Review Paper on Community Coping, Vulnerability and Social Protection

This paper reviews the literature on traditional coping mechanisms and their relationship to vulnerability and social protection, with particular reference to the southern African countries. Traditional coping comprises household and broader community methods for dealing with risk and the aftermath of shocks, including building up and selling assets, diversifying income sources, and drawing on customary community reciprocity.
A large body of empirical research finds that, although it makes valuable contributions, traditional coping is uneven in coverage across community members, and can be disequalising in eventual outcomes. This is because household asset building and disposal by far constitutes the greater proportion of all traditional mechanisms, and the assets of the better off tend to be eroded less severely than those of the poor in the event of both having to deal with a crisis of equal magnitude. Moreover, the better off are able to diversify incomes by engaging in more remunerative activities than the poor.
In the southern African region rising vulnerability overall has eroded traditional mechanisms, especially those involving community reciprocity. This is because when all or most community members experience livelihood stress, they are unable to respond to previous customary obligations. The chief causes of rising vulnerability have been market liberalisation, poor overall economic performance, declining remittance income following closure of the South African labour market, rising prevalence of HIV/AIDS, declining farm size, weak governance, declining effectiveness of public institutions, and deteriorating civil security (increased crime and theft).
The argument has been made that externally devised safety nets led by governments, donors and NGOs may ‘crowd-out’ traditional coping mechanisms. This occurs because modern safety nets substitute for rather than build upon the previous methods. For example, food-for-work may interfere with the timely accomplishment of seasonal agricultural tasks; or cash-for-work may be more attractive even at minimal levels than the effort required to rebuild assets.
However, the patchy coverage of traditional mechanisms means that safety nets can be devised that complement rather than substitute for them. Moreover, recent approaches to social protection are beginning to emphasise its asset building and broader livelihood enhancing role, consistent with maintaining a central role for traditional mechanisms. Whether customary community-level reciprocity can be revived is doubtful since culturallyembedded obligations of that kind are difficult to retrieve once they have vanished. Nevertheless, this does not rule out the building of new community codes of practice around contemporary issues such as the care of HIV/AIDS orphans and reducing civil insecurity in villages.
Despite previous empirical research and existing literature covering a lot of ground, there remains a considerable amount of investigative work to be undertaken at the intersection of differentiated drivers of vulnerability at household and community levels, social protection efforts in place or planned, and evolving social responses within communities to chronic vulnerability and to the various social protection measures being conducted by governments, donors and NGOs. Some possibly ethically rather dubious positions are being taken as short cuts to efficient social protection delivery, such as distinguishing the incapacitated vulnerable from the ‘vulnerable but viable’. Disability advocacy groups might justifiably have some interesting things to say about making such distinctions. Communities are not static entities containing clearly demarcated social groups, and nor do their own norms of social behaviour necessarily see distinctions made by outsiders as ‘fair’ or helpful to their own social cohesion.
A lot more work is needed on linking specific drivers of vulnerability to emerging social protection practice, so that outcomes confer resilience and set households on pathways towards more robust future livelihoods. In this context, developing vulnerability indicators that can reliably track whether people are becoming more or less vulnerable, and institutionalising these indicators in vulnerability assessment and analysis (VAA) would be a useful step forward. On the social protection side, state agencies and NGOs have been implementing a great range of different protection methods, in different countries and at different times and of varying durations, and yet extraordinarily little is known about the success of these efforts in setting in train sustained improvements in households ability to withstand shocks.
The foregoing suggests two principal areas of evidence gathering with practical implications for future approaches to social protection in the region. The first is to make the specific link between different drivers of vulnerability, the social protection responses that are considered appropriate for addressing those vulnerabilities, the extent to which that link holds up to more detailed scrutiny, and the pathways towards greater resilience suggested by experience on the ground. The second is to evaluate the effectiveness of the wide variety of different social protection measures that have sprung into existence in the southern African region in the wake of the 2001-02 food security crisis, where effectiveness does not just refer to the cost efficiency of delivering to targeted beneficiaries, but examines the relative success of different measures at accomplishing their stated goals, looking critically also at targeting itself, inclusion and exclusion errors, and cumulative effects at household level as well as social impacts in the communities in which beneficiaries reside.

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Review Paper on Community Coping, Vulnerability and Social Protection

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