Project Area B consists of eight projects that examine the dynamics of coverage and generosity in case studies and small-N comparisons for selected countries or regions and specific social protection programmes. As in the first phase, the focus remains on qualitative in-depth studies, but some projects now also employ mixed-methods approaches by enriching the country and regional studies with quantitative analyses.

As a whole, the projects cover all world regions, but analytically they each focus on a specific horizontal and vertical type of interdependence: the question is how social programmes develop in the two dimensions under the influence of war, economic crises, pandemics, international organisations or transnational flows of ideas. The relevant contextual factors are taken into account when analysing the causal relationships.