Adapting and validating a subjective resilience scale to explore individual climate resilience: gendered evidence from Bhutan, Laos and Nepal

Growing evidence has highlighted the gender differentiated experiences of climate change on individuals, even within the same households. Understanding and tracking these differential experiences requires reliable tools that measure subjective resilience. Yet there are few validated tools that can operate across sectoral contexts. In this paper, we describe the process of adapting and validating a scale to measure individual climate resilience with reference to four climate events (floods, drought, landslides and severe storms) with specific emphasis on intra-household differences. The tool was adapted from the Subjective Self-Evaluated Resilience Score and piloted during 2022 in Bhutan, Lao PDR, and Nepal (n = 2,406) leading to a reliable six-item scale (omegaT = 0.90–0.96). In nearly all geographies, there were statistically different resilience scores between women and men and only low agreement between spousal-dyad pairs. These results call into question household-level measurement approaches and confirm the importance of a focus on individuals. As development researchers and practitioners aim to understand the impact of their programs in the context of climate change and intra-household variation, this short scale offers a reliable option to measure resilience at the individual rather than household level.