis and action by young people on themes including climate justice, democratic governance, education, feminism, food and land rights, humanitarian action, LGBTQI+, and social movements.