ANNOUNCEMENTS
As climate shocks and socio-economic risk increasingly overlap in rural India, traditional social protection interventions fail to deliver. This research explores how India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) can be an enhanced Adaptive Social Protection (ASP) intervention by deliberately designing its public works as effective Nature-based Solutions (NbS). Informed by a qualitative, comparative case study of two West Champaran, Bihar villages, this research assesses MGNREGA interventions against the IUCN Global Standard for NbS and measures their impact on the Adaptive Social Protection components of preparedness, coping, and adaptive capacity. The findings show synergistic, direct correlation: the project with a strong NbS design, which innovated criteria like inclusive governance and biodiversity net-gain, successfully built long-term adaptive capacity through resilient assets and new livelihoods. The project with a weak NbS design, which scored 'Insufficient' marks on economic viability and design at scale, provided limited coping support and no boost to community resilience. The research identifies systemic vulnerabilities in both, including failure to incorporate climate data in planning and weak economic analysis, which compromise the ASP system's building blocks. The research concludes that the evolution of MGNREGA requires a strategic policy shift from asset creation to the provision of measurable resilience outcomes, which is possible by mainstreaming NbS principles into the program's design, finance, and institutional framework to build real, long-term climate resilience for India's rural poor.
Keywords: Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Change Adaptation, Adaptive Social Protection, Nature-based Solutions, MGNREGA.
