Social Protection in Conflict and Conflict-Related Displacement Crises¹

Abstract

In recent years, efforts to encourage the use of social protection in response to conflict and displacement have increased. Yet many of the lessons from social protection and shock-responsive programmes emerged in response to climate shocks and other disasters and are not necessarily transferable to conflict and displacement settings. Ultimately, the concern must be how to sustain support to the poorest and most vulnerable populations during conflict. This shifts the focus away from simply maintaining the functions and delivery capacities of state-directed social protection towards how to harmonise multiple channels and providers of social assistance. State-directed social protection may not be the most appropriate channel to address the needs of conflict-affected and displaced populations. This article considers the challenges to introducing, extending, and sustaining social protection in crises characterised by conflict and displacement.

Keywords

Social protection, conflict, displacement, crises, refugees, humanitarian–peace–development nexus.

1 Introduction

In recent years, there has been a groundswell of governmental and donor interest in social protection as part of the wider policy architecture to respond to large-scale covariate shocks (O’Brien et al. 2018; Longhurst and Slater 2022). Advances in shock-responsive social protection (SRSP), i.e. assistance provided to respond to greater need after a shock through an established system, have been substantial. Headway has been achieved largely due to learning from scale-up and innovations in response to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as to other large-scale climate shocks (Gentilini et al. 2022; Bowen et al. 2020).

Despite the substantial interest in SRSP, there has been comparatively less attention shown within the social protection sector to conflict and displacement (Birch et al. 2023). Most social protection policies and programmes pay limited attention to conflict until circumstances force them to do so (Harvey and Mohamed 2022). Moreover, few have mechanisms to extend provision to displaced populations that might lack legal recognition and be excluded from other types of support (Collyer et al. 2022; Lowe et al. 2022). The recent focus on SRSP has missed a needed emphasis on sustaining routine delivery functions when conflict erupts (Slater 2022), including to displaced groups, or to building the elements of a social protection system in places with conflict legacies and displaced populations.

In most crises characterised by armed violence and conflict-induced displacement, humanitarian assistance remains the dominant channel of response. Humanitarian assistance is designed to respond to acute shocks, where needs are presumed to be short term as conditions stabilise, allowing for a return to a pre-conflict state. However, in many conflict-affected settings, insecurity and conflict-related events continue for many years, as they do in places such as Somalia, Yemen, and Syria. Further, displaced populations remain for many years, indeed decades, in more secure areas of their home countries or abroad, unable to access either resettlement or options to return. Humanitarian assistance is an inadequate and inefficient mechanism to support those in situations of protracted conflict and displacement who face chronic deprivations.

The article asks: What are the challenges to introducing, extending, and sustaining social protection in crises characterised by conflict and displacement? We argue that aid discourses must focus, first, on how to most effectively provide for, and sustain support to, those in need. A secondary focus can be one of finding ways to sustain a specific social protection system or programme. Of course, these foci are not mutually exclusive; still, donor and government interest in using social protection can minimise attention that is equally necessary on finding ways to improve coordination between humanitarian aid and social protection.

This article progresses as follows. Sections 2 and 3, respectively, examine the features of conflict-related crises (Section 2) and conflict-displaced populations (Section 3), and the challenges that these raise for the provision of social protection. In Section 4, the nexus of social protection and humanitarian assistance is examined across different settings, distinguished by the strength of the social protection system as well as the nature of the conflict setting. The difficulties of introducing processes and institutional infrastructure to support social protection programmes and systems in places that have experienced protracted conflict and displacement are explored in Section 5. This is followed by a discussion in Section 6 of the challenges of extending and sustaining social protection, in contexts that slide into conflict-related crisis but where social protection programmes and systems exist. Section 7 offers considerations for the way forward.

2 Conflict and conflict-related displacement crises

Crises related to conflict cover a spectrum of contexts, each with their own specific history, dynamics, and politics that shape patterns of vulnerability as well as the type, mix, and scope of response to needs. In most cases, patterns of conflict are internally heterogeneous, varying hugely from one administrative region to another, or between core regions and particular borderlands (Naess, Selby and Daoust 2022). Some current contexts of protracted crisis were not fragile or conflict affected ten or fifteen years ago. Equally, some countries that are currently thought to be stable include elements, or particular geographical zones, of conflict. Still, conflict and displacement are characteristics of multidimensional crises that span several other intersecting variables, including climate as well as political instability and hazards (referring to natural disasters). Figure 1 shows how these different dimensions of crisis overlap in several exemplar countries (based on an assessment of countries in 2022).

Figure 1 Dimensions of fragility in crises

The conditions associated with conflict-related crises pose challenges for social protection programmes. These include the following:

• Conflict-related armed violence: this has significant impacts on vulnerabilities, which social protection programmes may be ill-equipped to address. Violence can generate new, heightened needs for those who may already be covered by social protection programmes; it may also affect parts of the population that were previously food secure and had access to livelihoods and, thus, were not covered by social protection. At the same time, governments are often party to conflicts and may not have effective control over their territory, and/or non-state armed groups could be present. Thus, violence involving governments and other non-state actors impedes access to areas and populations that require support and services. Moreover, armed militia and government armies often explicitly deny humanitarian access to conflict zones (e.g. the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza in 2023–24) and seize food aid and other relief supplies (e.g. Al-Shabaab in Somalia in 2011).
• Weak administrative capacities for delivering programmes in conflict settings: lower-level programme staff may themselves be displaced and unable to carry out their duties. Restrictions on access to the most insecure areas may necessitate remote management and oversight, further diminishing administration and monitoring functions at the frontline of delivery.
• Damaged and destroyed infrastructure: the impacts of conflict may portend poorly functioning or absent infrastructure, including roads and bridges that are necessary to transport goods, as well as a lack of vehicles that are accessible to frontline workers, scarcities of electricity and fuel, interruptions and outages in mobile and internet networks, and closed banking services.
• Higher operational costs: governments and humanitarian agencies that seek to extend social assistance in the most insecure contexts confront heightened delivery costs through the need for armed escorts, higher transport and petrol costs, and insurance for goods and personnel.
• Association of social assistance with parties in a conflict: contested public authority has significant implications for programming since the provision of support is inseparable from questions of legitimacy and the efforts of different political stakeholders to influence broader public attitudes. Thus, improving the effectiveness of delivery is inseparable from navigating political rivalries and relationships as well as public views of different stakeholders.
• Highly politicised decision-making: while short-term humanitarian assistance may not be the most appropriate response to protracted conflict or displacement, the geopolitics of conflict situations may preclude efforts to introduce or extend social protection-type support. Multilateral funders as well as bilateral donors may restrict contact with governments or non-state actors that are anathema to the values and principles of global donors.

3 Displaced populations and social protection

Conflict-induced displacement and households and communities affected by displacement (including host communities as well as family members left behind) create significant new need for social assistance while at the same time introducing unique challenges for provision and delivery. When people are dislocated within their own country of residence, but especially when this happens across international borders, their rights and status will be governed by a range of national and international laws and conventions, which are themselves difficult to navigate (Long and Sabates-Wheeler 2017).⁴ Challenges to provision include:

• Access barriers: even when social protection is available for displaced populations, access to it can be extremely challenging as they move across administrative boundaries. This can be true for both internally displaced persons (IDPs) and externally displaced populations (i.e. refugees and asylum seekers). State-directed social protection programmes, which by design exclude non-citizens in most places, are ill-prepared to extend support to displaced people.⁵ This is particularly the case regarding social insurance and occupation-based forms of formal social protection. Yet access to other social protection provisions, such as for elderly people or for nursing mothers, may be cut off because family members are spread across various locations/countries.
• Mobility between equally deficient social protection systems: it is often the case that people are displaced between regions and countries with equally deficient social protection systems whose coverage is limited and patchy. For example, refugees moving from Burundi to Tanzania, where national social protection systems are nascent but access for refugees is heavily restricted. MacAuslan (2011) documents the difficulties in accessing entitlements to the public distribution system for IDPs who have crossed administrative state borders in India. The difficulties in enabling the portability of social rights across equally deficient or non-equivalent systems is well documented (Avato, Koettl and Sabates-Wheeler 2010; Sabates-Wheeler and Feldman 2011).
• Ambiguous rights in relation to a state: displaced populations often live and gain a living outside the parameters of the state (local and national). Some states will simply refuse to recognise welfare responsibilities for certain categories of displaced people (i.e. refugees or asylum seekers), due either to political and/or cultural motives. On the other hand, displaced people may strategically choose how to interact with state provisioning and negotiate other regimes of provision that may be transnational, cross-border, charity-based, or non-formal (Zaman et al. 2023).
• Coordination and interoperability: difficulties in registering households affected by displacement can surface due to the lack of coordination and harmonisation between different delivery agencies. The delivery of cash transfers usually relies on digital systems. These are mainly bespoke, disconnected, and non-interoperable. In theory, a displaced family could receive several entitlements in response to the same crisis, each through different modalities (cash, voucher) and cash transfer systems (mobile phones, biometric cards) and from different agencies (Hagen-Zanker et al. 2017).

4 The relationship between social protection and humanitarian relief

These various challenges and obstacles to state-led social protection imply that there are likely to be significant gaps in provision during conflict and displacement-related crises. Other providers, most obviously humanitarian agencies, typically cover these gaps. Other provision, such as through faith and community-based organisations as well as mutual assistance from family and friends, responds to increased needs arising from conflict and displacement (Zaman et al. 2023). Of course, these providers face the same challenges as those described above, but their political distance from the state implies that access and distribution barriers are lower. Alternate funding sources accessed and dispersed under very different mandates can be an advantage when a state is no longer able to distribute donor funds earmarked for ‘development’.

The provision of social or humanitarian relief in response to a conflict crisis presents challenges and opportunities for establishing and sustaining state-led social protection. Table 1 distinguishes different social protection scenarios in relation to state involvement in social protection and the probable remit for humanitarian support. These scenarios help to illustrate the different providers, types of interventions, and methods of delivery that are most appropriate in varying crisis settings. Where a system is shattered or severely weakened in part due to conflict, such as in Sudan or Yemen, the most appropriate provider of social assistance is likely the international humanitarian system. In protracted conflict settings, such as in Somalia and South Sudan, a social protection programme, let alone a system providing wider coverage and links to complementary services, may not have existed before the onset of conflict. In these settings, introducing social protection will entail the need to coordinate with an array of transfer programmes implemented by a range of international organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). More commonly, elements of social protection systems and programmes exist in many conflict-affected settings, especially where these predate the start of conflict, such as in Iraq and Syria. Where the state system exists but is weak, the international system can provide support, where feasible and appropriate, to sustain state-led social protection and deliver humanitarian resources through the system. This is especially the case in countries that host large refugee populations, such as Kenya and Uganda.

Table 1 Maturity of state-led social protection system and remit for humanitarian response

The mix of providers, types of intervention, and modes of delivery will reflect conflict dynamics, levels of violence, the presence of non-state armed groups, the legal status of conflict-affected populations, and the geopolitical standing of public authorities that control particular states and territories therein. Broadly speaking, conflict-related crises can be distinguished between those that are politically stable, those that are politically contested, and those that are in a post-conflict period. In politically stable crises, such as in Iraq and Somaliland, state legitimacy is broadly accepted, providing greater scope for state-directed social provision and efforts to institutionalise systems at a subnational level through strengthening capacities and capabilities. Yet service delivery capacity is stressed due to shock-induced acute needs, and disaster responses (led by the state or otherwise) are evident alongside social protection. In politically contested crises, such as in Somalia, Yemen, and Sudan, control over national-level structures is contested through violence and, therefore, these function poorly, if at all. Further, constrictions on humanitarian aid present challenges to addressing acute needs in these places; thus, forms of non-state social provision forms are predominant and may include support through armed groups. In post-conflict crises, such as in South Sudan or Tigray in northern Ethiopia, conflict-associated humanitarian needs often exist long after the official ‘end’ of a conflict as the situation remains unstable. The state may seek to (re)assert control over social provision as a technique of governance and building legitimacy. Nevertheless, forms of non-state social provision that were important during the height of conflict will remain critical.

Efforts to encourage the use of social protection in conflict and situations of conflict-induced displacement confront very different challenges depending on whether there is an existing social protection system to sustain and, ideally, extend, or whether social protection is being introduced in a setting where social assistance has been delivered largely through humanitarian channels. These efforts are explored in the following sections.

5 Introducing social protection in conflict and displacement crises

Over the past decade, international organisations and donors have piloted and encouraged the use of social protection in conflict-affected countries where there were no existing social protection systems. Examples include the Baxnaano programme in Somalia (see McDowall and Khan, this IDS Bulletin) as well as various small-scale interventions in South Sudan (Deng 2018). In settings like these, a core challenge is the dominance of existing humanitarian provision, including a complex landscape of multiple providers. These will reflect the reliance on humanitarian responses over time, whether for acute shocks or more chronic needs that manifest during crises. The case for introducing social protection in conflict-affected settings where there is no existing system is strongest where it can complement social assistance provided through humanitarian channels. Some humanitarian actors may welcome the introduction of social protection as the chance to shift part of their caseload and, thus, to deliver more effectively on their core mandate of responding to acute needs. However, political and financial support for social protection in these settings is far from guaranteed.

Furthermore, in places where state authority is contested and/or associated with violence targeting civilian populations, humanitarian stakeholders may be hesitant to engage with efforts to introduce state-coordinated and directed social protection. The ideal of increasing coverage under the aegis of state-directed social protection may also defy the reality of there being multiple public authorities, especially in peripheral regions that resist central government control. In these settings, and for marginalised populations who may not trust the state, the reach of social protection will be limited, and the need for provision through alternative channels including humanitarian ones will remain.

Moves to introduce and build social protection in places without existing programmes and systems would ideally utilise many of the systems already established by humanitarian organisations. Large-scale humanitarian provision often relies on well-developed systems of registration, targeting, and delivery. If data is not able to be shared, then system processes and procedures can be replicated or mimicked as a way of setting up the social protection system.⁶

Where data sharing is possible, creating social registries (which is just one example of the social protection delivery chain as described by Seyfert et al. 2019) in conflict settings is fraught with difficulty. This is due to the substantial funding that is required, continued insecurity and displacement that result in significant population dislocations, and the administrative requirements of keeping registries updated on an ongoing basis. Finally, securing funding to establish and maintain registries could be difficult, especially when under-coverage and inadequate transfer sizes loom as more fundamental challenges.

6 Sustaining and extending social protection through and after conflict

The question of how to expand and sustain social protection systems in the event of a crisis has garnered significant attention in recent years. Lessons from Iraq, Sudan, and Uganda offer guidance to major stakeholders on extending social protection initiatives to forcibly displaced persons (OECD/EBA 2022). Where there are existing social protection programmes, there is a considerable interest in how these can be part of the wider policy architecture of response to conflict and displacement crises as these emerge. Yet most social protection programmes are not designed to respond to conflict (Birch et al. 2023). To a degree, this is understandable given the impacts of conflict on the spaces and capacities for delivery. While the SRSP agenda has generated learning around vertical and horizontal expansion in response to climate shocks and other disasters, this is not necessarily transferable to conflict and displacement settings because of the various characteristics of these contexts as outlined in Sections 2 and 3. In short, it is not guaranteed that social protection channels can be extended in some conflict and displacement crises.

The focus on extending social protection to respond to large-scale shocks, conflict or otherwise, has detracted from an equally needed emphasis on how to sustain social protection in conflict. Slater (2022), while recognising the paucity of research, challenges the assumption that states lack the capacities to maintain the delivery chain in conflict. Lessons relate to resuming social protection systems and provision in the aftermath of an acute conflict, and in areas and regions that may experience only spillover effects from a conflict but where a state system functions to some degree, as in the Amhara and Afar regions of Ethiopia (Lind et al. 2024).

Attention on how to sustain social protection systems is significant insofar as it contributes to thinking on how to sustain support to the poorest and most vulnerable populations during conflict. This shifts the focus away from maintaining the functions and delivery capacities of state-directed social protection towards how to harmonise multiple channels and providers of social assistance in a way that ideally provides an institutionally coordinated matrix of support. Social protection may not be the most appropriate channel to address the needs of conflict-affected and displaced populations. This is because social protection systems and programmes themselves are difficult to sustain during conflict, and in many cases can no longer function. In these situations, sustaining support to social protection recipients will require coordination with humanitarian providers. A substituting and flexing of humanitarian aid in places with existing social protection systems that slip into a severe conflict shock underscores how there is, conceptually at least, an important symbiotic relationship between state-directed provision and delivery through non-state channels. The latter encompasses not only large national and international humanitarian agencies, but also provision directed by a raft of other non-state organisations and groups that are trusted by conflict-affected populations. Beegle, Coudouel and Monsalve (2018) stress the roles that non-state actors play in sustaining social protection. Upstream, donor agencies support around 46 per cent of social protection financing, while downstream, ‘both NGOs and the UN agencies provide safety nets for hard-to-reach communities in fragile or conflict-affected areas’ (ibid.: 210).

7 Towards more effective use of social protection in conflict and displacement-related crises

This article sought to consider the challenges to introducing, extending, and sustaining social protection in crises characterised by conflict and displacement. Building robust social protection systems with shock-responsive functions remains the ideal for stable settings, and where the state can assume some coordination and delivery functions. Yet strengthening social protection may not be the best option to respond to the greater needs relating to large-scale conflict or in places with considerable legacies to overcome from recent conflict and displacement. Conditions in conflict-affected areas may mean that it is not possible to direct humanitarian aid through the social protection system, or the population most in need of assistance could be outside the system.

Yet the current trend is likely to grow in finding ways to use social protection in conflict and displacement-related crises. Given the real challenges of introducing social protection in conflict settings where most social assistance has been delivered through humanitarian channels, or of extending and sustaining social protection in places that experience new conflict shocks, what are the key considerations to ensure the most effective use and scope for social protection?

First, political commitment to coordination between humanitarian and social protection actors is necessary to ensure effective pivoting between and blending of delivery through both channels. The reasons to strengthen coordination are obvious and compelling on many fronts, from ensuring coverage as wide as possible, harmonising and streamlining vulnerability analyses, joining up early warning and response plans, and expediting responses to new conflict-generated needs. While the imperative to strengthen coordination is usually approached as a challenge that is practical, functional, and instrumental (Slater, Haruna and Baur 2022), ultimately it is something that involves negotiating the politics associated with different and distinct sets of actors and their interests at multiple levels of governance. Domains of responsibility for hybrid ways of working across sectors and providers during a conflict crisis will be important to define so that transitioning between state-led and non-state systems during and after conflict is as smooth as possible. At lower levels of governance, necessity dictates that social protection and humanitarian actors already coordinate in implementation and delivery. Rather, coordination is often patchier at higher levels of governance and politics, reflecting still siloed structures and funding streams.

Second, while social protection may not be the most appropriate instrument to address needs in conflict and displacement-related contexts, social protection actors must find ways to design and deliver support in ways that are conflict sensitive. This is key, as any initiative conducted in a conflict-affected environment will interact with conflict dynamics, and this will have consequences that could either be positive or negative. Hence, it is critical to ensure that humanitarian assistance and social protection interventions do not exacerbate tensions, such as by worsening inequalities or weakening local solidarities (Nanthikesan and Uitto 2012). As an example, drawing on her work in Sudan, Ahmed (Elehemier) (2022) illustrates how a lack of attention to the hostile perceptions from people in the South to the identity of the Islamic Bank meant that the Bank’s development interventions were considered highly suspicious and lacking legitimacy. A conflict-sensitive approach will demonstrate an awareness of how an intervention or programme interacts with the context in which it is being implemented. At a minimum, it will aim to avoid further harm. More ambitiously, it may deliberately seek to influence conflict dynamics in a positive direction, possibly even in ways that directly transform them (Birch et al. 2023).

Finally, intentionally preparing and planning for large-scale displacement and the vulnerabilities and deprivations that come with that will be critical for encouraging innovations in design and delivery of social assistance for displacement-affected groups. Much more work needs to be conducted in evaluating and piloting digital solutions for transferring cash to displaced populations. There will be different political and legal considerations for internally and externally displaced groups, yet the innovations will apply across the board. Guidance that temporarily alleviates administrative access barriers that restrict the location where people can access state-provided benefits can be put in place. In addition, provisionally changing some basic programme requirements – for instance, allowing someone other than the household head to receive payments, or switching modalities and dropping conditionalities – can be introduced at the onset of conflict. Other considerations, as detailed in work by Hagen-Zanker et al. (2017) on Syrian refugees in Turkey, include mimicking host country systems of targeting, payment, and support for camp-based populations; this will provide a useful platform for possible future merging and harmonisation of state and non-state systems. Finally, considerations of equity of provision across displaced and resident populations are important for minimising any social and economic tension.

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Notes

1. The contributions to this IDS Bulletin emerged from an international conference on ‘Reimagining Social Protection in a Time of Global Uncertainty’, organised by the Centre for Social Protection and hosted by the Institute of Development Studies in September 2023. The conference was generously funded by UK aid from the UK government through the Better Assistance in Crises (BASIC) Research programme, and by aid from the Irish government (Irish Aid). Publication of this IDS Bulletin was funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (grant number 98411). Return to note marker 1.
2. Jeremy Lind, Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, UK. Return to note marker 2.
3. Rachel Sabates-Wheeler, Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, UK. Return to note marker 3.
4. The question of who the accountable duty bearer is to provide for the basic needs of different categories of displaced people is a legal one and is not within the remit of this article (see Long and Sabates-Wheeler 2017 for a review). Return to note marker 4.
5. With significant exceptions: for example, Mauritania (which includes refugees in its national social safety net Tekavoul) and Chad, where the whole national social safety net is focused on refugees and host populations - operating solely in geographic zones marked by high and chronic refugee presence. Return to note marker 5.
6. See Hagen-Zanker et al. (2017) for an example of parallel system development for Syrian refugees in camps in Jordan. Return to note marker 6.

Credits

Copyright © 2024 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2024.122

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited, any modifications or adaptations are indicated, and the work is not used for commercial purposes.

The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK. This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 55 No. 2 October 2024 ‘Reimagining Social Protection’; the Introduction is also recommended reading.