Emotionally Responsive Social Assistance: Towards ‘Just’ Processes for the Poorest and Most Marginalised People in Crises Contexts

Marginalised people are disproportionally impacted by protracted crises, which increases their poverty deprivation, and the risks they face, by exacerbating pre-existing inequalities. This has destabilising emotional effects, leading to individual and collective trauma, on top of which are added poverty stigma and shame. Social assistance processes grounded in the same discriminatory systems may amplify emotional distress. Yet little is known about how these compounded emotional impacts interact and the implications for providing social assistance in crisis. Through creative, participatory and narrative research methodologies with 58 marginalised participants we explored the layered emotional and psychosocial aspects of social assistance in protracted crises: working with disabled people, widows, single mothers and older people in east and north-east Uganda, and women with disabilities, rural youth and religious minorities in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Our methodologies enabled participants to generate evidence about tacit emotional aspects of their experiences, providing deeper knowledge to inform policy and practice. Our marginalised participants face the harmful legacies of multiple protracted crises, amplified by structural violence and poverty stigma. This manifests in layered feelings of stress, despair, shame, frustration, and hopelessness; negative emotional states that were worsened when trying to access social assistance. Unfair, unsafe, discriminatory and undignified social assistance processes generated upset, fear and frustration, intensified hurt and shame, and exacerbated desperation after support hopes were dashed. This understanding is crucial to inclusive, just social assistance policy and we point forward to how participatory action research approaches can build cross-stakeholder dialogue, and productive collaborations towards emotionally responsive social assistance programming.