Ten years ago, the concept of resilience was totally absent from the communications of the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO). Since, ECHO has progressively introduced the word in its official documents and seems now to consider resilience as one of the generic concepts needed to summarize its action.Projects as "Supporting Horn of Africa’s Resilience" or communication as "The EU Approach to Resilience: Learning from Food Security Crises" are good illustrations of this recent evolution.
By having a close look at how ECHO has spread the concept in its different activities (publications, funding, official events) and the definitions that are associated to it, it appears that the use of the concept of resilience -and the debate that follows it- displays the will of this institution to gain better recognition in the field of the public policies, in which its own legitimacy remains for now weak.
ECHO follows a general trend initiated by the United Nation Office for Disaster Reduction and the NGOs specialized in humanitarian help, that promoted first the concept of resilience in order to gain better recognition of their work, and to advocate for an increase of their role that would be then not only connected to crisis intervention but also to prevention and development policies.
Therefore, if the value of resilience as a new paradigm can be discussed, it shows a new strategy elaborated by these organizations to be more included in public policy elaboration processes.
