Adaptive social protection (ASP) helps to build the resilience of poor and vulnerable households to the impacts of large, covariate shocks, such as natural disasters, economic crises, pandemics, conflict, and forced displacement. Through the provision of transfers and services directly to these households, ASP supports their capacity to prepare for, cope with, and adapt to the shocks they face—before, during, and after these shocks occur. Over the long term, by supporting these three capacities, ASP can provide a pathway to a more resilient state for households that may otherwise lack the resources to move out of chronically vulnerable situations. Adaptive Social Protection: Building Resilience to Shocks outlines an organizing framework for the design and implementation of ASP, providing insights into the ways in which social protection systems can be made more capable of building household resilience. By way of its four building blocks—programs, information, finance, and institutional arrangements and partnerships—the framework highlights both the elements of existing social protection systems that are the cornerstones for building household resilience, as well as the additional investments that are central to enhancing their ability to generate these outcomes. In this report, the ASP framework and its building blocks have been elaborated primarily in relation to natural disasters and associated climate change. Nevertheless, many of the priorities identified within each building block are also pertinent to the design and implementation of ASP across other types of shocks, providing a foundation for a structured approach to the advancement of this rapidly evolving and complex agenda.

Uninsured risk had far-reaching consequences for rural growth as well as poverty reduction. A range of informal mechanisms to insure rural households against the impact of shocks, but they are a modest component of a risk layering strategy for well-off households and even less protective for low-income households. Formal insurance mechanisms have inherent market imperfections. State interventions to address these limitations have proven costly and generally are targeted poorly. Recent developments in microfinance as well as in insurance marketing have opened new possibilities for household risk reduction. Index insurance, such as weather indexing, addresses other inherent problems in insurance by using an indicator that is not affected by individual behaviour and may address monitoring costs and moral hazard. A number of innovations using index insurance are being tried currently in diverse settings ranging from India to Mongolia to Malawi. Marketing costs may limit the provision of such insurance to small farmers, but even in such cases microfinance institutes may serve as market intermediaries. Moreover, state and submational governments can use insurance to achieve countercyclical funding programs. In this vein, municipal governments in Mexico have used insurance to finance disaster contingency while the World Food Program has insured a portion of its emergency assistance to Ethiopia. Humanitarian organizations and NGOs may also seek insurance in this manner.

This exciting and innovative Handbook provides readers with a comprehensive and globally relevant overview of the instruments, actors and design features of social protection systems, as well as their application and impacts in practice. It is the first book that centres around system building globally, a theme that has gained political importance yet has received relatively little attention in academia.

The roadmap aims to support the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) and its development partners in their current efforts in social assistance and disaster risk management. It aimed at policy makers, legislative bodies, UN agencies and donors at national and sub-national levels.

The Philippines has made significant strides in reducing poverty, but the persistent threat of natural disasters, compounded by the country's vulnerability and exposure, continues to jeopardize these gains. Many households in disaster-prone areas hover precariously close to the poverty line, and the devastating impact of disasters on their assets, income, and well-being exacerbates this vulnerability. Anticipatory Action and adaptive and shock-responsive social protection emerges as critical approaches to mitigate the effects of disasters. Specifically, anticipatory cash transfers have shown promise in reducing asset and income losses for affected households. However, the effectiveness of such measures hinges on strengthening the existing social protection system, improving data collection and coordination, and addressing policy gaps, such as the absence of clear cost-sharing rules and concerns over local government capacities. This investment case has shown that the government has various effective and financially viable anticipatory action programming options at its disposal to reduce potential losses from natural disasters. While the choice of which options will be implemented in response to future emergencies lies with the government and the responding agencies, any effective and timely response will depend on the preparations and strengthening activities that will be carried out at the policy, program, and administrative levels over the coming years.

As the quality of climate risk information and scientific forecasting has continued to improve, the imperative to act in advance of an imminent shock in order to protect people, assets and livelihoods has also gained notable attention and increasing investment. Recognizing this opportunity, some governments, and development and humanitarian partners are trying to gain a better understanding of the potential of social protection to deliver support ahead of a forecasted shock, including exploring options to systematically integrate anticipatory action approaches within existing national social protection systems. As such, this document discusses the conceptual and practical linkages between these two topics alongside presenting four country case studies, thereby contributing to the literature on how social protection and anticipatory action can protect agricultural livelihoods.

What circumstances or behaviors turn poverty into a cycle that perpetuates across generations? The answer to this question carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. Yet a major challenge analysts and policymakers face in understanding poverty traps is the sheer number of mechanisms—not just financial, but also environmental, physical, and psychological—that may contribute to the persistence of poverty all over the world. The research in this volume explores the hypothesis that poverty is self-reinforcing because the equilibrium behaviors of the poor perpetuate low standards of living. Contributions explore the dynamic, complex processes by which households accumulate assets and increase their productivity and earnings potential, as well as the conditions under which some individuals, groups, and economies struggle to escape poverty. Investigating the full range of phenomena that combine to generate poverty traps—gleaned from behavioral, health, and resource economics as well as the sociology, psychology, and environmental literatures—chapters in this volume also present new evidence that highlights both the insights and the limits of a poverty trap lens. The framework introduced in this volume provides a robust platform for studying well-being dynamics in developing economies.