Addressing the risk of maladaptation in Social Protection: The case of World Food Programme

Abstract: The need to adapt to climate change has been widely acknowledged as a challenge expanding beyond the discrete realm of adaptation initiatives. Accordingly, social protection has received growing attention due to its potential to promote adaptive capacity, whilst partly addressing both direct and indirect drivers of vulnerability to climate change. Addressing the risk of maladaptation has been proposed as a first step of this wider process, to avoid inadvertently increasing vulnerability that initiatives were meant to reduce. Based on a multidimensional analytical framework that understands maladaptation as a socio-political process, influenced by multiple drivers across several temporal and spatial scales; this thesis explores the case study of the World Food Programme, in Latin America and the Caribbean region. Through interviews, the empirical findings indicate that a long-term and systemic vision of social protection and climate change is crucial to leverage cumulative impacts of World Food Programme’s social protection work. However, a process-oriented analysis of the organisation finds continuities between their historical mandate and present attempts to act upon a broader adaptive landscape. Thus, underlining the influence of power and politics when framing and balancing multiple drivers. The study suggests that an inclusive negotiation of the adaptive-maladaptive continuum can potentially pose emancipatory opportunities for groups generally subjected as vulnerable. Hence, beginning social protection initiatives with an ex-ante approach to the risk of maladaptation can contribute to the explicit consideration of adaptation goals and barriers, by identifying the type of processes and outcomes perceived as important to avoid, in a given context.