Challenges and Potentialities for Implementing Social Protection Responses to Emergency Through Decentralized Administration : Lessons from Brazil’s Auxilio Emergencial
With the advent of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), Brazil has come out with one of the fastest and most generous social protection responses globally. Auxilio Emergencial (AE’s) operation is in contrast to that of regular social protection pro...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Brasilia
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/undefined/099220101172240554/P17483609702e30c90b70f0a0d69d378aed http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36839 |
| Summary: | With the advent of Coronavirus
disease 2019 (COVID-19), Brazil has come out with one of the
fastest and most generous social protection responses
globally. Auxilio Emergencial (AE’s) operation is in
contrast to that of regular social protection programs due
to its highly centralized setup with limited formal
involvement of subnational governments. Therefore, this
analysis aims at understanding some core reasons why this
happened and what were the main implications of this
centralized operation to the program. The text also
describes measures that were enacted to mitigate challenges
due to the exclusion of subnational governments from the
operation of AE and discusses the extent to which these can
integrate traditional decentralization mechanisms of regular
programs in the future and further improve the sectoral case
management capacity at large. This paper is structured in
seven chapters. Chapter one is introduction, chapter two
presents a conceptual framework describing main forms of
decentralization and discussing their adequacy to different
contexts and traditional functions of the social protection
sector. Chapter three presents an overview of AE
highlighting its centralized setup and already discussing
some main reasons why traditional decentralization
mechanisms, such as the unified social assistance system
(SUAS), were not formal members of the program. Chapter four
discusses legacies of SUAS historical support to social
protection in Brazil and how these have contributed to AE
even if the system was not formally involved in the program.
Chapter five describes some main challenges faced by AE and
that can arguably have been mitigated had SUAS and or other
subnational governments been part of its formal operation.
Chapter six considers how SUAS and decentralized forms of
social protection were nevertheless relevant as
complementary measures to that provided by AE. Finally,
chapter seven concludes by summarizing some core lessons
learned for engaging decentralized mechanisms in emergency
responses in the future. |
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