The dialogue strongly echoed the Catalytic Agenda’s diagnosis that social protection remains marginal in FCAS despite evidence of feasibility and necessity. The Catalytic Agenda identifies structural obstacles, including political narrative and buy‑in, design and delivery challenges, chronic underinvestment, siloed approaches, and insufficiently resilient systems, reinforced by risk avoidance and weak transition planning. The discussions provided concrete illustrations of these barriers in practice in focus countries, but also others.
Developing the narrative and political buy-in
A recurring barrier is that social protection is still too often perceived narrowly as welfare, rather than as a strategic investment in stability, legitimacy, and recovery. The dialogue repeatedly returned to the importance of language and framing in strengthening support for social protection both within governments and more broadly across societies. In some settings, rights‑based language was seen as essential and foundational; in others, particularly under constrained fiscal politics, a social investment framing can resonate more effectively with finance actors and sceptical audiences.
Participants emphasised that narrative is not cosmetic: it shapes whether social protection is treated as central to national strategy and whether external actors justify sustained engagement – meaning that global and local alliances to help shape that narrative (and build further evidence for it, where necessary) will matter going forwards.
Investing in design and delivery: people, data, and systems
Design challenges in FCAS are less about missing models than about the gap between idealised designs and the realities of contested governance, weak delivery chains, and under‑resourced local actors. Examples include fragmented registries, unreliable payment systems, weak recognition of local solidarity mechanisms, and the risks of digital solutions without safeguards, alongside the frequent absence of transition planning.
The dialogue stressed that technology cannot substitute for people: social protection workers, local governance, and frontline capacity were highlighted as central to system resilience, while digital tools were seen as useful (especially to showcase Public Financial Management (PFM) and accountability-related capacities for future funding and compliance), but insufficient.
Moving away from chronic underinvestment and the “wrong kind” of finance
Underinvestment is not only about inadequate volume; it is also about volatility, short cycles, and risk avoidance that produce stop-start programmes and parallel systems. Participants described a financing environment in which social protection was already chronically underfunded and is now shaped by shrinking humanitarian and development budgets, restructuring within agencies, and high competition for limited resources. These pressures were linked to fragmentation, which ultimately affects outcomes in recipient countries: many small financing packages, each with its own requirements and ‘earmarking’, and incentives for agencies to compete for visibility while demonstrating ‘impact’ against narrowly defined objectives such as number of people served, rather than contribution to system strengthening.
Phasing out siloed approaches and weak transition planning
Humanitarian, development, peace and climate actors still too often operate in parallel, even when rhetoric emphasises nexus approaches. Participants emphasised that transition planning is too often late or absent. As an emblematic example, data handovers are disrupted by (generic/vague rather than specific) data protection, privacy and security concerns in the absence of agreed protocols and thorough risk management frameworks.
There were thus calls for humanitarian cash and protection programming to more systematically link with social protection so that this could serve as a ‘ramp’ or ‘bridge’ into developing and strengthening national systems. Within this, priorities should be set by national actors from a systems building, comprehensive (across all social protection pillars), medium-term, capacity-informed viewpoint, and not by humanitarian agencies.
Investing in resilient systems and financing through crises
A core FCAS reality is that systems are most needed when they are most likely to fail; contingency planning and shock-response mechanisms can sustain systems during turbulence. This was discussed as both a technical and political conversation, hinging on the importance of ‘continuity of support’. When conflict escalates or governance shifts, risk tolerance often decreases precisely when maintaining support is most important. Participants stressed that the goal should be to protect support, including through temporary shifts in delivery modality that keep the same system architecture alive.