Towards Future-Proof Society: Adaptive Social Protection Against Climate Change

Indonesia is currently trying to embed Adaptive Social Protection (ASP) into the country’s social protection framework, an initiative in accordance with the social protection reform. ASP combines considerations of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), Climate Change Adaptation (CCA), and poverty reduction into social protection. Since ASP is still a nascent framework to complement the mainstream social protection system, there is a lack of understanding at several levels. First, how does ASP complement mainstream development social protection and climate-disaster-related protection 2 such as humanitarian cash transfers? Second, there is a lack of understanding of how ASP is linked with communitybased protection and transfer mechanisms such as informal risk-sharing arrangements and other forms of communitybased risk finance mechanisms. Third, there is a lack of understanding of how to govern the ASP amid a complex institutional context in Indonesia, where there are many layers and sectoral players from ministerial to district-level governance. Such issues bore the need for a new understanding of an established ASP model. Furthermore, understanding other forms of alternative protection utilising community-based financing can be very useful for the government to understand a fuller picture of community response capacity and resilience. Consequently, this research seeks to understand the potential use of a more extensive social protection system beyond the state-centric ASP mechanism to include community-based informal risk-sharing arrangements and other alternative protection measures against climate impacts.