Identifying factors of vulnerability and resilience means looking at vulnerability and resilience factors, including those that are not immediately obvious, but which provide an important insight into what your intervention might impact on.
This tool is most useful at the design stage, but can also be used during implementation. It can be used together with:
1.1 Understanding the VE challenge
1.3 Guiding questions for vulnerability and resilience
1.4 Prioritisation of factors
1.5 Guiding questions for PVE actor mapping
Depending on purpose, a Venn diagram can be used either to deepen and inform a context analysis or to inform a specific intervention. This process has been designed for where a focus for the programme already exists.
This process focuses in on the crux of the VE problem (the triangle in the Venn diagram in Figure 6). It builds on the analytical framework provided in Tool 1.1 Understanding the VE challenge.
Note: A vulnerability factor cannot always be 'flipped' and turned into a resilience factor by making it the opposite and vice versa. For example, if unemployment is a vulnerability factor, employment does not automatically equate to resilience.
Figure 6: VE factors nexus triangle tool
Place each of the relevant factors (either vulnerability or resilience) on the triangle. Unpick how the impact of these factors plays out at individual, social and structural or institutional levels in the context of your programme.
Undertake this process twice: for vulnerability (triangle 1) and for resilience (triangle 2). This helps to avoid seeing vulnerability and resilience as binary opposites, where resilience factors would be characterised as the reverse of vulnerability factors and vice versa.
You can use Tool 1.3 Guiding questions for vulnerability and resilience to guide your discussions.
Do this analysis with partners to build a shared understanding of what you are monitoring and why.
A VE vulnerability triangle might look like this
