This report presents the discussions and recommendations emerging from an international workshop on “Making Social Protection Work for Pro-poor Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation”, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on March 14–17, 2011 and organised by the World Bank, in collaboration with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
The workshop brought together policy makers, practitioners and researchers from three fields of expertise that normally operate in separate but parallel systems: disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation (CCA) and social protection (SP). The workshop had two core objectives: 1) to better understand how social protection can be used to strengthen the poor’s resilience to climate and natural disaster risk in developing countries; and 2) to create a forum for cross-regional learning about good practice for realising the potential synergies between SP, DRR and CCA.
Recommendations:
- Integration is a big part of the way forward. Integrating SP, DRR and CCA more comprehensively may not be easy, but the insights they can gain collectively promise to be more effective at reducing vulnerability than working in isolation. This integration is not about finding a wholly new system, but is about sharing knowledge and bringing flexibility into the design of existing programmes. What is needed, therefore, is to draw on existing institutional arrangements and use those institutional mechanisms that have been developed over years to build flexibility into programmes.
- Recognise where integration is already occurring and learn from it. There is a growing body of operational pilots and national-level programmes moving toward the operational integration of SP, CCA and DRR. While not yet reflected widely in published literature, they confirm the existence of an empirical rich knowledge among experts, policy makers/analysts and practitioners on the ways to integrate SP, CCA and DRR.
- Use a human-centred approach. In order to be effective, greater integration will have to engage more fully with the perspectives, priorities and capacities of poor people. Not enough attention has been paid to community-based approaches to facilitate the integration between SP, CCA and DRR. Instead, the frameworks used to conceptualise, plan, implement or evaluate interventions have thus far been too “programme-centred.” The use of local community risk assessments and participatory planning are both useful to address these concerns.
- Improve coordination and capacity. There remain significant differences in the language and jargon deployed between SP, CCA and DRR. Disparities in international or even national coordinating bodies, and incoherence of, or competition between, funding mechanisms, are also in evidence. This lack of coordination observed at all levels is exacerbated by the lack of capacity that affects most developing countries’ governmental or non-governmental institutions. Related to capacity is the danger of overloading existing programmes. By integrating CCA into existing DRR programmes, or accounting for potential DRR or CCA risks in ongoing SP programmes without at the same time enhancing the human, financial, institutional and organisational capacities and resources of the implementing agencies, countries are likely to overburden those programmes and affect their abilities to deliver benefits to their initial target groups.
