Working paperHumanitarian assistance and social protection in contexts of forced displacementEffects on social cohesionChristina Lowe, Heiner Salomon, Jessica Hagen-Zanker and Amanda Gray MeralMay 2022Key messagesWhere tensions exist around assistance to displaced people, they are rarely caused by the assistance itself; they are instead typically a symptom of existing social discontent within the host community. This often relates to perceived institutional neglect of hosts’ socioeconomic concerns and needs, and is best addressed by tackling these, rather than by reducing critical support for vulnerable displaced households.Perceptions of assistance influence cohesion dynamics more than the actual support provided. Social tensions are most likely to arise when assistance is perceived to be diverting resources or attention away from vulnerable citizens.International financing is therefore critical to ensure that assistance to displaced people can be delivered while maintaining existing services and filling prior gaps in provision for vulnerable citizens.Even if assistance is internationally financed, it may be publicly perceived to be state-funded, particularly if it is linked in some way with government systems. Such an assumption may strengthen recipients’ relations with the state but may also aggravate tensions among non-recipients. Programme framing is therefore key, and should be carefully tailored to the context. Readers are encouraged to reproduce material for their own publications, as long as they are not being sold commercially. ODI requests due acknowledgement and a copy of the publication. For online use, we ask readers to link to the original resource on the ODI website. The views presented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of ODI or our partners.This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.How to cite: Lowe et al. (2022) Humanitarian assistance and social protection in contexts of forced displacement: effects on social cohesion. London: ODI (www.odi.org/en/publications/humanitarian-assistance-and-social-protection-in-contexts-of-forced-displacement-effects-on-social-cohesion/) AcknowledgementsWe sincerely thank the entire project team for their invaluable contributions to this paper. In particular, we are indebted to the in-country primary research teams who collected the data and expertly produced the country-level analysis on which this paper draws: Simon Levine, Antoine Socpa, Nathalie Both and Felicien Fomekong for the Cameroon case study; Andrés Ham, Sandra García, María Cecilia Dedios, Ángela Guarín, Stephanie Majerowicz, Mariana Martínez Gómez and Camila Cuéllar Pizano for the Colombia case study; and Angelo Tramountanis, Apostolos Linardis, Aliki Mouriki, Patricia Gerakopoulou, Dimitra Kondyli, Olga Papaliou and Christina Varouxi for the Greece case study (alongside their wider research and enumeration teams). We are also immensely grateful to Nathalie Both for her work on the related Global Evidence Review publication, and to Babken Babajanian, Francesca Bastagli, Aliki Mouriki and Angelo Tramountanis who reviewed earlier drafts of this paper and provided invaluable comments. Thanks also to our project management and editorial colleagues who saw this paper through to publication, notably Roni Lee, Isadora Brizolara, Zara Mahdi, Nina Behrman and Steven Dickie. Finally, we thank the many displaced people and host community members, as well as the representatives from government, local, national and international organisations, who gave up their time in challenging circumstances to share their reflections and experiences with us. Without their generous participation, none of this research would have been possible.About this publicationThe overall aim of this project is to better understand effective mechanisms for linking social protection programmes and humanitarian assistance. By providing clearer guidance about when, how and why different linkages might be considered, the project will develop the theory, evidence base and operational guidance on how social protection systems and humanitarian systems can work together to meet the needs of those affected by displacement crises, including not only displaced people but vulnerable households in their host communities as well. The research is grounded in three country contexts with a total of six study sites that present different contexts of displacement and humanitarian response: Greece (Athens and Ioannina), Colombia (Bogotá and Cúcuta) and Cameroon (Far North and East). The project is led by ODI, who work in close collaboration with the Centre for Applied Social Sciences Research and Training (CASS-RT ) in Cameroon, the School of Government at the University of Los Andes in Colombia and the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE) in Greece.This work is part of the programme ‘Building the Evidence on Protracted Forced Displacement: A Multi-Stakeholder Partnership’. The programme is fund