Hello all,
I am looking for country level examples of where social protection ministry staff have been incentivised to embrace / take forward shock-responsive SP either before, at the design / preparedness stage or during implementation. I'm thinking beyond the high-level policy goals of SR-SP, to more tangible, material or other incentives. Examples could be through explicit measures such as additional budget allocations for ministry priorities or, perhaps ministry staff have indicated in case study KI interviews some unexpected benefits they found individually and for their ministry, from engaging in SR-SP. There is of course some literature on the broad issues around the political economy of shock-responsive SP but I'm really looking for a couple of simple, tangible, illustrative examples of incentives. ASEAN country examples would be ideal but global also fine. Thanks in advance for any pointers! Georgia
Comments
This is an excellent question and cuts to the heart of how to implement shock responsive social protection systems in practice. Additional budget allocation is indeed a critical incentive, but needs to be complemented by an increase in human resources and overall capacity - and understanding individual level incentives are also key. The set of incentives that often gets overlooked is around the issue of collaboration between the social service and humanitarian sectors. There needs to be clear entry points that can reduce competition and can lead to clear efficencies. The obvious one is to work on a common social registry that leads to common targeting systems. Will work to dig out some practical examples but would be very good to hear from others.
Thanks Stephen, that would be helpful. Yes, it's really the individual incentives, beyond the official policy objectives (and any performance targets attached to those) that I'm trying to identify. I'm just thinking from the point of view of an SP ministry staff member, even up to permanent secretary level, on face value the downside of taking on partial responsibility for a humanitarian case load - and all the adjustments to the SP system that go along with that, and as you point out, additional coordination - would look far greater than the higher level benefits to government and beneficiaries. I guess incentives might be less necessary in the immediate aftermath of a rapid onset disaster when people are visibly suffering, but more needed for policy or preparedness activities, or maybe slow onset disasters. Someone mentioned to me a case where an SP ministry that was reluctant to have shock-responsive objectives built into a new policy were incentivized by being awarded additional budget, for other ministry priorities, that were not shock responsive SP related. I'm looking into this more but wondering if there are any other interesting incentive examples out there, including where individual staff have mentioned how they were personally motivated. Thanks again!