Supporting the working but vulnerable: linkages between social protection and climate change

The conceptual framework presented in this article brings together two bodies of work: social protection and climate change adaptation, through the sustainable livelihoods approach, to provide a viable framework for income and livelihood supporting interventions in the face of climate change. To date, there is scant and underdeveloped research that explores (i) why these two disciplines need to be brought together and (ii) how that can be done to assist climate-sensitive livelihoods in vulnerable communities. This article addresses this lacuna in existing literature and argues that climate change brings a new way of conceptualizing vulnerability to the traditional understanding of social protection, thereby altering who is targeted and how. Social protection interventions will only be able to assist climate-vulnerable rural livelihoods, once a wider and more flexible definition of vulnerability is recognized and accepted at a structural level.