Migration and social protection: a concept paper

A framework to understand migration and social protection

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical framework in which to understand the relationships between vulnerability, migration and social protection. It examines social protection concerns as emerging at all stages of a migration process, as different vulnerabilities characterise the "deciding migrant", the "mobile migrant", the "arrived migrant", the "'returned migrant" and the migrant’s family that may remain at home.

The paper makes a case for expanding social protection to include politically-determined understandings of vulnerability, which incorporates a transformative function into social protection policy. By focusing on determinants of vulnerability in addition to factors that enable the management of risk, policy solutions can include structural, long-term perspectives rather than just remedial perspectives.

The paper highlights four categories of vulnerabilities that migrants are especially prone to: temporal, spatial, socio-cultural and socio-political; and distinguishes between migration as a social protection strategy and migration as leading to vulnerabilities that require specific social protection instruments. [adapted from author]

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Migration and social protection: a concept paper