Working Paper 1: Conceptualising shock-responsive social protection

The Shock-Responsive Social Protection Systems study is a two-year, £1 million research programme led by Oxford Policy Management (OPM), in consortium with the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), the the CALP Network and INASP, and funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

This is the first in a series of papers from the ongoing research.  Together, the set of papers will develop theoretical perspectives about the interface between social protection, humanitarian assistance and disaster risk management (DRM), review the latest literature and generate insights from new case studies across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

This study presents the latest thinking on the concept of ‘shock-responsive social protection’, and explain how this shapes the direction of our research. It starts with an overview of the understanding of shocks in the context of this study. New  typologies of the maturity of social protection systems are introduced  and the different ways in which a social protection system, designed primarily to support households in chronic difficulty, might be able to be used in the event of a humanitarian disaster is discussed.

Finally the research considers how social protection, humanitarian and DRM systems are connected, and the challenges there might be in linking them as well as the implications of the context of fragility and conflict for shock-responsive social protection