Building resilience and wellbeing of rural poor to climate risks: are the economic functions of social protection enough?

As climate change accelerates, the popularity of adaptive social protection over conventional social assistance programmes is on the rise for they are seen to enhance people's resilience and wellbeing outcomes. Despite this upsurge, little is known about the impacts of adaptive programmes on resilience and wellbeing outcomes compared to conventional programmes. We analyse the economic functions that social protection programmes offer through empirical studies in two climate-vulnerable zones in Bangladesh. By operationalising a simplified analytical framework to understand subjective resilience, the qualitative data show the adaptive programme to be more effective in enhancing beneficiaries' perceived resilience to climate risks. Regrettably, neither programme is found to contribute much significantly in terms of enabling beneficiaries to achieve desired wellbeing outcomes that one might expect to see from social protection. The analysis offers rich insights about the design components of the programmes, affording an on-the-ground understanding of their implications for resilience and wellbeing.