تمهیدات مدیریت ریسک مبتنی بر جامعه : نقد و بررسی

Risk and its consequences pose a formidable threat to poverty reduction efforts. This article reviews a plethora of community-based risk management arrangements across the developing world. These types of arrangements are garnering greater interest in light of the growing recognition of the relative prominence of household- or individual-specific idiosyncratic risk as well as the increasing shift towards community-based development funding. The article discusses potential advantages (such as targeting, cost and informational) and disadvantages (such as exclusion and inability to manage correlated risk) of these arrangements, and their implications for the design of community-based social protection programs and policies.

Vulnerability to risk is increasingly recognized as one of the defining characteristics of poverty (World Bank, 2000). Over the past decade or so, this has generated a large amount of research on the various aspects of risk in developing countries, including the sources and types of risk, the effects of risk and shocks on poor households, and individual, household and community responses to risk.1 If risk is salient to understanding poverty dynamics, then an understanding of the strategies the poor employ to cope with shocks is also important for development policy and practice. Although many previous studies have examined community-based responses to risk in developing countries (most commonly, mutual insurance arrangements) and, in some cases, the extent to which they enable households to cope with shocks, none provide an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of the most commonly-observed arrangements. This article fills this gap by reviewing a broad range of sources in order to provide as extensive a coverage of existing arrangements as possible, including arrangements which have not yet received much scrutiny from researchers, yet are commonly instituted by states or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Given the increasing importance of community-based and community-driven development funding (Mansuri & Rao, 2004), as well as the growing recognition of the critical role of social protection policy in risk management and poverty reduction (Barrett, Carter, & Ikegami, 2008), we expect that this review will be of immediate interest to policymakers, practitioners and researchers. Community-based risk management arrangements (CBRMAs) have the potential to fill the gap between household-level and national-level strategies for risk management. These arrangements have the ability to help households cope with idiosyncratic shocks but are likely to break down in the face of covariate shocks (unless they find ways to transfer risk outside the community). However, there is always some idiosyncratic component in shocks, even largely covariate ones, because of differences among households in their exposure and capacity to respond to shocks. In addition, a growing body of empirical evidence indicates that idiosyncratic risk dominates covariate risk in rural Africa and Asia (Deaton, 1997, Kazianga and Udry, 2006, Lybbert et al., 2004, Morduch, 2006 and Townsend, 1995). This suggests the potential for CBRMAs to address a diverse range of shocks. Given these reasons, a review of existing CBRMAs can facilitate a better understanding of their limitations and advantages and help to devise ways in which to either bolster them or design new programs based on them. The CBRMAs reviewed in this article primarily offer social insurance, although a few facilities for community-based social assistance are also discussed. The review also emphasizes the limited empirical evidence that exists on the efficacy and role of external intervention. On the one hand, external intervention may be useful for bolstering CBRMAs in the face of covariate shocks and enabling the inclusion of excluded groups through well-targeted social assistance programs. On the other hand, it may also have adverse impacts on existing CBRMAs by disrupting information flow, cooperative decision-making and informal social insurance, among other things. The rest of the article is organized as follows: in Section 2, we define the main features of CBRMAs. In Section 3, we catalog a range of CBRMAs commonly observed across the developing world. In Section 4, we discuss the strengths and shortcomings of these arrangements. In Section 5, we discuss the policy implications for social protection programs which aim to support CBRMAs. Finally, in Section 6, we provide some concluding remarks.

There is widespread evidence that poor households often group together as part of informal community arrangements in order to reduce risk exposure and provide informal (typically incomplete) mutual insurance among group members. Such behaviors merit reinforcement, especially given the apparent relative importance of household- or individual-specific, idiosyncratic risk, which makes local risk management feasible, even desirable. This article reviews a plethora of CBRMAs across the developing world. However, evidence on which characteristics of community-based arrangements and their environments make them better candidates for outside intervention or scalability is limited. We therefore do not distinguish CBRMAs into different categories based on how successfully they can be supported by social protection interventions. Instead, in order to provide policymakers with some guidance regarding the design of policies to bolster community-based risk management, we discuss the gaps present in most CBRMAs, such as social exclusion and the small size of the risk pool, which social protection intervention can potentially fill. Notwithstanding, future studies that provide evidence on what features of such arrangements make them most suitable for outside intervention would provide compelling lessons. While CBRMAs potentially offer a useful basis for social protection programs, there exist no careful evaluations of the efficacy of or the rate of return to these arrangements and the extent to which they address problems of informational asymmetries and lower enforcement costs, either in absolute terms or relative to non-community-based models. In addition, existing evidence on the impact of external financing on crowding-out of private initiatives, opportunities for fraud and corruption, and the effectiveness and sustainability of community-based arrangements is limited. This should serve as caution to donors and policymakers planning to invest in community-based risk management programs. At the same time, there are sound reasons to believe that external intervention can effectively help CBRMAs to cope with covariate risk and address social exclusion, and may have crowding-in effects, thus making at least a preliminary case for extending such support. Empirical studies that fill the existing gaps in knowledge will therefore play an important role in informing future policy decisions regarding whether to bolster CBRMAs or allocate scarce resources elsewhere in efforts to address the pernicious effects of risk.