Promoting Resilience in the Practice of Humanitarian Assistance: Practitioners’ Perspectives on Challenges and Implications

While the promotion of resilience has emerged as a major agenda in recent academic debates on humanitarian crises, on-the-ground practices often reflect a shallow adoption of the concept. This article examines challenges faced by field practitioners in applying resilience-based approaches in humanitarian assistance, focusing on three areas: the longitudinal approach, the assessment of local needs, and the empowerment of marginalized groups. These issues are contextualized through the post-tsunami recovery process in Aceh, Indonesia (2004–2005) and the testimonials of practitioners who attempted to adopt resilience-oriented approaches. It argues that the adoption of resilience concepts has been complicated mainly due to two challenges: the unique contexts of humanitarian crises and the perceptual inertia of practitioners. While these may appear as practical constraints, the article contends they reflect a more fundamental challenge: the difficulty that humanitarian agencies face in shifting to a new paradigm of humanitarianism, which academic studies must more fully recognize and address.