Shocking social safety: Evidence from violence and drought in North-east Nigeria

Wolfgang Stojetz, Piero Ronzani, Tilman Brück, Jeanne Pinay and Marco d'Errico

No 420, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: Polycrises created by violent conflict and climate change are ubiquitous. Yet, the impacts of conflict and climatic shocks on human behavior and welfare have largely been studied in isolation. This paper studies the joint impact of conflict and climatic shocks on households’ social safety nets in fragile settings. Drawing on unique panel survey data from 1,293 households in North-east Nigeria, we document that experiencing a violence shock increases the strength of households’ social safety nets (SSN) when they do not experience a simultaneous drought shock. Yet, experiencing a violence shock decreases SSN strength when they experience a drought shock in addition. This perilous interaction between violence and drought shocks is concentrated in poorer local environments. When the local level of economic resources is high, in relative terms, the positive impact of a violence shock on SSN is dominant. However, when the level of economic resources is low, the influence of droughts shocks rises substantially and experiencing both a drought and a violence shock diminishes social safety drastically. Our findings emphasize the need for and potential of concerted social protection programs that account for the compounding vulnerability from poverty, conflict and climatic change in fragile settings.

Keywords: armed conflict; climate change; drought; polycrisis; social safety nets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D74 I32 O12 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hicn.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/HiCN-WP-420.pdf Full PDF document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hic:wpaper:420

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tilman Brück () and () and () and ().