Goal 3

Strive for risk-informed development

Overview

For GNDR, risk-informed development is about prioritising risks faced by communities living in the most vulnerable situations, and taking account of these risks when designing and delivering development plans and actions.

A risk-informed approach from the perspective of people most at risk enables more sustainable and resilient development and challenges everyone involved to recognise that development choices create risk as well as opportunity.

Sustainable development can only be achieved when local risk is fully understood. Risk is potential for adverse impacts on the lives, livelihoods and assets of people. And levels of risk are determined by the threats people face, their vulnerability, and their capacities.

When development is not risk-informed, communities report that far from offering progress, this so called ‘development’ is actually creating risk, increasing existing risk and wiping out any potential gains.

Critical to understanding and assessing the complex threats and risks, challenges and opportunities, uncertainties and options faced by communities most at risk, is the need to partner with those people who are most at risk. Where these partnerships happen, the need for coherence among sectors and policies is clear, especially in crisis or post-crisis contexts: violence, hazards and political instability are all part of the same equation for communities living in vulnerable circumstances.

If we understand the need for humanitarian action as a failure of development, a stronger integration of development, humanitarian, peace-building policies, actions and actors is required.

Further understanding and implementation of the triple nexus approach is essential to achieve sustainable development which is risk-informed and builds the resilience of people most at risk.

Through a range of member-led activities, GNDR is ideally placed to ensure that local knowledge, expertise and realities are contributing to the development plans of all actors, including government, international institutions and the private sector, so that policies and practices are more risk-informed.

Even in one location, a community can face a diversity of needs and risks. Those needs and the means to reduce risk are all connected.

This challenge is not just locally, but also nationally and internationally.

Governments have committed to implementing a range of international frameworks and, taken together, they reflect the range of risks and needs of a community. But often these frameworks lack coherence at the local level and are implemented in isolation, by different government departments. This not only creates inefficiencies and the potential to reduce, rather than build resilience, but also misses the connections between these needs and the underlying causes of risk.