Summary of key findings and policy recommendations
There is a global recognition within the development and humanitarian spheres of the promising linkages between social protection, disaster risk management (DRM), climate change adaptation, resilience, and humanitarian action in responding to shocks, including seasonal shocks.
This recognition has been clearly expressed, for example, at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit in SPIAC-B’s commitment to ‘support the further expansion and strengthening of social protection systems to continue to address chronic vulnerabilities and to scale up the utilisation of social protection as a means of responding to shocks and protracted crises’. Likewise, the Agenda for Humanity advocates for a shift from disproportionate focus on crisis management and response toward investing in crisis prevention and building up community resilience, moving from delivering to ending needs. Moreover, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development clearly points toward the creation of social protection systems that allow all people to enjoy basic standards of living.
In addition, this global recognition is supported by recent experiences in the use of social protection in emergency response in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and is buttressed by extensive research and debate. Social protection systems are intrinsically related to shock response. Social protection has conceptually and empirically been linked to shock response in LAC, both in relation to covariate shocks, like the Tequila Crisis in 1994 and the global financial crisis in 2008, which propagated the growth of cash transfer programmes, and to idiosyncratic shocks like unemployment, work accidents, and others. However, social protection systems can involve conflicting objectives, target populations, and operational processes when compared with humanitarian interventions. This can impede their ability to play a role in accommodating additional demand for assistance at the time of an emergency.
The objective of this study is to generate evidence and inform practice for improved emergency preparedness and response in LAC, linked to more flexible national social protection systems. The focus is on national social protection systems, although some findings also apply to civil protection actors and international humanitarian partners who complement and support national efforts in LAC. The study aims to contribute to further integration of humanitarian and development actions and raise commitment and awareness of the humanitarian– development nexus. The main research question for the study is: ‘What factors enable social protection systems to be more responsive to shocks?’ .