Migration and Social Protection: A Concept Paper

This paper attempts to locate ‘migration’ within a social protection framework both theoretically and empirically. We add to the dominant theoretical discourse around social protection by introducing a ‘transformative’ element. It unravels the links between social protection and migration by exploring migration-specific vulnerabilities.This paper makes a distinction between migration as a social protection strategy and migration as leading to vulnerabilities that require specific social protection instruments. The empirical literature on migration and social protection is reviewed in the second part of the paper with the aim of providing a foundation from which to build future work.