Resilience Realities:Resilience and Development Practice in Vanuatu

This report draws on two weeks of fieldwork undertaken in November 2015. Discussions and interviews were held in communities with different histories of engagement with development organisations, exploring their experiences of Tropical Cyclone Pam and the on-going El Nino event. The findings reflect on themes found in the academic literature to synthesise recommendations for those responsible for development programming and practice. Analysis focuses on four topics: the significance of differences between social groups in determining resilience outcomes; the nature of local resilience among communities with little or no experience of development interventions; the consequences of development actions for local resilience; and the potential of an alternative framing – resourcefulness – to support a transformation in relationships between communities and different government authorities. Key lessons emerge from this analysis. The difficulties of addressing the complex manner in which social difference is produced and reproduced must be a central concern for development practitioners. Without explicit attention to the deep roots of social and cultural difference, resilience interventions will reinforce or exacerbate existing patterns of vulnerability and exclusion. This remains the case even when participatory approaches such as village development or disaster risk committees are adopted as a mechanism to secure representation of different social groups. In communities that are isolated from development assistance, local resilience is underpinned by intricately woven and diverse livelihood practices and supported by the ability to capitalise on relationships with actors at other scales. There are, however, important limitations to local resilience, much of which is wrapped up in the marginalisation of communities from outside support and formal institutions of government. Deeply pernicious forms of resilience are also in evidence, in particular in practices of gender-based violence and ostracism of women from other islands. These issues must move higher up the development agenda if resilience programming is to lead to equitable improvements in wellbeing. At the same time, the fieldwork evidence suggests that interventions can undermine local resilience and develop dependency on NGOs as sources of resources, knowledge and skills. NGOs need to develop strategies that gradually build effective and supportive relationships between communities and different levels of government as part of a long term exit strategy. Finally, the report considers the potential shortcomings of resilience as a framing for development. In development programming and practice, resilience is associated with other frameworks in order to address issues of power and equity. This reflects the neutrality of resilience; it is a concept that has the potential to challenge inequality but is not inherently anti-poverty. As such, adopting a resilience discourse carries a risk, as resilience can and has been taken up by policy makers to justify the continued marginalisation of poor communities from government support. In programming terms, there is cause for significant concern that the weaknesses of resilience overlap with longstanding weaknesses in development practice in supporting communities to challenge resource distribution and the iniquitous effects of public policy. The report closes by proposing an alternative framing – resourcefulness – as an important counterpoint to resilience programming. Resourcefulness aims to support local people to engage in processes that lead to changes that are locally conceived and locally felt. The central concern is with practical support to secure a more equitable share of resources, via a framing that was found to resonate with the interests and priorities expressed by communities during fieldwork

Adaptation and Resilience in Vanuatu

The report documents findings from fieldwork in Vanuatu undertaken during November 2014. The intention is to contextualise the resilience building work of the Vanuatu NGO Climate Change Adaptation Program within themes that have emerged within the academic literature on climate change adaptation and resilience, and on community-based adaptation in particular. These themes challenge those concerned with adaptation to think more critically about the nature of communities, and to explore how power and politics at different scales (from the local to the global) influence the opportunities for and constraints on adaptation for different members of a community. The resilience perspective pushes understanding of adaptation further, inviting systematic consideration of how programming can address not only climate change impacts, but also how agency and structure can be addressed to empower vulnerable groups in the face of climate change. The findings draw attention to how vulnerability is defined by multiple interconnected issues that have different significance in the lives of different community members, each of whom have their own perceptions of risk and access to opportunities. While relationships defined by power and cultural norms shape how local risks are understood, prioritised and managed in adaptation decision making processes, a focus on equitable decision making can support the emergence of adaptive capacity that is the basis for future adaptive actions that benefit the whole community. Adaptive capacity also demands opportunities for local people to build their technical and decision making capacities and relationships with external actors. While this is increasingly understood by the agencies working within the Vanuatu NGO Climate Change Adaptation Program at the level of rhetoric, it remains for a deeper change in perspective to develop. It will take a significant investment of time if NGOs are to step back and restrict themselves to facilitating community access to information and knowledge as a precursor to informing their own processes of decision making. For the most part, structural issues, which fundamentally limit adaptation and development choices, remain in the background to the projects studied during the fieldwork. The baseline assessments that underpin community-based adaptation must take account of structural issues at multiple scales, and establish whether support for more equitable social, cultural or political change is a necessary part of action on adaptation. Taken together, this analysis supports the intention of the program to shift community-based adaptation away from its comfort zone. However, agencies will need to work hard to push beyond the familiar focus on climate change impacts and capacity building that supports individual agency, and towards actions that link agency and structure through support for broad-based coalitions for change. In support of this goal, rights-based strategies are proposed to address structural constraints on adaptive capacity. By exploring the mechanisms that underpin marginalisation and exclusion, rights-based approaches enable development actors to support vulnerable communities in seeking reform via social and political processes or through appeal to legal or administrative systems

swTVM: Exploring the Automated Compilation for Deep Learning on Sunway Architecture

The flourish of deep learning frameworks and hardware platforms has been demanding an efficient compiler that can shield the diversity in both software and hardware in order to provide application portability. Among the exiting deep learning compilers, TVM is well known for its efficiency in code generation and optimization across diverse hardware devices. In the meanwhile, the Sunway many-core processor renders itself as a competitive candidate for its attractive computational power in both scientific and deep learning applications. This paper combines the trends in these two directions. Specifically, we propose swTVM that extends the original TVM to support ahead-of-time compilation for architecture requiring cross-compilation such as Sunway. In addition, we leverage the architecture features during the compilation such as core group for massive parallelism, DMA for high bandwidth memory transfer and local device memory for data locality, in order to generate efficient code for deep learning application on Sunway. The experimental results show the ability of swTVM to automatically generate code for various deep neural network models on Sunway. The performance of automatically generated code for AlexNet and VGG-19 by swTVM achieves 6.71x and 2.45x speedup on average than hand-optimized OpenACC implementations on convolution and fully connected layers respectively. This work is the first attempt from the compiler perspective to bridge the gap of deep learning and high performance architecture particularly with productivity and efficiency in mind. We would like to open source the implementation so that more people can embrace the power of deep learning compiler and Sunway many-core processor

International Synergies to Address Climate Change: Participatory Community Organizing in Toronto and the Baixada Fluminense, Brazil

This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant numbe

The New Building on the Block

Members of the Building Committee relied on the expertise and input from faculty and staff to use the building\u27s design and architecture to enhance the School of Law\u27s sense of community

Variation in perception of environmental changes in nine Solomon Islands communities : implications for securing fairness in community-based adaptation

Community-based approaches are pursued in recognition of the need for place-based responses to environmental change that integrate local understandings of risk and vulnerability. Yet the potential for fair adaptation is intimately linked to how variations in perceptions of environmental change and risk are treated. There is, however, little empirical evidence of the extent and nature of variations in risk perception in and between multiple community settings. Here, we rely on data from 231 semi-structured interviews conducted in nine communities in Western Province, Solomon Islands, to statistically model differential perceptions of risk and change within and between communities. Overall, people were found to be less likely to perceive environmental changes in the marine environment than they were for terrestrial systems. The distance to the nearest market town (which may be a proxy for exposure to commercial logging and degree of involvement with the market economy) and gender had the greatest overall statistical effects on perceptions of risk. Yet, we also find that significant environmental change is under reported in communities, while variations in perception are not always easily related to commonly assumed fault lines of vulnerability. The findings suggest that there is an urgent need for methods that engage with the drivers of perceptions as part of community-based approaches. In particular, it is important to explicitly account for place, complexity and diversity of environmental risk perceptions, and we reinforce calls to engage seriously with underlying questions of power, culture, identity and practice that influence adaptive capacity and risk perception

Creatures of Play

This thesis explores my practice as an artist and my work’s cultural, theoretical and social contexts, such carnival theory, feminist studies and film studies, as well as references to mythology and my own biography. I discuss forms of representation of gendered identities through my work in drawing, performance, animation, video and installation. The masks we wear become as real as our bare face. Through the act of doubling the representation, my thesis work BECOMING/a fine line situates the mask as the mediator between reflections, mirroring the identity and the notion of performativity. Embracing a certain incompleteness and embodying the theoretical idea of becoming, my work relies on the ill-defined and immediate drawing quality to reflect the perpetually unrealized performance of a stable and fixed identity