10 things you wish you’d always known about shock-responsive social protection

Improving the ‘shock-responsiveness’ of social protection—in other words, its relevance to large-scale natural, economic and political shocks—is an alluring concept. If you’re a social protection practitioner, you may be hoping to find a way both to improve the ability of social protection programmes to accommodate needs of any scale, and to enhance their coherence with emergency response activities where such interventions remain necessary. If you work in emergency response, including in government agencies, this policy agenda opens another possible route to mitigating and responding to the risk of disasters. If you are in an international humanitarian agency, this agenda may appeal because you hope to transfer part of your caseload to the government or its partners so that you can focus on other emergencies; or maybe, in contrast, you hope to channel more funds labelled as ‘humanitarian’ into a nationally led system or extend your influence into the development sphere. Everyone hopes that ‘shock-responsive social protection’ will produce better results for people in crises, and that it will also save themselves time and energy.

What is this magical idea? Can this recently named (but long practised) approach achieve all these outcomes? Is the gold standard the ‘flexible scale-up’ of a social protection programme, triggered by an emergency, or is there more to it than that?