Overview

The Social Protection research theme has gained years of experience working on topics related to poverty and social protection to support evidence-based policy making as well as evaluations of programmes and policies. Researchers in this theme are particularly concerned with areas which play multiple and integral roles in the achievement of human development, and which relate to the proximate, intermediate and ultimate sources of economic growth, such as social protection, education or labour market policies. Our research is mainly empirical in nature and often set at the micro level. In our work, we apply both quantitative and qualitative research methods in a complementary way.

At the conceptual level, our research contributes to the theoretical and empirical understanding of the links between social protection, institutions and human development; it seeks to further the conceptual discussion on poverty, inequality and well-being, and how they can be measured within a given societal context. We have expertise on poverty analysis, social protection mapping, social protection capacity building, impact evaluations, microsimulations and fiscal space analysis. In this, our research is closely linked to the other research themes within UNU-MERIT through work on topics such as conflict, migration, public policy and economic growth.
Our work can be clustered into three main themes:

1. Poverty, vulnerability and inequality;
2. Social protection policy design; and,
3. Humanitarian social policy.

The staff in our research group has many years of experience of engaging in various institutional consultancies for diverse international organisations, including but not limited to UNICEF, ILO, World Bank, OECD, ADB, WFP and UNDP.