Palestine Resilience Conference 2016 - From Sumud to Transformative Resilience

The First Palestine Resilience Conference (PRC) 2016 – From Sumud to Transformative Resilience will be held on 24-25 November 2016 at the InterContinental Hotel in Amman, Jordan. Organized jointly by the Government of Palestine and the United Nations Development Programme/Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People (UNDP/PAPP), the Conference will provide the space where practitioners, donors, government actors, non-government actors, and the private sector will meet to think-plan-deliver on how to influence resilience-based programming across the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt).

What is the Palestine Resilience Conference

After almost 50 years of protracted occupation, limited developmental progress, socio-economic stagnation or deterioration, and political deadlock, donors and other stakeholders have been questioning the efficacy of the current aid paradigm and its applicability to the State of Palestine, where a unique situation of recurrent humanitarian crises and urgent development needs, sometimes termed as ‘de-development,’ persist. The First Palestine Resilience Conference (PRC) 2016 will address key questions and concerns of various stakeholders including whether there is another way to more effectively deliver humanitarian and development interventions that result in real on the ground change and empower individuals, communities, and institutions to become less vulnerable to shocks? The conference will also seek to review and reinvigorate the Palestinian resilience conceptual, programmatic, operational, as well as policy framework.Through the conference, key actors will address the below questions:

1. What is resilience- theory and practice?
2. How can resilience-based approaches support the Palestinian project of self-determination against Israeli occupation and siege?
3. How can resilience be built and integrated into existing aid policy and programming?
4. How can we measure the impact of resilience-based aid programming?
5. How does resilience thinking relate to the Palestinian narrative of Sumud (steadfastness)? What are the links and how to harness them for concrete solutions for Palestinians?

The conference will act as a starting point for change. Resilience-based strategizing holds the promise of bringing together a pool of stakeholders to think-plan-deliver effectively and efficiently to reduce the vulnerability of the Palestinian population. Donors and other key stakeholders now must make long-term commitments to resilience-based programming, policies, decisions and advocacy in order to see real change. Transformative resilience, anchored in Sumud, provides a real national connection to the overarching concept of resilience, and a lens through which Palestinian and international resilience actors can act in a transformative manner. We hope that the collective learning, open dialogue, and knowledge sharing from this conference will help us to develop a new map for aid, utilising the framework of transformative resilience.

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