On 2nd June, Common Ground and SETU held the inaugural session of a new Community of Practice on social protection in India, hosted on the iECHO platform. Around 40 participants joined from organisations working across multiple states, including Odisha, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, and Karnataka.
The problem this CoP is oriented around is specific. India has more than 3,000 central and state-level social protection schemes. The schemes exist. But for communities most exposed to climate shocks, income instability, and health crises, access remains deeply and persistently uneven. The gap is not primarily one of scheme availability. It is structural: field organisations working on livelihoods and natural resource management in commons-dependent geographies do not necessarily integrate social protection into their programmes, and the communities they work with often fall outside the reach of entitlement systems that were not designed with their contexts in mind. Last-mile barriers around awareness, documentation, and facilitation continue to block coverage where it matters most, and there is no consistent space where practitioners can work on those barriers together.
The Community of Practice is an attempt to create that space. It is not a training programme. Each session is built around a real field challenge brought by a participating organisation: a documentation bottleneck, a facilitation failure, a gap between scheme design and community reality. The session then moves through collective problem-framing, peer exchange drawing on experiences from other organisations, targeted expert input from SETU or external resource persons where gaps remain, and documented synthesis that becomes part of a shared repository. The aim is not just knowledge exchange but integration: social protection woven into existing field programmes, with the CoP providing the structure for that to happen over time.
Common Ground’s presence in commons-dependent geographies and its engagement with tribal and marginalised communities, combined with SETU’s expertise in last-mile social protection access, tested facilitation approaches, and experience in district-level saturation efforts, forms the basis for what this collaboration is trying to do. The geographic focus in this first phase is primarily Odisha and Jharkhand, with emerging engagement in Meghalaya and Karnataka.
The CoP will run for at least six months, hosted on iECHO. It is the second of two long-running learning programmes Common Ground has recently launched, the first being the Decentralised Governance Learning Series with CRISP and XISS. What connects them is a shared understanding: that the conditions for better governance and better access to entitlements are built through sustained, structured learning rooted in what is actually happening in the field