Coordination between social protection and rural productive development programmes can help poor and at-risk households escape the poverty trap and break its intergenerational transmission. In socioeconomic crises such as the current one resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, government responses must protect income through simplified subsidy and cash transfer strategies. Yet, in order to find those convergence strategies that optimise the synergies and complementarities between these interventions, we must first understand the institutional architecture behind the implementation of these coordination schemes. In the experiences analyzed, a constant resistance has been observed among ministries to work together. While in Africa the ministries of Agriculture are more consolidated and occupy an important space in public policy, in Latin America it is the Ministries of Development or Social Protection that have the greatest technical and budgetary capacity. However, this does not alter the conditions of resistance on both sectors. Also, the agricultural sector tends to prioritize its efforts in promoting larger scale agriculture, considering attention to small producers as the target population of the social sector.