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Paper short abstract:

Effective anti-poverty interventions require working "in" polycrisis (through sensitivity to contexts of intersecting challenges) and "on" polycrisis simultaneously to avoid impoverishment. This paper examines anti-poverty responses to polycrisis from DRM, the HDP nexus, and social protection.

Paper long abstract:

COVID-19 was one of multiple crises, though responses were often focused on singular hazards. Many anti-poverty responses during the pandemic worked “in” polycrisis, by being sensitive to the context of intersecting challenges. However, they often fell short of working “on” polycrisis simultaneously to manage contemporaneous crises in ways that could more effectively help avoid impoverishment.

This paper draws attention to anti-poverty interventions amidst polycrisis from policy/programming entry points of disaster risk management, the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, and social protection. During the pandemic, examples of manging the conflict-climate nexus sought to identify multiple hazards through early warnings and releasing contingency funds. Risk assessments and trigger designs in DRR were sometimes modified to account for the pandemic. There were also examples of social protection approaches used to respond to COVID-19 and disasters, though their low value and short duration made them largely inadequate in response to the multi-wave manifestations of the pandemic and the layering of crises over time. In this context, various household and community-level responses emerged to working “on” polycrisis.

From this analysis, the study makes recommendations for developing more effective anti-poverty interventions. It argues that equitably responding to polycrisis requires a range of investments including into cross-sectoral coordination pre-crises, shifting analysis and planning from single hazards to systemic risk, and ensuring that financing is sufficiently flexible to avoid one crisis crowding out funding for another. It is often a combination of these risk-informed responses and a commitment to equity that increase the effectiveness of working “in” and “on” polycrisis.