The concept of ‘transformative social protection’ (TSP) was born in 2003, while we were working with the Government of Uganda and DFID on ‘mainstreaming social protection’ in Uganda’s revised national Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP).
A series of interactions with government and donor officials, the Social Protection Task Force, the PEAP Secretariat and Sector Working Groups led us to observe that: (1) social protection was largely conceived in terms of a menu of instruments that were uncoordinated across sectors, expensive and likely to do little to reduce poverty or vulnerability in the long run; (2) the proposed menu (e.g. food aid distributions or targeted cash transfers) typically addressed the symptoms or consequences of natural disasters, conflict or chronic poverty, rather than addressing the underlying causes of these problems.
These observations led to a suggestion that the social protection agenda should be refocused on causes rather than consequences of vulnerability, which necessarily required an understanding of the structural nature of vulnerability, and an appeal to begin policy discussions from the objectives of social protection
rather than from the instruments available.
The ambition was to move thinking beyond ‘safety nets for basic needs’ and towards ‘social protection for vulnerability reduction’, bringing together livelihoods thinking with a rights-based approach.
While the rights agenda was not made explicit in our 2004 IDS Working Paper, the framework did open up space for linking social protection to rights, inclusion and citizenship, and we have subsequently started to think about how to do this.
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