- Coordinating institutions is key to moving from fragmented responses to effective, system-wide crisis management.
- Adaptive social protection strengthens systems’ ability to anticipate, absorb, and respond to shocks.
- The IDB's Adaptative Maturity Model provides a practical tool to assess readiness and improve integration across policies and institutions.
In many countries, when a major crisis occurs, such as an extreme climate event, economic crisis ,or health emergency, a broad institutional response is activated across the state.
Emergency agencies coordinate the immediate response. Social development ministries seek to expand support programs. Fiscal authorities look for resources to finance new measures. At the same time, other institutions collect information on affected households.
Everyone is working, but not always in a coordinated way, as part of a single system. The result is often a slower, less coordinated and less effective response than the situation demands.
This challenge, less visible than the emergency itself, but just as important, is at the core of the publication Construyendo resiliencia: avances y desafíos de la protección social adaptativa (in English: “Building Resilience: Advances and Challenges in Adaptive Social Protection”), published by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The report presents a simple yet powerful idea: to respond better to crises, public systems need to work in a more integrated way. It is also accompanied by an interactive tool that allows countries to assess how prepared they are to respond to such crises.
The division of functions across institutions has enabled important progress in the specialization of risk management—for example, by strengthening technical capacities for disaster preparedness and response. However, when a large-scale crisis occurs, this fragmentation also highlights the need to strengthen coordination mechanisms across institutions.
Emergencies do not follow administrative boundaries between ministries or agencies. They often simultaneously affect income, employment, health, access to services, and the living conditions of millions of people.
In this context, responding effectively requires more than strong individual programs. It requires systems that operate in a coordinated way, integrating capacities and aligning responses to address the complexity of crises.
The adaptive social protection approach seeks to strengthen systems’ capacity to anticipate, absorb, and adapt to crises by better leveraging and coordinating existing institutions. This involves:
- Social programs that can scale up rapidly during emergencies.
- Updated social registries to identify the most vulnerable households.
- Information systems that enable data sharing across institutions.
- Coordination mechanisms that allow responses to be activated quickly.
To measure countries’ progress in this direction, the publication introduces an Adaptive Social Protection Maturity Model, accompanied by an interactive tool. This dashboard assesses seven key dimensions and classifies how prepared systems are to respond to shocks. The results show that while many countries have made progress in expanding social coverage, there is still significant room for improvement in policy integration and coordination.
Building social resilience does not depend solely on creating new programs or increasing public spending. It also requires improving how existing systems work together. This means:
- Sharing information across ministries and agencies.
- Designing agile and predictable response mechanisms.
- Framing public policies as part of an integrated system, rather than isolated interventions.
When social systems are effectively connected, they can respond more quickly and expand their capacity to reach those who need support most during a crisis.
More than expanding social protection, the challenge today is how to design systems capable of responding when they are needed most.
As the publication shows, resilience is strengthened when social programs, data, and institutions work in a coordinated way. In this process, the Maturity Model offers a pathway to measure and strengthen this capacity.
At the end of the day, the difference between a response and an effective one may depend on something seemingly simple: ensuring that public policies communicate with each other and operate as a system.
Learn more about the Adaptive Social Protection Maturity Model here (available in Spanish).