Last week we opened the 2026 Wax and Gold dialogue series — and something landed.
The series is framed by sem ena werq, the Ethiopian tradition of “wax and gold,” a mode of layered speech where the surface meaning (wax) conceals a deeper truth (gold). In each dialogue, we ask: what is the wax of the dominant conversation, and what gold lies underneath it?
The opening dialogue — Resilience: From Must-Knows to Must-Dos — brought together the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Global Resilience Partnership, the African Climate and Development Initiative, SEEDS India, and Susanne Moser to examine what happens when resilience science meets the ground.
The nine Resilience Must-Knows, distilled from decades of research and cross-regional consultation, were taken seriously — and seriously challenged.
What are they missing? A named commitment to the psychological maturity required to prioritise the common good. A recognition that resilience is never a solo act. And the uncomfortable truth that the communities most expected to be resilient are often the ones most denied the structures that make resilience possible.
Again and again, what appeared was this: resilience lives in the relational space between people, not within them alone. From rotating credit associations running from Cape to Cairo, to Indian communities building Plan Bs from existing capacities to the collective decision of an entire refugee population to go home — what mattered was not individual endurance but collective sense-making, shared story, and the courage to act together.
The wax of resilience science says: here are nine things you must know. The gold beneath it is a harder question: who must act, and what must change in those who hold the most power, before must-knows become must-dos?
👉 Watch the Resilience Must-Knows dialogue on YouTube now.
👉 Read the full dialogue notes
Gerry Salole’s new blog deepens this thread, naming more explicitly what the dialogue circled but didn’t quite land on.
Taking Clifford Geertz’s line that we are animals suspended in webs of significance we ourselves have spun, he asks what happens when those webs no longer match the storms we are trapped in.
The boundaries through which we organise responsibility, voice, and power no longer map onto reality: state vs market, North vs South, donor vs beneficiary, formal vs informal. And those boundaries aren’t just outdated. They are actively maintained – through reporting templates, funding logics, and narratives that keep “capacity” on one side and “need” on the other.
Drawing on Barth’s boundary-work, Chambers’ question of whose reality counts, and the Gramscian challenge of who gets to name the problem, the piece asks: when we call two billion people “informal workers,” whose reality are we describing – and whose are we erasing? The label makes people visible enough to be targeted as a policy problem, but invisible as historical subjects with a voice, a project, a politics.
If the dialogue showed that resilience is collective, Gerry’s blog asks: then why are our boundaries still so wretchedly rigid?