• Social protection
• Introduction

Livelihoods and social protection

Developing pro-poor policies for agricultural development is important in countries with a large rural poor. In conjunction, there is also need to focus on social protection in order to address the risk and insecurity that the rural poor face. However, current policy fails to sufficiently link agricultural with social protection policies. The analysis in this paper provides a conceptual framework for analysing the different phases and changing synergies between different social protection and agricultural development interventions or instruments. The authors suggest that in broad terms the critical question facing policy makers is where and how to locate social protection and agricultural development interventions. This is further complicated by questions of capacity and political constraints, a changing global economic environment as well as the growing need to address climate change.

Strategies promoting social protection for agricultural growth focus primarily on insurance mechanisms, public works programmes and microcredit. There is an important research agenda here in comparing the costs and effectiveness of more generic growth and social protection approaches used in earlier state led agricultural development policies with more recent micro- level social protection approaches in order to identify combinations of instruments that can best promote both agricultural and non-agricultural growth and social protection in different contexts.

The authors discuss and then summarise how appropriate types of social protection and agricultural development instruments depend upon the design and implementation of each instrument.

Research issues that need further attention and could be helpfully addressed using this framework include:

• the potential for a mix of strategies and instruments that changes with phases of development and allows for the need for policy transitions (with exits from particular policies) while supporting livelihood transitions and maintaining trust in commitments to and delivery of social protection
• the extent and determinants of multipliers linking different social protection instruments to growth through labour markets, food prices and other linkages
• the importance and nature of thresholds affecting livelihoods and local food and labour markets, and their implications for targeting and for the scale and nature of different interventions
• the potential for social protection to reduce rather than increase dependency
• land policy options and their links with social protection and agricultural policy strategies
• food price and market policy options and their links with social protection and agricultural
  policy strategies.
  

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