Climate extremes and longer‐term climate change impacts threaten the achievement of development goals (Damania et al., 2017; IBRD, 2018). In 2030, up to 319 million extremely poor people will be living in the 45 countries most exposed to floods, droughts and heat extremes (Shepherd et al., 2013). According to the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on 1.5°C global warming, a 2°C increase in temperature will double 1 the number of people exposed to drought through water stress (IPCC, 2018). To eradicate extreme poverty by 2030, development cooperation and domestic action in the developing world is increasingly concerned with building resilience to these climate hazards (SDG Goal 1.5). Amid lively critical debates, the resilience‐building agenda has sparked a proliferation of projects in recent years. Resilience programmes are being implemented in some of the most climate‐vulnerable, institutionally fragile and unstable settings around the world. Often, they focus on improving people's access to climate and weather information, resources or markets, helping them plan ahead and navigate environmental change and uncertainty in the future. Importantly, resilience‐building is anticipated to give greater agency to vulnerable people and produce more co‐benefits or ‘dividends’ than conventional international development approaches (Rodin, 2014; Tanner et al., 2015a, 2015b; Bond et al., 2017; Cabot Venton, 2018; Cabot Venton et al., 2012). Building resilience from the ground up is critical because of the context‐specific nature of climate change and disaster impacts and the need to ensure the engagement of vulnerable groups. The five‐year, £100m UK Department for International Development (DFID) programme on Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) is one example of this intervention logic. Alongside the implementation of 15 projects in 13 countries, research and monitoring and evaluation, knowledge‐sharing activities that have taken place under BRACED present a unique opportunity to learn about how poor people and communities deal with climate shocks and other hazards in different contexts, their vulnerabilities and the kinds of interventions that can help strengthen their resilience. Similarly, the Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme funded by DFID for five years to provide technical and financial support to governments across five South Asian countries had a lesson‐learning function to share experiences and knowledge across the programme and with the outside world. This special issue of Disasters reflects on resilience‐building supported via BRACED and ACT in some of the world's most climate‐vulnerable countries and contexts. These programmes have focused on scaling up action to build resilience, 2 principally through the expansion and replication of good practices by influencing government policies, plans and investments. The papers provide insights that are each grounded in different contexts and understandings of local realities and the factors that support and undermine people's resilience. The BRACED articles emphasise the importance of this ground‐level engagement. They also highlight a range of different opportunities for intervening in the broader social structures and decision‐making processes that shape these local realities. The focus of the ACT article is explicitly and exclusively concerned with national and local government policy‐making and how this can be influenced. Each of the seven papers selected for this special issue was written by teams of researchers and practitioners engaged in the BRACED and ACT programmes, based in the Global South and North in a range of country contexts from the Sahel to Southeast Asia. Each brings a different perspective on the significance and operationalisation of efforts to build resilience to climate extremes and disasters. The contributing authors describe resilience‐building at different scales, for different types of projects and interventions: from gender‐differentiated perspectives within households in Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and Chad (Le Masson et al., 2019; McOmber et al., 2019), to devolved community planning and financing in Mali and Senegal (Beauchamp et al., 2019); from sector‐wide agricultural extension support in Sudan (Young and Ismail, 2019), to early warning systems in Ethiopia and Nicaragua (Ewbank et al., 2019), national social protection programmes in Ethiopia (Ulrichs et al., 2019) and advocacy for mainstreaming into government policy in South Asia (Tanner et al., 2019). It is important to understand that the projects of the BRACED and ACT programmes, which inspired the articles in this special issue, did not and could not invest in long‐term studies of the kind that could test the hypotheses of the resilience‐building programmes – that, through these sets of interventions, people's resilience could be enhanced and hence the negative impact of climate extremes and longer‐term climate change be reduced. This was because of the brief implementation time frames of both programmes. This is a common challenge with project‐based interventions, where the assessment of potential impacts needs to be done simultaneously with the investments intended to achieve these impacts. As such, these articles are not based on routine evidence of results produced through monitoring, learning and evaluation activities, but rather are selected expert reflections on the projects. They are intended for scientific peer review and journal publication, not project evaluation. The articles present rich and detailed descriptions and reflections from their respective fields and contexts, which we do not exhaustively or definitively summarise in this overview. Rather, this overview paper aims to gently pique the curiosity of readers, and to reflect briefly on the critical questions that the articles help address, which have hereto remain largely unresolved in resilience debates. We select and draw out insights from this special issue that feed into these debates, and highlight their significance for the wider community of humanitarian and development practitioners. Following a brief overview of how the term ‘resilience’ is being used in each of the articles, we then examine how each has approached the challenge of understanding and measuring bottom‐up interventions. We consider the multiple benefits or resilience dividends that make some of these projects unique, and reflect on what the authors consider are the prospects for effecting deeper structural, or transformative changes.