This paper examines the potential for jointly funded long-term cash transfers to form part of social protection in unstable situations. It argues that there are three essential challenges: financing – how to provide longer term, more harmonised and predictable funding for social transfers in unstable situations; actors and delivery capacity – which actors or combinations of actors could deliver social transfers at scale (governments, NGOs, UN agencies, or the private sector); mechanisms – the form a social transfer should take (food or cash).