Social protection and resilience in protracted crises

This article critically examines perspectives on social protection’s role in strengthening resilience capacities in protracted crises – contexts where conflict and displacement persist for five years or longer. These crises shape how stakeholders navigate their mandates to provide support, while influencing how affected communities seek to withstand, recover from, and adapt to ongoing shocks. International actors have promoted social protection as a means to strengthen absorptive, adaptive and transformative resilience capacities at household and community levels. While resilience has become a central concept in social protection policy and programming, much underlying evidence and assumptions stem from stable settings. Protracted crises introduce increased and distinct challenges, including conflict-related insecurity, disrupted public services, and legal uncertainty for displaced populations. Despite these difficulties, social protection for resilience-strengthening is still encouraged as an alternative to piecemeal humanitarian assistance. Drawing on global policy and research reports, and empirical evidence from a multi-country research programme, this article identifies four key limitations in approaches that aim to strengthen resilience through social protection in protracted crises. First, many approaches focus on supporting absorptive capacities. Second, there is often misalignment between the nature of interventions and the drivers of vulnerability. Third, current sectoral approaches work in silos. Finally, there is insufficient attention to local support mechanisms. By critically engaging with these limitations, this article contributes to debates on the relationship between social protection and resilience. It concludes by offering reflections on how aid actors can reconsider their approaches, advocating for strategies that are more collaborative, understanding of, and adapted to local contexts.