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Handbook of Social Policy and Development
 1785368427, 9781785368424

Table of contents :
Contents
List of contributors
Introduction to the Handbook of Social Policy and Development • James Midgley, Rebecca Surender and Laura Alfers
PART I: SOCIAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT: ORIGINSAND PROGRESSION
1 Social policy and development: an overview • James Midgley
2 The social policy nexus and development: convergence, divergence and dynamic change • Rebecca Surender
PART II: KEY ISSUES AND DEBATES
3 Shaping society from below: social movements, social policyand development • Laura Alfers
4 Gender: toward gender equality and poverty reduction • Leila Patel
5 Global social policy in a development context: ideas, actors and implementation • Huck-ju Kwon
6 The SDGs: towards a social development approach in the 2030 Agenda? • Marian Urbina-Ferretjans
7 Social and human rights • Hartley Dean
8 Social policy and urban development • Jo Beall
9 Rural development • Amrita Datta
10 The environment and development: fight against poverty and/or protection of the environment – a conflict of interests? • Karl Falkenberg
11 Security and development • Dina Kiwan
12 World-regional social governance, policy and development • Nicola Yeates
13 The informal economy and informal employment • Francie Lund
14 Employment-based social protection: ‘productivism’, universalism and social citizenship • Michael Rogan and Laura Alfers
PART III: SERVICES, PROGRAMMES AND POLICY SECTORS
15 Health and development • Amrit Virk
16 Education, social policy and development • Mayumi Terano
17 Housing, development and social justice • James Lee
18 Social insurance, pensions and development • James Midgley
19 Social assistance, poverty and development • James Midgley
20 Conditional income transfers, social policy and development • Armando Barrientos
21 Social work and family services • Antoinette Lombard
22 Financial inclusion and microfinance • Philip Mader and Solène Morvant-Roux
23 Community development programmes • Manohar Pawar
24 NGOs and their role in the welfare mix • Roosa Jolkkonen
Index

Citation preview

JOBNAME: EE1 - Midgley PAGE: 1 SESS: 4 OUTPUT: Wed Apr 24 13:36:50 2019

HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT

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Handbook of Social Policy and Development

Edited by

James Midgley Harry and Riva Specht Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School, School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Rebecca Surender Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford, UK

Laura Alfers Research Associate in Sociology, Rhodes University, South Africa

Cheltenham, UK

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Northampton, MA, USA

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© James Midgley, Rebecca Surender and Laura Alfers 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2018967821 This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection DOI 10.4337/9781785368431

ISBN 978 1 78536 842 4 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78536 843 1 (eBook)

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Contents

List of contributors

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Introduction to the Handbook of Social Policy and Development James Midgley, Rebecca Surender and Laura Alfers PART I 1 2

4 5

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7 8 9

SOCIAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT: ORIGINS AND PROGRESSION

Social policy and development: an overview James Midgley The social policy nexus and development: convergence, divergence and dynamic change Rebecca Surender

PART II 3

1

14

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KEY ISSUES AND DEBATES

Shaping society from below: social movements, social policy and development Laura Alfers Gender: toward gender equality and poverty reduction Leila Patel Global social policy in a development context: ideas, actors and implementation Huck-ju Kwon The SDGs: towards a social development approach in the 2030 Agenda? Marian Urbina-Ferretjans Social and human rights Hartley Dean Social policy and urban development Jo Beall Rural development Amrita Datta

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The environment and development: fight against poverty and/or protection of the environment – a conflict of interests? Karl Falkenberg Security and development Dina Kiwan World-regional social governance, policy and development Nicola Yeates The informal economy and informal employment Francie Lund Employment-based social protection: ‘productivism’, universalism and social citizenship Michael Rogan and Laura Alfers

PART III 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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SERVICES, PROGRAMMES AND POLICY SECTORS

Health and development Amrit Virk Education, social policy and development Mayumi Terano Housing, development and social justice James Lee Social insurance, pensions and development James Midgley Social assistance, poverty and development James Midgley Conditional income transfers, social policy and development Armando Barrientos Social work and family services Antoinette Lombard Financial inclusion and microfinance Philip Mader and Solène Morvant-Roux Community development programmes Manohar Pawar NGOs and their role in the welfare mix Roosa Jolkkonen

Index

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Contributors

Laura Alfers is a Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at Rhodes University in South Africa and the Director of the Social Protection Programme at the global action-research-policy network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). Laura’s research interests centre on the intersections of social policy, urban policy and employment, particularly informal employment. Her most recent articles appear in the International Social Security Review, Environment and Urbanization and Agenda. Armando Barrientos is Emeritus Professor of Poverty and Social Justice at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester in the UK. His research interests focus on the linkages existing between welfare programmes and labour markets in developing countries, and on policies addressing poverty, vulnerability and population ageing. His most recent books are Social Protection for the Poor and Poorest (co-editor with D. Hulme, Palgrave, 2008); Just Give Money to the Poor (co-author with J. Hanlon and D. Hulme, Kumarian Press, 2010) and Social Assistance in Developing Countries (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Jo Beall is a Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK. Her expertise lies in international development policy, particularly in the context of cities. She was formerly on the Executive Board of the British Council, Deputy Vice Chancellor at University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Professor in International Development at the LSE. Her specialist research interests are gender and social development; urban development and governance; and cities in conflict-affected states. She has significant research experience in South Africa, Pakistan and Afghanistan and has also undertaken research and policy advice in Colombia, Bangladesh, India, and in a number of African countries. Amrita Datta is an Assistant Professor of Development Studies at the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. Amrita’s research interests are in the areas of rural–urban migration, gender and development, and village and longitudinal studies. Her research has been published in several edited volumes and journals such as the Journal of Development Studies, Children’s Geographies, Indian vii

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Journal of Labour Economics and the Economic and Political Weekly. She was an Associate Editor of the Indian Journal of Human Development from 2014–16. Hartley Dean is Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK. His 30-year academic career was preceded by a 12-year career as a welfare rights worker in a deprived multicultural inner-London neighbourhood, which is where the practical foundations of his commitment to social policy were laid. The focus of his teaching and research has stemmed from his concerns with poverty, social justice and welfare rights. He is now part-retired, but currently working to produce an extensively revised edition of his earlier work on Understanding Human Need (first published by Policy Press, 2010). His other recent publications include: Social Policy (Polity, 2006, 2012 and 2018, plus Chinese language editions), Social Rights and Human Welfare (Routledge, 2015), Social Advantage and Disadvantage (co-editor with L. Platt, Oxford University Press, 2016). He is a past editor of the Journal of Social Policy. Karl Falkenberg has been a European Union (EU) official for the last 40 years, responsible for both international trade negotiations and environmental policies. He represented the EU in the Rio+20 Conference and participated as Senior Negotiator in the negotiations for the establishment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He wrote a report to the EU Commission on the implementation of the SDGs in the EU, titled ‘Sustainability Now’. He was attached to Oxford University, UK as a Senior Fellow and now works as an independent consultant and lecturer on sustainability issues. Roosa Jolkkonen is a DPhil candidate/researcher at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research interests comprise third sector actors, transnational social policy transfer and social policies in the Global South, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her doctoral study examines contemporary philanthropic development aid and the distinctiveness of its social policy influence within the changing aid landscape. She has previously worked in research positions at national and international institutions. Dina Kiwan is Reader in Comparative Education, University of Birmingham, UK. In 2015–2016, she was the Centre for Lebanese Studies Fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, UK; and previously was Associate Professor in Sociology at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, from 2012 to 2016. Her research programme focuses on citizenship and inclusion, and is interdisciplinary and comparative in

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scope. Her interests centre around sociological and politico-philosophical examinations of inclusive citizenship through the lens of education policy, naturalization policy and migration policy, in particular in the context of pluralist and multicultural societies, and also societies in conflict. This critical policy analysis is complemented by the study of the ‘marginalized’ and ‘vulnerable’ and how they constitute themselves as political actors. Her book Education for Inclusive Citizenship (Routledge, 2008) was awarded Second Prize for Best Book in Education published in 2008 by the Society for Educational Studies. Huck-ju Kwon is Professor at Graduate School of Public Administration, and the Asia Development Institute, Seoul National University, Korea. His research interest is in global social policy, international development cooperation and political theory of social policy. He is co-editor of Global Social Policy. His publications include ‘Poverty Reduction and Good Governance’ (Development and Change 45(2), 2014), Transforming the Developmental Welfare State in East Asia (Palgrave, 2005), and ‘Implications of the Sustainable Development Goals for Global Social Policy’ (Global Social Policy 17(2), 2017). James Lee is formerly Professor and Head of the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He specializes in comparative housing and social policy in East Asia. His research focuses on home ownership, asset-based housing policy and social development with a special interest on institutional arrangements facilitating both social and economic objectives. He publishes in international journals such as Housing Studies, Pacific Review, Policy and Politics, Environment and Planning and Economic Geography. His representative books include Social Policy and Change in East Asia (Lexington Books, 2014), The Crisis of Welfare in East Asia (Lexington Books, 2007), Housing and Social Change: East West Perspectives (Routledge, 2003) and Housing, Home Ownership and Social Change in Hong Kong (Ashgate, 1999). Antoinette Lombard is Professor in Social Work and Head of the Department of Social Work and Criminology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her research focus includes developmental social work and social development. She has a keen research interest in social work’s contribution to sustainable development. Her research has contributed to the conceptualization of developmental social work in South Africa. In 2015, she received a national award from the Minister of Science and Technology as the second runner-up of the Distinguished Women in Science Award (WISA) in the category Humanities and Social

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Sciences. She has been a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF) since 2017, and is a rated researcher at the South African National Research Foundation. Francie Lund is a South African who initially trained as a sociologist and social worker. She taught in the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her abiding interest in epistemological issues led her to combine quantitative and qualitative research methods. Changing Social Policy: The Child Support Grant in South Africa (HSRC Press, 2008) is her account of chairing the Lund Committee on Child and Family Support in 1995, which led to the first significant post-apartheid social policy reform, the introduction of a cash transfer for children. She was Director of the Social Protection Programme of the global research and advocacy network, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), exploring possibilities for improved social protection for poorer informal women workers in the Global South and North. She has worked as researcher and policy consultant for many international organizations and agencies such as the Africa Union, International Labour Organization (ILO), the European Commission, the World Bank, UN Women, UN Research Institute for Social Development, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development. Philip Mader holds the position of Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton, UK. As a sociologist and political economist, he works on finance, money, labour and development. He is the author of The Political Economy of Microfinance: Financializing Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and an editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Financialization (co-editor with Daniel Mertens and Natascha van der Zwan, forthcoming). His research at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (Cologne, Germany) was awarded the German Thesis Award and the Otto Hahn Medal. James Midgley is Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley, USA. He previously served as the Dean of the School of Social Welfare (1997 to 2006) and held the Harry and Riva Specht Chair in Public Social Services from 1997 to 2016 when he retired from full-time academic work. He has published widely on issues of social development, international social welfare and social policy. Among his most recent books are Social Development: Theory and Practice (SAGE, 2014), Social Welfare for a Global Era: International Perspectives on Policy and Practice (SAGE, 2017), Future Directions in Social Development (co-editor with Manohar Pawar; Palgrave, 2017) and

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Social Investment and Social Welfare: International and Critical Perspectives (co-editor with Espen Dahl and Amy Conley Wright, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and has held honorary professorial appointments at Nihon Fukishi University in Japan, the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Sun Yat-sen University in China. Solène Morvant-Roux is assistant professor in socioeconomy at the University of Geneva, Switzerland; she is sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Her research looks at financialization of the social reproduction of diverse population segments of the Global South. At the macro level her research is part of a critical approach to understanding the accumulation processes unfolding on the frontiers of global finance. She mostly works in Mexico (rural and peri-urban settings). She has been involved in several important research projects and has published several peer-reviewed papers and books. Leila Patel is the South African Research Chair in Welfare and Social Development and the Director of the Centre for Social Development in Africa (CSDA) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She has published widely on issues of social development in South Africa and internationally. Professor Patel’s research interests include social welfare policy, social protection, gender, care, the social services and children and youth. Her work experience spans academia, government, non-profit organisations and private sector social involvement initiatives. She was the former Director General of Welfare in the Mandela government and played a leading role in the development of South Africa’s welfare policy after apartheid. Her recent books are Development, Social Policy and Community Action: Lessons from Below (co-editor with Marianne Ulriksen, HSRC Press, 2017), Social Welfare and Social Development (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Social Protection in Southern Africa (coeditor with James Midgley and Marianne Ulriksen, Routledge, 2014). In 2014 she received the Distinguished Woman Scientist Award in the Humanities and the Social Sciences from the South African Ministry of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation. Manohar Pawar is Professor of Social Work, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, a member of the Institute for Land Water and Society, Charles Sturt University, Australia, and is the President of the International Consortium for Social Development. He has received several honours and awards, including an invitation to deliver the 2017 Hokenstad International lecture, USA; a Lifetime Achievement Award 2017 by the

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National Association of Professional Social Workers in India; and the citation award for outstanding contributions to student learning from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2008. His interests and publications include: Empowering Social Workers: Virtuous Practitioners (co-editor with R. Hugman, A. Alexabdra and A.W. Anscombe, Springer, 2017), Future Directions in Social Development (co-editor with J. Midgley, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Social and Community Development Practice (SAGE, 2014), Reflective Social Work Practice (with A.B. Anscombe, Cambridge University Press, 2015), Water and Social Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), International Social Work (with D. Cox, SAGE, 2013) and SAGE Handbook of International Social Work (coeditor with K. Lyons, T. Hokenstad, N. Huegler and N. Hall, SAGE, 2012). Michael Rogan is an Associate Professor in the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) at Rhodes University in South Africa and a research associate in the global research-policy-action network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). He holds a PhD and a Masters degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. Professor Rogan’s recent work has focused largely on informal employment, gender, poverty, food security, education and skills development, and survey design. Rebecca Surender is a Pro Vice-Chancellor for Equality and Diversity at the University of Oxford, UK. She holds a Senior Research Fellowship at the Department for Social Policy and Intervention at Oxford, and is a Fellow of Green Templeton College. Professor Surender’s research and publications are primarily in the area of health and social policy in developing countries. She has worked as a consultant and advisor for various multilateral and government agencies including the World Bank, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and she is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Rhodes University, South Africa. Previous edited books and monographs include Social Policy in a Developing World (co-editor with R. Walker, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013), Attitudes to Work and Social Security in South Africa (with P. Ntshongwana and M. Noble, HSRC Press, 2007) and Welfare State Change: Towards a Third Way? (co-editor with J. Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2004). Mayumi Terano is the Expert for Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), working as the Academic Advisor for the Faculty of

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International Business and Humanities / Liberal Arts and Culture Center at Egypt–Japan University of Science and Technology, Egypt. She is also a Visiting Researcher for the Institute of Education, University College London, UK. She specializes in social and comparative analysis in education, focused mainly on higher education policy and administration. Her publication and professional works are concerned with internationalization of higher education, education and social justice, and education policy reform in development contexts. Marian Urbina-Ferretjans is a Program Management Specialist at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in Washington, DC, USA. Her research interests focus on global social policy and South–South and triangular cooperation in the social and health sectors. She was an International Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), at the United Nations University – Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS) in Tokyo. She has also worked for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in the Latin America and the Caribbean Division in New York, and in the Philippines and China Country Offices. She obtained her doctorate in social policy from the University of Oxford, UK. Amrit Virk is a researcher based at the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development at the University of Leeds, UK. In the past, she has taught Social Policy at the University of Oxford, UK and Thammasat University, Thailand. Amrit’s research and publications are generally in the area of health policy and health systems research, spanning work in Sierra Leone, India, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. Nicola Yeates is Professor of Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy and Criminology at the Open University. She has published widely on social policy and social development internationally through the lens of globalizing and regionalizing processes. An ongoing theme of her research is how social diversity, divisions and inequalities are constructed, manifested and contested through myriad trans-border social processes. Recent books include Understanding Global Social Policy (Policy Press, 2nd edn 2014), The Global Social Policy Reader (co-editor with C. Holden, Policy Press, 2009), Globalising Care Economies and Migrant Workers (Palgrave, 2009), World-Regional Social Policy and Global Governance (co-editor with B. Deacon, M.C. Macovei and L. Van Langenhove, Routledge, 2010) and Health Worker Migration and Recruitment: Global Governance, Politics and Policy (with J. Pillinger, Routledge, 2019).

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Introduction to the Handbook of Social Policy and Development James Midgley, Rebecca Surender and Laura Alfers

While the study of social policy in the developing world goes back many decades it is nevertheless the case that extensive and sustained attention to the subject has been largely a twenty-first-century phenomenon. To a large degree this renewed focus has been driven by fast-changing developments on the ground; specifically that we now see in many low income and emerging economies the formation of a new ‘world of welfare’ with unique and often very large social assistance programmes, services, budgets and huge coverage. To take just one illustration, the largest social safety assistance programmes in the world are now provided by China, India and Brazil and cover almost 500 million people (a figure equivalent to the European population), and social pensions, child benefits and other cash transfers are now customary in many if not most low and middle income countries. The importance of universal health care for instrumental and ethical reasons, or social protection for mitigating the consequences of an increasingly globalized and ‘disrupted’ world, is now embedded in the work of the international aid and donor agencies. Consequently, there is fresh interest in evaluating the outcomes and impact of these reforms and understanding the political factors driving this new welfare expansion in the developing world. Within social policy and political science there is growing debate about the extent to which the ‘old’ theories of the development of the welfare state, or contemporary theories of new social risk, can explain this case of welfare expansion. Similarly, although originally focused on economic growth and industrialization, development studies is now routinely engaged with issues of social welfare and poverty reduction. While the analytic determinants and drivers of current trends may remain disputed, recognition of the importance of social policy and welfare in the developing world has indisputably gathered momentum. It is within this context that the Handbook of Social Policy and Development is located. It utilizes the different analytic models, theories and concepts which have developed within the two interdisciplinary fields of social policy and development studies to provide an up-to-date, 1

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comprehensive and critical introduction to some of the key issues and debates in the study and provision of human welfare in low and middle income countries. Between them, the chapters provide an analysis of the challenges and opportunities facing welfare and social policy systems in the Global South, and examine the current strategies for addressing these challenges. The various motivations, actors, instruments and innovations involved in the provision of social welfare are outlined, and the implications of current social policy dynamics for the future of welfare outcomes in those regions are examined. The book seeks to make these dynamics and practicalities accessible to a broad and multidisciplinary readership. Moving beyond a narrow conceptualization of food or cash, the volume adopts a broad definition of social policy which includes a range of public, private and informal mechanisms that provide income support, assets or services to vulnerable or marginalized communities. As illustrated within and across the various chapters, a variety of local, national and international actors and institutions are involved and normative debates about goals and practical debates about methods surround every sector and initiative. Moreover, the book adopts a comparative approach and illustrates the various issues, programmes and services with reference to a range of different countries and policy sectors. In particular, the Handbook makes an explicit case for enhancing greater collaboration and integration between the two interdisciplinary fields of ‘policy’ and ‘development’ in order to arrive at a more incisive and comprehensive analysis of welfare arrangements in the developing world. Although both are committed to the goal of better understanding and promoting human welfare in the Global South, there has been little relationship between scholars and each field has adopted distinctive conceptual frameworks, research agendas and approaches to policy and practice. However, as evidenced here in the various chapter topics and multidisciplinary backgrounds of the contributors, there is clearly a case for closer collaboration between social policy and development studies. Harnessing the extensive research undertaken and insights in both fields allows for an analysis of welfare processes and institutions that is more broad ranging and overcomes the conceptual and methodological limitations of each when seeking to understand the diversity and complexity of the developing world’s welfare needs and dynamics. Equally, this volume questions the recent discourse found in both comparative social policy and development economics, that classic (that is, Western) explanatory theories for analysing welfare processes and outcomes are less relevant for the study of the developing world. It is commonly asserted that differences across the actors, structures and

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procedures that comprise systems of governance, as well as the historic legacy and economic conditions that frame them, means that traditional frameworks of comparative welfare policy in ‘advanced’ economies are not applicable to the transitioning economies of the South. However, as illustrated here, the past decade has witnessed a fast pace of change and a progressively integrated world in terms of policy developments. In this context, compartmentalization of welfare theory and practice in Western countries from those in the Global South, increasingly makes little sense. Whether analysing the policy mix provided by social institutions such as families, communities, civil society, employers, firms and government – defining the scope of the ‘needs’ addressed or the coverage of the population – or evaluating the mode of delivery and financing, or the level or quality of provision aspired to, the chapters in this collection suggest that the variance between Global North and South is becoming smaller and less significant than is often assumed. This means that not only are traditional conceptual frameworks relevant for understanding events and dynamics in the South, but also, in turn, these analytic frameworks are strengthened and enhanced.

SCOPE AND STRUCTURE OF THE HANDBOOK The Handbook is divided into three parts, concerned with social policy and development and the major social policy and welfare sectors and interventions in a development context. Part I, ‘Social Policy and Development: Origins and Progression’, provides a theoretical and historical introduction to the book, tracing the evolution of social policy and development studies as academic and practice fields, and providing theoretical insights into key concepts and frameworks such as welfare and development. In Chapter 1, James Midgley argues that despite divergent histories and pathways (and ongoing belief among some that they have little in common) social policy and development studies have much to offer each other and much to gain from greater collaboration. The first half of his introductory chapter provides a detailed historical overview of the emergence of both interdisciplinary fields after the Second World War and contrasts their evolution and current characteristics. Historically concerned with Western ‘welfare states’, established social services and other national-level statutory intervention, Midgley argues that theoretical analysis within social policy has become more sophisticated and comparative inquiry has been broadened rapidly to include non-Western and industrialized countries, though it continues to employ a predominantly

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macro-statist approach to study the policies of these countries. The chapter proceeds to review the establishment and progress of development studies in the post-war period, again arguing that as economists, political scientists and sociologists became involved in the field, a broader theoretical interest in the factors that promote rapid economic growth and the well-being of the population (issues of poverty and inequality, education and health care, among others), emerged. The rest of the chapter traces the history of scholarly work about social welfare in the Global South to reiterate the call for closer collaboration between the two fields of study. Examples include the extensive research undertaken into social security in social policy, and social development’s long engagement with non-formal welfare institutions, co-operatives and social movements, and their role in promoting social welfare. Midgley concludes by arguing that this research paves the way for closer collaboration between the two subjects and may ultimately result in the synthesis of their work. In Chapter 2, Rebecca Surender argues that the past two decades have witnessed a rising interest in the significance of social policy in the management of welfare and risk in the developing world and a growing recognition that social development and economic development are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing. However, she suggests that despite the emerging consensus about the importance of social protection itself there has been no corresponding agreement about the utility of social policy as an academic field for developing contexts. In particular, the extent to which the analytic models and concepts for the study of social policy, established in the industrialized West and North, are transportable to a developing country context, remains disputed. The chapter traces some of the main stages in the shifting global discourse about the desirability and feasibility of social policy in low income countries and examines the extent to which the actors, institutions and ideas involved in shaping social policy in the Global South vary systematically in role and relative importance from those in the North. The discussion focuses on three current issues – the emergence of new philanthropic donors, the expansion of the developmental state model, and the surfacing of the notion of social rights and social citizenship – and suggests that there is evidence of both continued divergences but also new convergence across the actors, institutions and ideas involved in shaping social policy in both hemispheres. However, the chapter concludes by cautioning that rising heterogeneity within the developing world together with the fluid and dynamic pace of change mitigates against predictable models or typologies of ‘Third World’ social policy

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paradigms or a linear trajectory or ‘catch-up logic’ with the West in terms social policy advancement. Part II of the Handbook, ‘Key Issues and Debates’, is concerned with a number of topics related to the fields of social policy and development. These chapters show that very often both fields have engaged with issues such as poverty, gender and human rights, but from different perspectives. Discussing these issues, these chapters argue for a sharing of ideas and integration of conceptual approaches. Some chapters discuss issues that are largely distinctive to each field or, as in the case of the informal economy, are only starting to become a serious topic of investigation for both fields. The need to exchange knowledge in these and other fields is explored. In Chapter 3, Laura Alfers considers the role of social movements in initiating, engaging with, challenging and resisting social change from below. She reviews the different ways that both social policy scholarship and development theory have positioned social movements. Alfers argues that while the social movement and post-development literature does much to stress the difference of the development context from that in which the study of social policy originally developed, the social policy literature adds a much-needed focus on the material gains that have been made by social movements. Chapter 4 by Leila Patel provides an overview of changing frameworks for understanding gender and development, from women in development (WID) through to gender and development (GAD) and into the current Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) era. The chapter highlights the key tension that exists between addressing women’s material, everyday needs and challenging structural imbalances in gender relations. Patel illustrates this tension through an examination of cash transfers which have risen to prominence at the intersections of social policy and development, arguing that whilst these have demonstrated their ability to address women’s poverty, questions still remain about their capacity to effect a more structural transformation in gender relations. Following this, in Chapter 5, Huck-ju Kwon examines global social policy and its relationship to development, providing a conceptual overview of the field which provides answers to questions such as what constitutes global social policy, what differentiates it from national social policy, and how it is made and implemented at international and national levels. Kwon then moves onto a more grounded discussion of the development of global social policy instruments in the post-Second World War period, up to and including the United Nations SDGs. Ultimately, he argues, it is the integration of global social policy frameworks into national

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legislation and policy which has proven critical to the path of national development. In Chapter 6, Marian Urbina-Ferretjans picks up on the theme of the SDGs within the context of the 2030 global social development agenda. Drawing on both development and social policy literatures – and arguing that is necessary to work through both if shifts in global development are to become visible – she compares the SDGs with its forerunner, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The chapter argues that it is possible to discern a shift from the pro-poor perspective of the MDGs to a social development perspective within the SDGs, incorporating a greater focus on productivist and economic rationales for social policy provision, whilst maintaining an emphasis on universalism. UrbinaFerretjans links this shifts to the greater participation from countries of the Global South (such as the BRICS group of countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), not only in development policy processes, but also as providers of development assistance. In Chapter 7, Hartley Dean discusses the subject of social and human rights, providing an overview of the emergence and construction of different rights traditions. He points out that the engagement between rights-based approaches – which originally developed in the Global North – and social development approaches from the Global South have resulted in a greater focus on human rights within a social policy discipline that has traditionally focused on social rights. Dean goes on to show that, within social development, there are competing interpretations of the role that rights can play, arguing that it is essential for social policy to critically engage with these different interpretations if the two areas of study are to find a greater synthesis with one another. Chapters 8 and 9 focus on urbanization and rural development, respectively. In Chapter 8, Jo Beall brings attention to the challenges posed by rapid urbanization to a development framework which has traditionally oriented itself around rural contexts. Her chapter explores two areas of social policy which are most closely linked with urban development agendas – access to shelter and basic services, and livelihood opportunities – providing an analysis of the challenges city governments face in addressing these issues, located as they are between local communities and national governments. The chapter highlights a shift, encapsulated within the New Urban Agenda, away from urban development solutions which revolve around individual or community-based action, to one which focuses on city governments as agents of development and policy implementation. This highlights the need for social policy, which has often focused more strongly on the national level of

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government, to consider more fully the role of the municipal governments in policy changes and implementation. Despite increasing urbanization, more than half the world’s population still live in rural areas, albeit in a context of increasingly complex interactions with cities. In Chapter 9, Amrita Datta turns attention back to rural development and analyses the different ways in which the social policy and development literatures have characterized the subject. Tracing these differences through a range of theoretical perspectives – from modernization theory through to participatory development – she shows that while social policy perspectives have emphasized rural development as a state policy, the development literature has focused more on the role of non-state actors in processes of change in rural societies. Datta argues that there has been increasing convergence between the two areas of research, although differences remain which call for greater interaction between the two fields. The environment is the subject of Chapter 10, where Karl Falkenberg interrogates the supposed trade-off between environmental protection policies and social development. He provides a historical overview of various multilateral processes which have attempted to grapple with the balance between environmental sustainability and development. Falkenberg discusses the debates that have existed within these processes between countries of the Global North and South, with Southern countries often arguing that poverty reduction should have priority over environmental protection. This vision, he argues, has tended to ignore the needs of many indigenous communities whose existence has depended on natural resources, and which demonstrate that development and sustainability need not be seen in opposition to one another. Emphasizing the importance of national policy and regulation in undermining this binary choice, Falkenberg incorporates an analysis of policies adopted by China and South Korea to illustrate this argument. In Chapter 11, Dina Kiwan discusses security and development, tracing the ways in which these two areas of policy and practice have come to intersect with one another through global social policy. A key shift since the end of the Cold War has been away from a state-centric conception of security, to a more individualized conception of human security which has been institutionalized in the work of international development actors such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Grounding her arguments in a case study of Syrian women refugees, Kiwan goes on to demonstrate the contested nature of the human security paradigm, contributing a gendered critique centred on the experiences of migrant women. She argues that the study of security and development would

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benefit from more contextualized engagements which draw on multiple theoretical perspectives. In Chapter 12, Nicola Yeates examines ongoing sub-global, transnational processes at the regional level as they relate to both social policy and development. While great attention has been paid by the academic community to the European Union, Yeates points out that regional bodies have become important outside of the industrialized context, as countries increasingly seek cooperation with their neighbours to address crossborder social, economic and environmental concerns. Despite this, the significance of regional bodies in shaping and (reshaping) the governance of welfare capitalism across the globe continues to be heavily contested. Yeates provides an overview of some of the key questions and debates that have characterized the field, suggesting that there remains significant scope to further develop our understanding of the role of worldregionalism from both social policy and development perspectives. The last two chapters of Part II focus on different aspects of the labour market as an entry point into social policy and development debates. In Chapter 13, Francie Lund concentrates on the question of informal employment, arguing that neither development studies nor social policy has engaged comprehensively enough with this issue. Definitions and statistics on informal employment have improved significantly in recent years, and Lund provides an overview of their evolution. She then suggests three critical issues of relevance to both social policy and development: the importance of local government in determining the working conditions of urban informal workers, the links between women’s unpaid care work and incomes in the informal economy, and the importance of greater representation and voice of organizations of informal workers in policy processes. In Chapter 14, Michael Rogan and Laura Alfers focus on the ways in which changing employment relationships, and particularly the erosion of the standard employment relationship, across the globe has impacted on the long-standing debate about the suitability of employment-linked social protection in development contexts. They argue that the situation is more complex than is commonly assumed, and that rather than posing the question simply as one of linking versus delinking social protection from employment, the question is better framed as one which asks under what conditions different groups of workers can gain access to various types of social protection. The chapters in Part III of the Handbook, ‘Services, Programmes and Policy Sectors’, offer accounts of the major welfare policies and programmes that social policy and development studies scholars have examined. Most of this research has focused on the traditional social

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services such as health, education, housing, social protection and social work and family social services, but topics such as community development, financial inclusion and the role of voluntary organizations have also been addressed. Although these topics have been analysed from different perspectives, the chapters reveal that there is considerable overlap and scope for integrating these perspectives to provide a more comprehensive analysis. The chapters summarize this research and pay particular attention to the role of social welfare in development. They challenge the view that the social services detract from economic growth, and contend that social welfare policies and programmes function as social investments which are compatible with wider development goals. They also foster social well-being and promote social justice. Chapter 15 by Amrit Virk provides an overview of policies and programmes for promoting health in the context of development. Focusing on low and middle income countries, she examines the way health care systems are structured and reviews key debates about how health care can be promoted so that all of the world’s people can live healthy and productive lives. Universalizing health care is a major focus of health policy today, as is ensuring that access and outcomes are equalized. Noting that much progress has been made in formulating appropriate policies that challenge the colonial legacy, she recognizes that much more needs to be done to ensure equitable access and universal coverage. Achieving these goals will not only contribute positively to development but also achieve the ideal of health as a human right. Chapter 16 by Mayumi Terano asks how education is conceptualized in social policy and development studies and how key issues and debates are presented in each field. Although there is a common concern with achieving universal access, curricular appropriateness and the quality of teaching and educational services, different perspectives have also emerged creating a need for scholars in both fields to cooperate and integrate their knowledge. Accordingly, the author advocates for a multidimensional and inclusive perspective on education which addresses the role of states, governance, rights and the role of social and political factors in educational policy. She pays attention to international initiatives that are promoting greater commonalities in educational policy, and argues for a more effective commitment to combine the goals of equity and development. In Chapter 17, James Lee discusses the role of housing in social policy and development studies, pointing out that while there is agreement that housing needs to be compatible with both development and social welfare, the policies formulated by governments and voluntary organizations have not succeeded in achieving this goal. A major reason for

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this failure is the fundamental shift which has taken place in housing policy, favouring market allocation and privatization. To resolve the issue, the importance of housing as an asset and wealth-building instrument needs to be recognized. Using John Rawls’s concept of a propertyowning democracy, the chapter concludes by suggesting that a policy of home ownership promoted by the state could provide a sustainable and socially just model of housing policy for both Western and developing nations. The following two chapters by James Midgley discuss the historical evolution and key features of social insurance and social protection, and consider their role in development. Chapter 18 pays special attention to social insurance pensions, which are widely used to meet the income needs of retired workers in Western countries and increasingly in the developing countries where populations are ageing. It reviews some of the challenges facing social insurance such as coverage, equity, administrative effectiveness and cost, and considers future directions for social insurance. Contrary to the claims of market liberal critics who advocate the privatization of social insurance, the author argues that the challenges facing these schemes can be resolved without abandoning their basic principles. With appropriate modifications, social insurance can make a positive contribution to development and promote social justice for the world’s people. Next, in Chapter 19, Midgley provides an overview of social assistance and examines its role in development. Although previously limited in scope, social assistance is being used widely today to alleviate global poverty. The author traces the evolution of social assistance from its formative association with charitable almsgiving to its current role in reducing poverty and deprivation. He provides an overview of the key features of social assistance, noting that the use of the means test and other conditionalities are common features of these schemes. In addition to paying cash benefits, food subsidies and supplements are widely used. Unique forms of social assistance such as conditional income transfers, community works projects and local nutritional programmes targeted at women and children are discussed. Although social assistance is hampered by implementation, funding and other difficulties, the chapter shows that it is helping to meet the poverty reduction targets of the Sustainable Development Goals. In Chapter 20, Armando Barrientos provides an overview of conditional income transfers, showing that their rationale lies in an understanding of poverty as caused by deficits in productive capacity. They are conditional on children attending school and on household members attending primary health care, especially expectant mothers and infants.

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The author contends that their core design feature, namely the combination of income transfers with incentives for human development, is an effective intervention. Extensive research, including impact evaluations into the outcomes of conditional income transfers, confirms that they are broadly meeting their objectives, with variation across countries and programmes. This research also reveals that they are strong and innovative welfare institutions, especially in middle income countries, and that eradicating poverty requires improving the productive capacity of low income groups, and children in particular. Chapter 21 by Antoinette Lombard provides an overview of social work and family services and considers their implications for development. The author traces the historical evolution of social work and family welfare services, discussing how since ancient times non-formal welfare gradually gave way to formalized social welfare through faith-based organizations, government intervention and professional social work. Different social work interventions for families are outlined, emphasizing the relevance of empowerment and strength-based approaches. Family services are outlined from both a micro and a macro practice perspective, indicating that both are important if social work is to achieve social justice for all people. The author also discusses how social work can contribute to social development within a global sustainable development framework, and concludes that effective social work requires the integrated non-formal and formal welfare framework, based on government policies that strengthen the involvement of families and communities in caring for their members. In Chapter 22, Philip Mader and Solène Morvant-Roux ask whether access to financial services constitutes an urgent universal human need, and they probe for empirical evidence regarding the potential benefits and harms of financial inclusion. The authors discuss different approaches to understanding and defining financial inclusion, and then look at the history of microfinance. They examine the empirical evidence for and against poverty alleviation and women’s empowerment resulting from financial inclusion, which they believe is inconclusive. Discussing the broader politics of financial inclusion, the authors highlight how it is implicated in a broader financialization of development, which inserts market logics into non-market spaces and enables new forms of accumulation, without necessarily contributing to development. They conclude that the value of financial inclusion, as an intervention governed by the unequal rules and power relations of financial systems, remains questionable. Next, in Chapter 23, Manohar Pawar observes that community development programmes play a crucial role in both social policy and

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development. The author discusses the meaning of community development in historical and contemporary contexts, and outlines the basic strategies used in community development practice. He shows how these programmes are implemented to facilitate social, economic and political development of people and their communities in both Western and developing countries. He summarizes the main strengths and weaknesses of community development programmes, noting that implementing these programmes according to the values and principles of social justice is yet to be achieved. However, he concludes that there is a great potential to achieve these ideals through improvement and reforms. In the final chapter of Part III, Roosa Jolkkonen contends that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are central actors in implementing social welfare and development policies. Beside their welfare function, they are recognized as prominent policy advocates, furthering social transformation by shaping development and social policy agendas. They are a fundamental building block of the welfare mix (also known as the division of welfare) between the state, market, family and the non-profit or ‘third’ sector. Despite the similar roles NGOs play in both Western countries and the Global South, the academic study of these organizations has taken divergent paths: NGOs operating in the Global South have been mainly studied by scholars in development studies as ‘development organizations’, while those operating in the Global North have been investigated by social policy scholars as ‘charities’ and ‘nonprofits’. Questioning this separation, the author highlights their similarities and argues for the integration of these two perspectives so that NGOs can more effectively promote social welfare, development and social justice around the world.

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PART I SOCIAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT: ORIGINS AND PROGRESSION

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1. Social policy and development: an overview James Midgley

As the social services of Western countries expanded in the years after the Second World War, some academics took the view that it would be worthwhile to study and assess the impact of government social policies. At about the same time, others were of the opinion the process of development, which was being given high priority by the governments of the newly independent developing nations at the time, was worthy of academic scrutiny. As a result, two new interdisciplinary fields known as social policy and development studies emerged at universities in Europe, North America and in other Western countries. While social policy was primarily concerned with the social services in these countries, development studies focused on the economic policies of governments in the Global South. Although both fields had a distinctly practical bent, they drew liberally on established social science disciplines to enhance their intellectual content. In some cases, social policy and development studies emerged out of existing social work and colonial administration training programmes, but separate academic departments as well as centres and institutes devoted to both fields were also created. In addition, courses in both subjects were introduced within established disciplines, especially economics, sociology and political science. In time, both launched their own journals and established professional associations, and by the 1960s a significant number of books, journal articles and research reports had been published. In addition to offering professional undergraduate and graduate courses, doctoral education was introduced to prepare students to assume leadership positions in both fields. The work of academics in social policy and development studies began to influence governments as well as international organizations, foundations and nonprofits, and policy-relevant contract research for these organizations was also undertaken. Scholarly inquiry that was not of direct policy relevance was also pursued and often it was of a critical nature, challenging prevailing academic ideas and policy approaches. 14

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Although social policy and development studies are now well established, they remain distinct and there is little sharing of ideas and information between them. With few exceptions, social policy scholars have paid little attention to the work of their colleagues in development studies, and similarly those in development studies remain largely ignorant of the knowledge generated in social policy. They seldom read each other’s literature and hardly ever attend each other’s conferences. They infrequently collaborate on joint research projects. However, it is widely recognized that both fields overlap. Both are concerned with the promotion of social well-being even though they do so in different ways. Social policy pursues this agenda by studying the social services and the politics of social policy making, while development studies is primarily concerned with the way policies and programmes rooted in economic growth generate prosperity. This chapter reiterates earlier calls for closer collaboration between social policy and development studies. It contrasts the two fields, discusses their evolution and current characteristics and shows they have not only enhanced knowledge but also contributed to policy formulation in each field. It then reviews the now extensive research undertaken into social welfare in the nations of the Global South, arguing that this research paves the way for closer collaboration between social policy and development studies. Focusing on how social policy functions in the context of economic development, it addresses issues of mutual concern that should be conducive to forging a partnership between scholars from social policy and development studies, as well as cognate disciplines. It may ultimately result in the synthesis of their work.

SOCIAL POLICY AND WELFARE Although social policy was only recognized as an academic field in the 1950s, it is rooted in centuries-old debates about how societies can promote the well-being of their citizens. Since ancient times, religious scholars have exhorted the faithful to care for those in need and behave in ways that foster the common good. Secular writers also offered prescriptions for how rulers should enhance social well-being. In some cases, very detailed instructions were given. For example, Kung Fu Tzu (or Confucius, as he is known in the West) provided a comprehensive set of practical guidelines for achieving this goal which continues to exert influence in East Asian societies today. Others offered visionary proposals for creating perfect societies. Beginning with Plato, utopian thinking shaped the Western reformist agenda, finding ultimate expression in the

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late nineteenth century with the adoption of legislative initiatives that sought to address social problems and raise living standards. Compulsory education, labour reforms, the introduction of social insurance, improvements in public health and the creation of statutory welfare services were only some of the steps taken by governments that embodied the utopian vision. As policies of this kind multiplied in subsequent years, the need for systematic scholarly enquiry into statutory social welfare was widely recognized. Academic studies of social welfare first emerged in the early twentieth century as scholars traced the history of social services, evaluated their impact and offered normative accounts which legitimated their expansion. Many were associated with the emerging profession of social work, while others came from disciplines such as economics, history and sociology. Some urged the expansion of social insurance, while others addressed working conditions and the problem of unemployment. Many focused on poverty, calling on governments to remedy its causes and effects. The authors of these studies were often involved in campaigns for the expansion of statutory welfare and in some cases they assumed office and implemented social reforms. Arguably the best example is Clement Attlee, whose book on social work, which was published in 1920, outlined an activist agenda for social change which came to fruition when he became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (UK) in 1945. Other Fabians such as the Webbs, who published extensively on welfare issues, also shaped this agenda as did Beveridge, whose work on unemployment meshed with Keynes’s analysis to call on governments to intervene and promote economic and social prosperity. These efforts resulted in the massive expansion of state welfare in the UK and other Western countries such as the United States, France, Germany and the Scandinavian nations. The emergence of the so-called ‘welfare state’ in these countries created new opportunities for the systematic study of social welfare. In addition, the need to train administrators who could implement and effectively manage government social policies was recognized. Relevant courses in what was known as social administration were established in the UK, while in the United States statutory welfare agencies often recruited their staff from schools of social work. An important development was the creation of the Department of Social Science and Administration at the London School of Economics, which built on its history of training social workers to formulate a coherent approach to the study of government social policy. Led by Richard Titmuss, who was appointed its first professorial head in 1950, the department prompted the creation of social policy as an academic field. Although the study of social policy

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was dominated by British scholars in its formative years, comparable analyses of government social policies emerged in other Western countries. However, these accounts were not always available in English, hampering the emergence of a comparative perspective in the field. The major exception was the United States, where research into social policy was widely disseminated in the UK and other English-speaking countries. In addition, scholars in disciplines such as sociology, political science and economics also began to study social policy, and in continental Europe where academic departments of social administration did not emerge, research in the field was largely pursued by scholars in these disciplines. Social policy’s formative commitment to training administrators was soon augmented by scholarly analyses of the evolution, features, normative dimensions and impact of state welfare. Of particular importance was the formulation of paradigmatic normative interpretations which offered value-based legitimations of government intervention. Titmuss’s own work articulated the influential and beguiling idea that welfare should be regarded as a form of collective altruism which gives expression to the deeply held caring values found in all societies. He regularly juxtaposed his view of statutory welfare as an unconditional gift against individualist, market-based interpretations which he claimed were inimical to well-being (Titmuss 1971). A similar normative account was Marshall’s (1950) conception of social welfare as a social right. Reflecting the international preoccupation with human rights at the time, Marshall claimed that citizens have an unconditional right to education, health care, social security and other social services. By guaranteeing the right to welfare, governments built on the centuries-old struggle for civil and political rights to create of a just society. Both Marshall and Titmuss reflected the then popular view derived from social liberalism and social democracy that government should intervene to mitigate the excesses of the market and raise living standards. Variously known as institutionalism, welfare statism or simply as welfarism, this belief exerted an almost hegemonic influence in social policy circles in the post-war years and provided a normative framework for much enquiry in the field. However, it was eventually challenged by the ascendancy of market liberalism, popularly known as neoliberalism. Although vigorously rejected by mainstream social policy writers, market liberal prescriptions were implemented in the 1980s after radical right political parties were elected in the UK, the United States and elsewhere. In addition to liberalizing the economy, these governments sought to curtail the expansion of state welfare and promote greater individual responsibility for welfare. A new body of scholarship, emanating mostly

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from the United States, now offered a very different interpretation of the role of the state in social welfare. Government welfare was criticized by best-selling authors such as Gilder (1981) and Murray (1984) for being inefficient and wasteful, fostering dependency and causing high unemployment and economic stagnation. Scholars such as Mead (1986) argued that instead of passively claiming their rights, welfare recipients should fulfil their obligations to secure employment, conform to societal norms and discharge the duties of citizenship. As these and similar ideas exerted influence, major changes to the social services were introduced, not only in the United States but also in Europe and other parts of the world as well. Privatization, retrenchment, increased conditionalities, welfare-to-work and outsourcing now characterized social policy in many countries. The value assumptions institutionalized in social policy in the 1960s were challenged by critics of other normative persuasions as well. Marxist writers such as O’Connor (1973), Gough (1979) and Offe (1984) claimed that social policy was being used by the owners of capital and their political allies to mollify discontent and control working people. Wilson (1977) and Pascall (1986) were among the first of many feminist scholars to point out that government welfare programmes were based on a male breadwinner model that reinforced institutionalized patriarchal values and discriminated against women. Writing from a multicultural perspective, Wiliams (1989) drew attention to the ethnocentricity and discriminatory features of state welfare, while radical populists challenged the idea that governments should be primarily responsible for social welfare, arguing that community initiatives should be given far higher priority. At the same time, religious traditionalists such as Olasky (1992) maintained that the family should be recognized as the primary welfare institution and that its role should be reinforced by government support for faith-based charities. These different normative interpretations challenged the dominance of social democratic welfarism, but it continues to exert a potent influence in the field, influencing the way most social policy scholars view the role of the state in social welfare today. These accounts also reveal the extent to which the study of social policy was no longer shaped by British writers associated with academic departments of social policy and administration, but increasingly by political scientists, sociologists, historians and scholars in other disciplines. Although social policy has been primarily engaged in normative debates about state welfare, accounts of the dynamics of social welfare and typologies of welfare systems have also been popular. Myles and Quadagno (2002) reveal that a great deal of effort has been devoted over the years to identifying the factors responsible for the growth of

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government welfare in Western countries since the Second World War. Pioneered primarily by political scientists, numerous but competing interpretations of these dynamics were offered. These highlight the role of industrialization, interest group politics, working class pressures and the influence of civil servants and political elites in initiating and shaping welfare expansion. Although none of these accounts have been universally accepted, they reveal the extent to which social policy scholars have engaged in quite sophisticated theoretical speculation about the reasons for the expansion of state welfare, and how empirical data has been used to support their claims. Typologies and stadial interpretations of the evolution of state welfare have also been popular. Dichotomies such as Wilensky and Lebeaux’s (1965) formative residual versus institutional model have been augmented by a plethora of classifications of domestic arrangements and normative preferences. They have also been used for comparative purposes to classify the welfare systems of different countries. Arguably the most celebrated is Esping-Andersen’s (1990) ‘three worlds of welfare model’, which has survived sustained critiques to be repetitively cited in the literature. In turn, typologies have been linked to stadial interpretations such as those by Jessop (1994) and van Keesberger and Hemerijck (2012) which conceptualize complex historical processes in terms of discrete phases in the evolution of government welfare. Typically, the growth of the Western welfare state is said to begin with Keynes and Beveridge, transitioning to a neoliberal stage, followed by a stage characterized by crisis, and more recently a pluralistic consolidation of state welfare marked by recalibration and innovations such as social investment. As mentioned earlier, the research undertaken by social policy scholars over the years reveals the extent to the state is viewed as the prime agent of welfare. Although the statist preference has been widely challenged, scholarship in the field remains largely focused on government responsibility, and the role of nonprofits, local communities and commercial providers has been neglected even though it is recognized that these agents now feature much more prominently in the current pluralist social welfare mix. Few social policy scholars today are wedded to the idea that governments should be the exclusive providers of social services, but they continue to believe that the state should proactively direct, coordinate, fund and be ultimately responsible for the welfare of their citizens. As Midgley (2013) observes, the Eurocentric, social democratic origins of this normative position will be readily apparent, and although challenged by the realities of welfare in other parts of the world, it pervades the field and serves as a paradigmatic framework for social policy

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research in many countries. It will be shown later that this approach contrasts with the multidimensional and pluralist interpretations that have evolved in development studies.

DEVELOPMENT STUDIES AND SOCIAL PROGRESS Like social policy, development studies is rooted in ideas that have ancient provenance. Arguably the most important of these is the belief in progress: the contention that societies evolve over time from simple to complex systems marked by economic prosperity and high levels of welfare. While progress was historically believed to be driven by forces beyond human agency, it was gradually recognized that humans themselves could direct the process of change and bring about significant improvements in social conditions. This view found expression in the late nineteenth century in the adoption of progressive economic and social policies. Reflecting the popularity of evolutionary thought at the time, social liberals advocated judicious state-sponsored reforms, while social democrats called for a more expansive role for government characterized by economic planning, regulation and extensive social services. Marxists went further, calling for the complete socialization of the economy and the redistribution of productive surpluses to the whole population. These different normative interpretations all gave expression to progressive ideas and a belief in the desirability of state intervention. These notions also informed economic thinking in the early decades of the twentieth century. In Western countries Keynesian ideas displaced the dominance of laissez-faire neoclassicism, while in the Soviet Union centralized economic planning sought to promote industrialization through state ownership of the economy. In their different ways, both embodied the claim that social progress could be realized through economic development. This idea appealed to the nationalist leaders who were campaigning for independence from European imperial rule at the time. When the former colonial territories secured sovereignty after the Second World War, economic planning inspired by the Soviets combined with Keynesian growth proposals to inform the five-year industrial development plans published by the new central planning agencies established in many developing countries. However, not everyone agreed that the key to social progress lay in industrialization, and in some countries such as Tanzania and China, improving rural conditions was given high priority. This was also the case in India, where Nehru’s commitment to industrialization contrasted with Gandhi’s belief in rural development. This dual focus on modern industry and rural community

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development subsequently became two major intellectual thrusts in development thinking which, respectively, found expression in national planning and local community development. These events helped to launch the academic study of development. Like social policy, development studies emerged in the Western countries after the Second World War, and in some countries such as the UK it was initially associated with university training courses for colonial administrators. Some of these courses subsequently evolved into major interdisciplinary centres. In addition, scholars working in established disciplines such as economics, political science, sociology and anthropology also became interested in development. Economists gave the lead and attention soon focused on how agrarian, post-colonial societies could be transformed into modern, industrial states. At the same time, courses in community development were established in both the metropolitan and developing countries. Although primarily concerned with training community workers, they also engaged in research, producing a large number of reports and monographs on the subject. In the 1950s, most development economists believed that by expanding domestic industry governments would initiate a virtuous process of economic growth that would modernize traditional societies. ‘Unproductive’ labour would be drawn out of the subsistence agricultural sector into the small modern wage economy that had emerged in many colonial territories. By expanding wage employment, incomes would rise and demand for domestic goods and services would increase. In turn, this would stimulate more industrial investment, create more jobs, raise incomes and promote widespread prosperity. A voluminous literature authored primarily by economists with Keynesian proclivities such as Nurkse (1953), Lewis (1955) and Rostow (1960, 1963) rapidly evolved to provide detailed proposals for how this process could be initiated. These ideas were supported by sociologists, political scientists and psychologists such as Hagen (1962), Hozelitz (1960) and McClelland (1964) who fostered the emergence of a paradigmatic interpretation of development that became known as modernization theory. In addition to modernizing economic production, governments were urged to adopt policies that would transform the traditional culture and promote individualistic and secular attitudes compatible with the needs of an industrializing society. However, modernization theory was soon challenged. As mentioned earlier, some such as Gandhi and Nyerere argued that living standards should be raised through agricultural improvements rather than industrialization. Although this belief prompted the introduction of numerous state-sponsored rural community development programmes in the Global South in the 1950s (see Chapter 23 of this book), they too

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were criticized largely because they were sponsored by governments, and said to be bureaucratic, corrupt, controlled by politicians and indifferent to the needs of rural people. In response, a much more activist style of community development emerged. This approach sought to mobilize communities to confront the bureaucracy as well as local elites who, it was claimed, had hijacked community development for their own purposes. Known as community action or community participation, it would give authentic expression to people’s aspirations by helping them to determine their own needs and find solutions to their own problems. The community development literature, which had focused on promoting self-help among rural people, was now augmented by radical interpretations such as Freire’s (1970) ‘conscientization’ approach. The emergence of community activism was also inspired by revolutionary anticolonial movements which drew on Maoist ideas to launch major insurrections against several governments at the time. In the 1970s, these developments influenced another radical critique of modernization theory. Known as international structuralism or dependency theory, it was pioneered by neo-Marxist scholars in the Global South (and particularly in Latin America) such as Frank (1967) and Cardoso (1972) who challenged the view that endogenous industrialization would raise living standards in the developing world. They drew attention to the global patterns of exploitation that persisted after the formal end of the colonial era, arguing that the nations of the Global South were caught in a web of exploitation that favoured the Western countries, large international corporations and global capitalism. Faced with these realities, industrialization policies were doomed to failure and governments, they proposed, should resist international capitalism and delink from the global economy. The work of the dependendistas was compatible with the growing realization in development studies that policies adopted at the national level needed to be accompanied by international reforms that addressed global inequities. In 1974, the United Nations launched the New International Economic Order (NIEO) initiative which advocated for equitable trade, increased international aid and greater power sharing among the world’s nations. Subsequently, the Brandt Commission (1980) produced a detailed set of proposals for enhancing North–South cooperation in development. As Moyn (2018) suggests, these events stimulated the emergence of a growing academic literature on global social justice and international human rights. Another critique of the modernization approach came from development economists such as Seers (1969) and Myrdal (1971) who argued that the pursuit of industrialization had produced a highly distorted process of development in which the impressive rates of economic

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growth achieved by many countries in the post-war years had not created wage employment on a sufficient scale to reduce the incidence of poverty. Instead of creating jobs and raising standards of living, they claimed that the benefits of growth had accrued disproportionately to political, administrative and military elites, the business community, professionals and the civil service, leaving the bulk of the population behind. The problem, they argued, should be addressed by the adoption of egalitarian social policies that would foster inclusive development and raise living standards for all. International organizations such as the United Nations, International Labour Organization and World Bank were sympathetic to this approach. In a major speech to the Governors of the World Bank in 1973, President Robert McNamara announced that the Bank’s lending policies would give high priority to reducing poverty. In an important study (Chenery et al. 1974) senior staff at the Bank collaborated with the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in the UK to examine income inequality in the developing world and to propose policies that would address the problem without affecting economic growth. Earlier, the ILO had launched fact finding missions to several developing countries to determine why industrialization had failed to significantly reduce poverty. These studies found that instead of absorbing the large numbers of rural workers who came to the cities in search of work, industrial policies had created a large and growing informal urban economy, situated in sprawling informal settlements marked by poverty and deprivation. It was soon recognized that modernization theory had not fulfilled its promise, and that an alternative approach that focused on poverty eradication was needed. To achieve this goal, governments were urged to abandon their commitment to modernization and to ensure that the basic social needs of their citizens were met. The ILO and the United Nations became leading sponsors of this approach. Instead of waiting for economic growth to raise living standards, they advised governments to adopt policies that would address the educational, health, nutrition, housing and other needs of their citizens. Leading development scholars, notably Streeten and his colleagues (Streeten and Burki 1978; Streeten et al. 1981; Stewart 1985) provided an intellectual basis for this approach and offered an alternative to Myrdal and Seers’s egalitarianism by emphasizing what Moyn (2018) describes as a minimal sufficiency standard for social welfare. This approach has now been widely adopted in development studies. Instead of seeking to address inequality, many scholars believe that it is more feasible to ensure that people’s basic needs are met. This idea influenced the

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adoption of the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals by the member states of the United Nations. These developments were accompanied by a critique of modernization theory that focused on the environment, claiming that the relentless pursuit of economic growth through industrialization had caused considerable ecological damage and fostered wasteful consumerism. Unless checked, it would ultimately have disastrous consequences (Meadows et al. 1972). This analysis attracted widespread attention, resulting in the appointment of a major international commission by the United Nations in 1983. Known as the Brundtland Commission, it did not reject the need for economic growth, but argued that development should be sustainable, meeting current needs without compromising the needs of future generations (Brundtland Commission 1987). Since then, these ideas have been widely accepted in development studies. Equally trenchant critiques challenged the way industrialization had fostered male wage employment and perpetuated conventional gender roles. One of the first came from Boserup (1970), who pointed out that while women made a major contribution to economic development by working in agriculture, trade, crafts and other productive activities, their role was ignored. A powerful international movement now emerged that campaigned not only for women’s economic contribution to be properly recognized but also for an end to gender discrimination and oppression. These arguments resulted in far more attention being paid to gender in development studies, especially after the United Nations launched the first United Nations Decade for Women in 1975. Since then, feminist scholarship into development has increased exponentially, and supported by international conferences and activist women’s groups, an egalitarian gender approach has featured prominently in the field. However, as in social policy, these progressive ideas were challenged in the 1980s by the rise of market liberalism. This approach was fostered by the electoral success of radical right political parties in several Western countries at the time, and heavily influenced by leading neoliberal scholars in Western countries such as von Hayek (1944, 1948) and Friedman (1962). Of particular importance was the appointment of market liberals to key executive positions at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and under their leadership both organizations now required governments receiving aid to liberalize their economies, privatize state enterprises and reduce social spending. These radical policy changes would, it was argued, challenge the statism that had dominated development since the end of the Second World War, and foster rapid economic growth and prosperity. Since many governments had become heavily indebted, they had little choice but to comply with

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these structural adjustment conditionalities as they were known. With the notable exception of development economists such as Bauer (1971), Lal (1983) and de Soto (1989), neoliberalism enjoyed little support in development studies, but it was widely adopted in policy circles. In addition to reducing the role of governments, it paved the way for the rapid increase of nonprofit organizations and commercial providers in the field which were believed to offer superior services to statutory agencies. They now became the primary recipients of international aid and began to play a key role in development, especially in low-income countries. Despite rejecting neoliberalism, many development scholars were influenced by the individualism of the market liberal interpretation. The formative focus on national and community-level interventions in development studies was augmented in the 1990s by a new emphasis on households, which were viewed as the primary agents of development. Since they act rationally to promote their interests and livelihoods, their capabilities should be enhanced through various development initiatives. In addition to agricultural inputs, Polak (2008) proposed that they be provided with credit and technical assistance and helped to establish micro-enterprises. Their human capital and resourcefulness should be improved through training and educational programmes, and policies that assist them to accumulate assets should be introduced. Unlike neoliberalism, the livelihoods approach, as it became known, gained significant support in development studies, particularly as Sen’s (1999) writings informed this approach. Assisting the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to formulate these ideas (UNDP 1990) he famously redefined development as a process of enhancing people’s choices. The emergence of numerous interpretations of the development process and the formulation of a variety of normative and policy prescriptions reveals the complex, multidimensional nature of development studies. Unlike social policy, which is primarily concerned with the provision of services by national governments, development studies analyses interventions that operate at multiple levels including households, communities and nations and, as mentioned earlier, it also addresses international economic and social policies. It is also more pluralistic than social policy which, as suggested earlier, has been largely concerned with statutory interventions, paying relatively little attention to the role of nonprofits which feature much more prominently in development studies. Although social policy scholars have analysed the ways families and particularly women engage with statutory welfare, there is more emphasis on households and their efforts to enhance their livelihoods in development studies. Both fields have been inspired by social democratic politics and Keynesian economics, and have resisted the market liberal tide, but it has

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been shown already that conceptual and normative innovations that diverge substantively from statism have been more common in development studies. The livelihoods approach, the long-standing commitment to community development and the promotion of sustainable development reveal the extent to which development studies has adopted multiple, competing normative interpretations. To complicate matters further, some development studies writers have even challenged the very existence of the field itself. These members of the anti or post-development school such as Escobar (1995) and Sachs (2010) take a very negative view of development studies, its assumptions and policy prescriptions.

THE STUDY OF SOCIAL WELFARE IN THE DEVELOPMENT CONTEXT As suggested at the beginning of this chapter, studies of social welfare in the Global South undertaken by scholars in both social policy and development studies (as well as other disciplines) creates a terrain on which closer collaboration between social policy and development studies can be forged. This research focuses on statutory welfare services but it also addresses issues of economic and social development and, for this reason, offers a useful way of bridging the respective interests of these two fields. The knowledge of statutory welfare pioneered by social policy will benefit from the study of development, while the focus on development can be informed by an understanding of how welfare institutions operate in the Global South. Contrary to the generally accepted view that the literature on social welfare in the developing world is limited and of ‘recent vintage’ (Haggard and Kaufman 2008, p. 1), a great deal has been published on the subject over many years. In fact, the first accounts of this kind emerged during the colonial era when, as Hodge (1973) revealed, the authorities undertook official inquiries into social problems or the nascent social services. In some cases, these inquiries paved the way for major social reforms. For example, Harrison (2011) notes that the Moyne Commission into political unrest in the British Caribbean territories in the 1930s fostered the introduction of social services during the Second World War. At this time Mair, an anthropologist, published the first major study of social welfare in the British colonies (Mair 1944). She noted that the British government had authorized the expansion of education, health care and other social services by allocating funds through the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts, the first of which was passed in 1929. She also observed that the League of Nations, which had been founded in

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1919, had urged the European imperial powers to promote statutory social welfare in their possessions. The United Nations, together with its affiliate organizations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) and World Health Organization (WHO), made important contributions to the study of social welfare in the newly independent developing countries. These organizations vigourously advocated for the expansion of government welfare by adoption resolutions, convening conferences and producing a plethora of reports which shaped thinking about social policy in the Global South. The United Nations was also instrumental in promoting the integration social and economic planning at the national level. It encouraged the training of social planners who could work closely with economists to formulate national development plans which prioritized the integration of economic and social goals and the expansion of social services. Academics were often invited to advise on these developments and some, such as Myrdal, played a key role in promoting the growth of welfare programmes in the developing countries. They also advised the governments of the newly independent countries on social policy. One of the first was Titmuss and his colleague Abel-Smith (1961), who helped the government of Mauritius to design its welfare system. As Midgley (2014a) discusses, the United Nations made a major contribution by pioneering social development as distinctive approach to social welfare in the Global South. This approach sought to end the compartmentalization of social and economic policies by ensuring that economic development plans had a demonstrable social welfare impact, while social programmes contributed positively to development. The governments of many developing countries concurred with the principle that economic development and social welfare goals should be given equal priority, and it was adopted by national planning agencies, social sectoral ministries and community development programmes. In particular, local economic projects that contributed directly to improvements in living standards were given high priority. However, despite its importance, social development was almost entirely ignored by Western social policy writers and attracted little attention in development studies. This can be partly attributed to a dearth of scholarly literature on the subject. Although some books and a journal devoted to social development appeared (Jones and Pandey 1981; Sanders 1982), it remained focused on practical interventions which had limited appeal in scholarly circles. On the other hand, the basic needs approach mentioned earlier generated a substantive literature and provided a normative framework conducive to the expansion of social policy in the Global South.

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Although essentially concerned with welfare, basic needs was inspired by scholars in development studies (supported by the ILO, the United Nations and other international organizations) rather than social policy writers. However, the basic needs approach was fiercely rejected by market liberals and was largely supplanted by the adoption of structural adjustment and other neoliberal policies in the 1980s. Nevertheless, as noted previously, it paved the way for the Copenhagen World Summit of Social Development in 1995 and the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals and subsequently the Sustainable Development Goals (see Chapter 6 of this book). Closely aligned with social development thinking, both gave expression to the idea that governments have an obligation to provide basic welfare services to their citizens as of right. Despite the influence of neoliberalism, the academic literature on social welfare in the Global South by both social policy and development studies scholars grew steadily. Much of it was descriptive, focusing on the social services and their implementation. As far as can be ascertained, the first book on the subject was by Livingstone (1969), a development studies scholar at the University of Manchester. In addition to tracing the history of the social services, he drew attention to various issues relating to their role and function. One of these was the failure to demonstrate how the social services contributed to economic development. This was to be a focus of subsequent debates in the field. Other formative studies, such as a comprehensive textbook on social policy in developing countries by Hardiman and Midgley (1982), also addressed key policy issues. They challenged the then prevalent view that the social services in these countries were limited and underdeveloped. In fact, they explained that most governments had incrementally expanded the social services and that access to education, health care, family welfare and other services had increased significantly since colonial times. On the other hand, they drew attention to the inappropriateness of welfare policies which were largely based on those of the Western countries. The emulation of Western approaches, they argued, resulted in services that were concentrated in urban areas, wasteful and neglectful of the needs of the rural majority. A similar account summarizing the key issues affecting the social services was published by Jones in 1990. In addition to these accounts of social policy in the developing world as a whole, numerous books dealing with social welfare policy in particular countries such as China (Dixon 1981), Nigeria (Onokerhoraye 1984) and India (Dubey 1973) were published at this time. These mostly descriptive studies were augmented by theoretical and critical accounts of the way social policies functioned in the Global South. MacPherson (1982) offered one of the first analyses of this kind.

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Drawing on dependency theory, he linked the notion of policy inappropriateness to the exploitative nature of development and the failure of social welfare policies to promote the well-being of the people of the developing world. Midgley (1984) offered a similar critique by showing how social security, which had been based on Western approaches, had not only failed to reduce but had in fact exacerbated inequality. In 1987, MacPherson and Midgley co-authored a book intended to inform Western social policy scholars about social welfare in the developing world, and to show how a greater knowledge of social policy in the Global South could inform their own research. The question of the relationship of social welfare to development came into sharp focus as several studies of the social policies of the rapidly industrializing countries of East Asia were published during the 1990s. The orthodox view that social welfare and economic development were antithetical seems to be at odds with the observation that countries such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea were recording high rates of economic growth even though their social services were also expanding. Offering insights into this question, scholars such as Holliday (2000), Kwon (2005) and Midgley and Tang (2001) drew on the developmental state concept originally formulated by Johnson (1982) to suggest that the drive for industrialization was aided by the social services and particularly education, health care and social security. The East Asian ‘tigers’, they argued, had formulated a productivist social policy model which was not only compatible with but also supportive of economic growth. This contention addressed the issue Livingstone had raised in 1969 about the relationship between social welfare and economic development. The notion of developmental welfare also comported with the social development approach which sought to link social and economic policies within a holistic development process (Midgley 2014a). The idea that social policy should contribute to economic development has recently found expression in the notion of social investment. Popularized by European social policy writers (Bonoli 2013; Hemerijck 2017; Morel et al. 2012), it responds to the criticism that the ‘welfare state’ has failed to adapt to changing social and economic realities, and contributed to the economic stagnation and high levels of unemployment that characterized the European nations in the 1990s. Instead of transferring resources to ‘passive’ welfare recipients, governments are urged to adopt ‘active’ social policies that invest in people’s capabilities and foster their integration into the productive economy. Education, skills training, family leave policies, child care and other services that support employment as well as wider economic development goals should be given higher

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priority than conventional income maintenance and family welfare services. These ideas share many similarities with social development and developmental welfare, but their contribution has not been acknowledged by Western social policy writers who, Midgley (2013) suggests, would benefit from the insights of these approaches. A helpful development is the recent interest among social policy scholars in what is called ‘global social policy’ (Deacon 2007; Yeates 2008). This field focuses attention on the work of the international agencies, donors and nonprofits, and transcends social policy’s conventional focus on the nation state. It has also exposed social policy scholars to the important role these agents play in promoting social development and social welfare in the Global South. It is not constrained by the conventional parameters of social policy, and although pioneered by social policy writers it helps to bridge the gap between social policy and development studies. The recent surge of interest in income transfers in development studies also has the potential to forge closer cooperation between the two fields. Although development studies scholars had paid little attention to the rapid expansion of social security in the Global South in the years following the Second World War, it attracted growing attention in the 1990s when several governments, mostly in Latin America, modified conventional social assistance schemes by paying income benefits to poor families, provided they complied with school attendance and other requirements (see Chapter 20 of this book). Cash transfer programmes were also given increasing priority in disaster relief and gradually it was recognized that they could, as Hanlon et al. (2010) suggest, make a significant contribution to poverty reduction by ‘just giving money to the poor’. Other forms of social security such as universal child allowances and pensions are also being scrutinized for their impact on poverty. ‘Social protection’ was adopted in preference to the older term ‘social security’, and it has since become a major focus of scholarship in development studies. However, the study of social protection in development studies has proceeded with little reference to the work undertaken into social security by social policy scholars. This is unfortunate since, as Midgley (2014b) points out, development studies has much to gain from being better acquainted with the study of social security in social policy. Major issues such as financing and affordability, managerial effectiveness and political opposition to statutory programmes have been analysed and debated by these scholars for many years and can inform development studies where these issues have not yet become prominent. At the same time, the author contends that Western social policy scholars have much to learn from their

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colleagues in development studies who have undertaken extensive research into social protection in the Global South. In addition, social policy scholars have paid little attention to non-formal and community-based social protection which functions in many migrant communities in the West. Clearly, far more collaboration between the two fields is needed. It will be clear that, despite considerable overlap, much more should be done to promote collaboration between scholars in social policy and development studies who undertake research into social welfare in the Global South. Given a commitment on both sides, fairly simple steps can be taken to foster cooperation. They should make a concerted effort to become acquainted with each other’s literature, attend each other’s conferences and convene meetings where issues of mutual interest can be debated. Joint research projects culminating in joint publications should also be undertaken. These straightforward, practical steps could promote a deeper understanding of the approaches adopted in each field and lead to the production of useful knowledge with positive policy implications. It is also clear that collaboration will provide opportunities to examine a complex range of issues that have direct relevance for the study of social welfare in the Global South. These include questions concerning the role of development in promoting social well-being and the respective importance that should be attached to economic and social processes. The respective role of the state, community, household and market in promoting social well-being also needs to be addressed in more depth. Political ideologies and the influence of competing agendas on government policies, as well as the interventions sponsored by nongovernmental organizations, foundations and international bodies, need to be analysed in more depth. Another issue of particular relevance to the study of social policy in the Global South is the need for an emic approach that focuses on existing, indigenous welfare institutions rather than imposing Western concepts and typologies, to analyse these institutions. Walker and Wong (2013) forcefully contend that this ethnocentric approach has impeded the study of social policy in the developing world, and Midgley (2013, 2017) agrees, arguing it has not produced plausible or useful accounts. By focusing on actual policy activities, appropriate knowledge of policy significance can be generated. For example, social policy analysis would benefit from focusing on the Sustainable Development Goals which, as suggested in Chapter 6 of this book, provide a major opportunity for social policy and development studies scholars to find common ground when studying social policy in the Global South. There are many other issues that still need to be examined and debated jointly by social policy and development studies scholars which could

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promote a collaborative partnership concerned with the study of welfare institutions in the Global South. Chapter 2 of this Handbook by Surender sketches out an agenda for future debate which points the way forward and offers useful insights into how a partnership between social policy and development studies may be forged.

REFERENCES Attlee, C.R. (1920). The Social Worker. London: Bell & Sons. Bauer, P.T. (1971). Dissent on Development. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Bonoli, G. (2013). The Origins of Active Social Policy: Labour Market and Childcare Policies in Comparative Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press. Boserup, E. (1970). Women’s Role in Economic Development. London: Allen & Unwin. Brandt Commission (1980). North–South: A Programme for Survival. London: Pan Books. Brundtland Commission (1987). Our Common Future: From One Earth to One World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cardoso, F.H. (1972). Dependency and Development in Latin America. New Left Review, 74, 83–89. Chenery, H., Ahluwalia M., Bell, C., Duloy, J.H. and Jolly, R. (1974). Redistribution with Growth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deacon, B. (2007). Global Social Policy and Governance. London: SAGE Publications. de Soto, H. (1989). The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. New York: Harper & Row. Dixon, J. (1981). The Chinese Welfare System, 1949–1979. New York: Praegar. Dubey, S.N. (1973). Administration of Social Welfare Programs in India. Bombay: Somaiya Publications. Escobar, A. (1995). Imagining a Post-Development Era. In J. Crush (ed.), Power of Development. New York: Routledge, pp. 211–227. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Frank, A.G. (1967). Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder & Herder. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gilder, G. (1981). Wealth and Poverty. New York: Basic Books. Gough, I. (1979). The Political Economy of the Welfare State. London: Macmillan. Hagan, E. (1962). On the Theory of Social Change. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press. Haggard, S. and Kaufman, R.R. (2008). Development, Democrary and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia and Eastern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hanlon, J., Barrientos, A. and Hulme, D. (2010). Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press. Hardiman, M. and Midgley, J. (1982). The Social Dimensions of Development: Social Policy and Planning in the Third World. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Harrison, J. (2011). The Colonial Legacy and Social Policy in the British Caribbean. In J. Midgley and D. Piachaud (eds), Colonialism and Welfare: Social Policy and the British Imperial Legacy. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 55–70. Hayek, F. von (1944). The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Social policy and development: an overview 33 Hayek, F. von (1948). Individualism and Economic Order. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hemerijck, A. (ed.) (2017). The Uses of Social Investment. New York: Oxford University Press. Hodge, P. (1973). Social Policy: An Historical Perspective as Seen in Colonial Policy. Journal of Oriental Studies, 9 (3), 207–219. Holliday, I. (2000). Productivist Welfare Capitalism: Social Policy in East Asia. Political Studies, 48 (4), 706–723. Hozelitz, B.F. (1960). Sociological Factors in Economic Development. New York: Free Press. Jessop. B. (1994). The Transition to Post-Fordism and the Schumpeterian Workfare State. In R. Burrows and B. Loader (eds), Towards a Post-Fordist Welfare State. New York: Routledge, pp. 13–37. Johnson, C.A. (1982). MTTI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy 1925–1975. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jones, H. (1990). Social Welfare in Third World Development. London: Macmillan. Jones, J. and Pandey, R. (eds) (1981). Social Development: Conceptual, Methodological and Policy Issues. New York: St Martin’s Press. Kwon, H. (2005). An Overview of the Study: The Developmental Welfare State and Policy Reforms in East Asia. In H.-J. Kown (ed.), Transforming the Developmental Welfare State in East Asia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–26. Lal, D. (1983). The Poverty of Development Economics. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Lewis, W.A. (1955). The Theory of Economic Growth. London: Allen & Unwin. Livingstone, A. (1969). Social Policy in Developing Countries. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. MacPherson, S. (1982). Social Policy in the Third World: The Dilemmas of Underdevelopment. Brighton: Harvester. MacPherson, S. and Midgley, J. (1987). Comparative Social Policy and the Third World. Brighton: Wheatsheaf. Mair, L. (1944). Welfare in the British Colonies. London: Royal Institute for International Affairs. Marshall, T.H. (1950). Citizenship and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McClelland, D. (1964). A Psychological Approach to Economic Development. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 12 (2), 320–324. Mead, L.M. (1986). Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Free Press. Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens, W.W. (1972). The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books. Midgley, J. (1984). Social Security, Inequality and the Third World. New York: Wiley. Midgley, J. (2013). Social Development and Social Welfare: Implications for Comparative Social Policy. In P. Kennett (ed.), A Handbook of Comparative Social Policy. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 182–204. Midgley, J. (2014a). Social Development: Theory and Practice. London: SAGE. Midgley, J. (2014b). Social Development and Social Protection: New Opportunities and Challenges. In L. Patel, J. Midgley and M. Ulriksen (eds), Social Protection in Southern Africa: New Opportunities for Social Development. New York: Routledge, pp. 2–12. Midgley, J. (2017). Social Welfare for a Global Era: International Perspectives on Policy and Practice. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications. Midgley, J. and Tang, K.L. (2001). Social Policy, Economic Growth and Developmental Welfare. International Journal of Social Welfare, 10 (4), 242–250.

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34 Handbook of social policy and development Morel, N., Palier, B. and Palme, J. (eds) (2012). Towards a Social Investment Welfare State? Ideas, Policies and Challenges. Bristol: Policy Press. Moyn, S. (2018). Not Enough; Human Rights in an Unequal World. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Murray, C. (1984). Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. New York: Basic Books. Myles, J. and Quadagno, J. (2002). Political Theories of the Welfare State. Social Service Review, 76 (1), 34–57. Myrdal, G. (1971). The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-poverty Outline. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Nurkse, R. (1953). Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries. London: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, J. (1973). The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St Martin’s Press. Offe, C. (1984). Contradictions of the Welfare State. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Olasky, M. (1992). The Tragedy of American Compassion. Washington, DC: Regnery. Onokerhoraye, A.G. (1984). Social Services in Nigera. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pascall, G. (1986). Social Policy: A Feminist Analysis. London: Tavistock. Polak, P. (2008). Out of Poverty: What Works when Traditional Approaches Fail. San Francisco, CA: Berret-Koehler. Rostow, W.W. (1960). The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rostow, W.W. (1963). The Economics of Take-Off into Sustained Growth. London: Macmillan. Sachs, W. (2010). Introduction. In W. Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge and Power, 2nd edition. London: Zed Books, pp. xv–xx. Sanders, D.S. (ed.) (1982). The Development Perspective in Social Work. Manoa, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Seers, D. (1969). The Meaning of Development. International Development Review, 11 (4), 1–6. Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf. Streeten, P. and Burki, S.J. (1978). Basic Needs: Some Issues. World Development, 6 (3), 411–421. Streeten, P., Burki, S.J., Ul Haq, M., Hicks, N. and Stewart, F. (1981). First Things First: Meeting Basic Needs in Developing Countries. New York: Oxford University Press. Stewart, F. (1985). Basic Needs in Developing Countries. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Titmuss, R.M. (1971). The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. New York: Vintage. Titmuss, R.M. and Abel-Smith, B. (1961). Social Policies and Population Growth in Mauritius. London: Methuen. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (1990). Human Development Report 1990. New York. van Keesberger, K. and Hemerijck, A. (2012). Two Decades of Change in Europe: The Emergence of the Social Investment State. Journal of Social Policy, 41 (3), 475–492. Walker, A. and Wong, C.K. (2013). The Ethnocentric Construction of the Welfare State. In P. Kennett (ed.), Handbook of Comparative Social Policy. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 98–114. Wilensky, H.L. and Lebeaux, C.N. (1965). Industrial Society and Social Welfare. New York: Free Press. Williams, F. (1989). Social Policy: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wilson, E. (1977). Women and the Welfare State. London: Tavistock. Yeates, N. (ed.) (2008). Understanding Global Social Policy. Bristol: Policy Press.

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2. The social policy nexus and development: convergence, divergence and dynamic change Rebecca Surender

The progressive expansion of the idea of ‘development’ from one of economic and income growth to one which encompassed core concerns of social policy – poverty, inequality and the distribution of welfare – was, perversely, spurred not by a social policy theorist but by an economist. Amartya Sen’s seminal work at the end of the twentieth century, Development as Freedom (Sen 1999), a repost to neoclassical economics (and the economics of the World Bank at that time in particular), shone a light on the essential contribution of social policy to development and the responsibility of government to supply public goods such as education and health. The intervening two decades have witnessed a rising interest in the significance of social policy in the management of welfare and risk in the developing world and a growing recognition that social development and economic development are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing. However, despite the emerging consensus about the importance of social protection itself, there has been no corresponding agreement about the utility of social policy as an academic field for developing contexts. In particular, the extent to which the analytic models and concepts for the study of social policy, established in the industrialized West and North, are transportable to a developing country context, remains disputed. This chapter begins by tracing some of the key stages in the shifting global discourse about the desirability and feasibility of social policy in low income countries. It then examines debates about the extent to which some of the key actors, institutions and ideas involved in shaping social policy in the Global South, vary systematically in role and relative importance from those in the North, and thereby the extent to which the analytic toolkit of the subject of social policy is useful in understanding developing country dynamics. The discussion focuses on three current issues – the emergence of new philanthropic donors, the expansion of the developmental state model, and the surfacing of the notion of social rights and social citizenship – and suggests that there is evidence of both 35

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continued divergence but also new convergence across the actors, institutions and ideas involved in shaping social policy in both hemispheres. The chapter concludes by arguing that as many differences now exist within the developing world as between the so-called developing and developed world, and that these differences are increasing. The fluid and dynamic pace of change means that we should be cautious about assuming any sort of linear trajectory or ‘catch-up logic’ with the West in terms of social policy advancement, or indeed any predictable models or typologies of Third World social policy paradigms.

ASCENDENCY OF THE SOCIAL Until the 1990s, the dominant wisdom of development thinkers and agencies was that social expenditure was neither affordable nor desirable in poorer countries since it would blunt incentives and undermine indigenous resourcefulness and culture (Woods 2006; Currie-Alder et al. 2014). If social policy was to be justified, it should remain subordinate to overriding economic policy and be used primarily to improve social capital and productivity, for example through education or labour market activation interventions. Economic growth and trickle-down benefits would be the most secure route to overall development. Sen’s challenge, radical at the time, was that focusing on macro indicators such as the aggregate wealth of an economy revealed little about the distribution of that wealth or the quality of life of the population. Gross indicators such as income tell us little of the reality of hunger, undernourishment or morbidity. Moreover, the sources of much social exclusion (‘unfreedoms’) especially in developing countries, derive not from lack of material resources but from other systems of social stratification, such as caste, gender or religion. Income, industrialization and technology, while important, are not panaceas and, most crucially, they are means not ends. Freedom has to be the ultimate end goal, and public and social policy is the lynchpin to unlocking it. Several writers have both foreshadowed and developed Sen’s work, in particular rethinking social policy away from a residual category of safety nets – something to be ‘tolerated’ to correct market failure or natural disaster – and recasting it and the State as a key instrument for development. As indicated in Chapter 1 of this volume, earlier influences from economics on thinking about poverty, deprivation and inequality in development and the urging of state intervention came from Myrdal (1971), Streeten and Burki (1978) and Stewart (1985). More recently, Mkandawire (2004, 2010), a fellow economist, criticized narrow economic

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thinking that characterized social expenditure as ‘non-productive’ or sunk costs, and instead set out the idea of ‘transformative social policy’, the ability of social policy to actively achieve fundamental goals of social justice and social integration, and development. While acknowledging the inherent interconnection between economic and social policies, Adesina (2007) also argues for reclaiming a wider vision of social policy at the epistemic and policy levels. He argues against a reduced function for social policy as one which is simply limited to crisis management or instrumentalist objectives, and instead stresses the multiple enabling roles of social policy and its potential to meet Africa’s development challenges by embracing normative goals of equality, social solidarity and empowerment. Writers such as Midgley (2017, 2014, 2013), Hall and Midgley (2004) and Patel (2015) have critiqued and developed the various analytic discourses surrounding the normative role of social policy. Early models of ‘social welfare’, underpinned by human capital theory, emphasized social investment in education, health and population nutrition. They were subsequently replaced with a ‘social protection’ approach: mainly a social risk management methodology which targeted the weakest and vulnerable though safety nets and social assistance. This gave way ultimately to a more radical ‘social development’ paradigm which saw an expanded role for social policy intervention, including gender and youth participation and civic engagement, social capital, community-driven development, conflict prevention and resolution, and social accountability. Throughout this period, development theorists’ focus has swung back and forth between a productivist/social investment approach to an activist/redistributive one, as have the strategies and modalities of practitioners and international aid actors. The trajectory of development assistance from the main multilateral agencies can thus be traced from an initial emphasis on infrastructure and capital in the post-war period to a basic-needs approach during the 1960s and 1970s, to the era of structural adjustment during the 1980s, to a focus on governance and most recently ‘partnerships’ and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the turn of the century (Mares and Carnes 2009). In turn, analysts such as Deacon (2007) and Yeates (2008) have theorized the impact of the globalization process on social policy. They assert that increased interconnectedness (the ‘shrinking of time and space’) means that national social policy, especially in the South, is increasingly determined by international organizations. Its substance is therefore becoming progressively transnational and now has to be understood in terms of global redistribution, regulation, provision and empowerment. It means that the classical concerns of social policy (with social rights,

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regulation and redistribution) become transported from within-nation to between-nation political contestation, and this also has implications for which actors and stakeholders predominate. We can see in this literature, then, not just the evolution of thinking concerning the role of social policy in generating development but also debates about the normative role of social policy in shaping the goals and types of growth in contexts of development. Earlier paradigms of social risk, social investment and basic needs have been replaced with discourses of pro-poor and transformative social policy. Paralleling this, similar discussions have taken place about the relevance and utility of conventional social policy theories and frameworks for the study of social policy in contexts of development. The next section of this chapter now proceeds to provide an overview of these analytic and methodological debates.

ORTHODOX SOCIAL POLICY ANALYSIS: FIT FOR PURPOSE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH? Despite the important contribution of the writers cited above, and the fact that non-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries are a rapidly growing focus of research, it remains the case that social policy in the developing world continues largely undertheorized, with few equivalent guiding frameworks to that of Wilensky, Titmus, Korpi, Esping Andersen or Pierson. Mares and Carnes (2009) proclaimed a decade ago that ‘our grasp of the variation in the design and economic consequences of social policies in developing economies, is sketchy and preliminary … as is our understanding of the political factors that have caused these outcomes’. Notably, their statement has as much resonance today as a decade ago. Where literature does exist it tends to be the more empirical or descriptive accounts (evaluations of interventions) rather than the development or testing of cohesive analytic frameworks. Some have argued that the classic explanatory theories employed in industrialized economies, such as varieties of institutionalism, and group competition and power resource models, are inappropriate for the study of arrangements in the South because the underlying conditions are fundamentally different (Gough 2005; Wood 2004; Davis 2001). Gough and Wood captured many of these arguments in their 2004 text. The essence of their case is that, given that policy analysis must necessarily be contextual, the complexity of welfare arrangements, novel channels of funding and the impact of colonialism and globalization

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make it difficult if not impossible to apply social policy theories developed in relation to twentieth-century European societies to presentday developing economies. Most of the conditions and capabilities associated with the emergence of state-led welfare in the now ‘developed’ world remain largely absent in the still developing world. Most crucially this includes industrialization and formal labour markets, which enable sustained economic growth and the mobilization of the labour movement and the working class. It (fiscally) allowed wealth accumulation and redistribution and (politically) allowed a settlement whereby the structural power of capital was maintained in exchange for social protection of workers. It is not coincidental that social insurance for state and manual workers was the dominant form of social protection in early European welfare states. Only gradually did it expand to include wider sections of the population who, largely due to age or disability, were outside systems of wage labour. This of course diverges from the current strategies in developing countries of ‘targeting the poorest’ with social assistance, grants and cash, most of whom are typically outside the formal labour market. Equally important for the purpose of social policy analysis is of course the development and power of the state, in terms of both its functional capability and its public authority. However, whereas the modern state in Western societies developed largely through complex and protracted internal political processes in the course of the big transformations from agrarian to industrial societies, the origins of most states in today’s developing world were externally imposed, and they had their borders and main institutions enforced during the colonial era (Leftwich 2014). Artificially imposed geographical boundaries across a wide range of multiple, overlapping and alternative ethnic, religious, linguistic, tribal and other collective identities had far reaching and detrimental consequences (Burnell et al. 2014). They undermined the state’s sovereignty and hegemony; in particular its ability to establish legal or other authority over artificially demarcated geographical areas. Moreover, insofar as the institutions of colonial rule could be termed ‘colonial states’, they existed primarily for purposes of extraction of commodities and economic exploitation for the benefit of the imperial powers. They did not, in the manner of emerging states in Europe, aim at promoting and organizing national economic development. This colonial legacy of weak institutional infrastructure and political legitimacy dramatically constrained the ability of newly independent states in the post-colonial era to function as centralized, autonomous and effective institutions.

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Additionally, the expansion of the state in European countries during the twentieth century was a gradual process based on corporatist consensus between the state, business and unions. For the reasons cited earlier, however, a corporatist political process is a model that developing countries will find challenging due to high levels of informality, inequality and population heterogeneity. Whereas the state in early stages of European welfare expansion gradually crowded out prior forms of welfare provision provided by both the voluntary sector and the familyhousehold economy, welfare in the South continues to be largely defined and experienced as informal. In place of a traditional typology of a welfare state regime, Gough and Wood (2004) characterized this as an ‘informal security regime’ where individuals, to a greater or lesser extent, rely primarily on community and family relationships to meet their security needs and insure their risks. It is civil society and not the state that compensates for the absence or inequalities of the market through systems of reciprocity or other customary strategies for social protection. Since most of the population in many developing economies exist outside formal labour markets and wage relationships, customary and informal institutions continue to provide important safety nets for many. Social group memberships accord a range of entitlements to land and other material resources (for example, grazing and water rights) and also to social protection in times of hardship or crisis (for example, gifts, loans, meals, and dowries). Increasing migration also has expectations of support, with remittances now exceeding overseas development assistance in many countries (Adelman and Spantchak 2014). Within the traditional Western social policy nexus of the state, market, third sector and family, it is the state and to lesser extent the market that predominates. For developing countries, however, the institutional welfare mix is more uneven and complex. According to Gough and Wood (2004), it is for this reason that the main explanatory models of social policy remain less relevant for theorizing either the provenance or the subsequent evolution of social policy and welfare in the Global South.

SUBSTANTIVE DIFFERENCES OR CONCEPTUAL BIASES? Thandika Mkandawire (2004) takes a less benign view, arguing that it is not just the different structural and historical foundations between North and South which explain the undertheorizing or neglect of social policy in developing countries in mainstream policy analysis. It is also the case that there is considerable Western chauvinism. According to Mkandawire,

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the conceptual gap between the theoretical work on welfare states in OECD countries and the literature on social policy in developing countries arises in large measure as a result of an ‘OECD bias’ or ‘normative dissonance’. He asserts that for some Western writers the harnessing of social policy to economic development, rather than being driven by goals of equity and social justice, ‘instrumentalises social policy and undercuts the intrinsic value of its pursuits’. Mkandawire observes a tendency in Western accounts to disparage social policies in developmental states as ‘top down’ ‘paternalistic’ or ‘productivist’, thereby depriving them of more ‘valid’ normative properties of social policy. Moreover, the fact that social policies in developing economies are often implemented by ‘unsavory authoritarian developmental regimes’ adds to the unwillingness of Western theorist to countenance them. In contrast to power resource theories whereby social gains are extracted by working class mobilization and ‘voice-driven’ political activity, the top-down nature of the introduction of social welfare reforms in much of the developing world is viewed cautiously and sceptically. Mkandawire is not alone in highlighting an OECD bias. Mishra (2004) argues that the experiences of developing countries have remained largely opaque if not invisible, often because the social policy instruments used have not been drawn from the familiar arsenal of social policy mechanisms utilized in developed countries. In contrast to Western-style social insurance and assistance, they include far reaching redistributive measures such as land reform, security of tenure, pan-territorial pricing, commodity stabilization programmes, food subsidies and active labour market policies. According to Mishra, the neglect of this ‘social protection by other means’ has produced a ‘measurement bias’ which, in the extreme, has led to the misreading of the East Asian developmental state as as ‘social policy free zone’. Similarly, Walker and Wong (2005) argue that the reluctance to absorb non-OECD countries into existing welfare paradigms stems not from substantive differences between the two hemispheres, but rather from a parochial ‘refusal to develop more inclusive and pluralistic explanatory frameworks’.

ONGOING VARIANCE BUT ALSO NEW CONVERGENCE? Although the academic subject of social policy could until recently be reasonably charged with ethnocentricity, the current policy environment is progressively less polarized. It is evident that there continues to be important differences in the welfare and policy nexus of ‘developed’ and

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‘developing’ countries, and that this means that the traditional toolkit of social policy cannot be straightforwardly exported. Nevertheless, it is important not to overstate the unwillingness, or understate the utility, of standard frameworks of social policy for explaining the drivers, processes and outcomes of welfare arrangements in contexts of development. The next section illustrates evidence of both divergence and convergence with reference to the role of actors, institutions and ideas. Social Policy Actors On many dimensions, there continues to be significant divergence between the actors involved in policy formulation and implementation in the Global North and South. As the various chapters in this volume demonstrate, there are a much wider range of actors and organizations, including international and non-state, contributing to social welfare needs in the South than in a traditional welfare state context. In particular, while Esping-Andersen’s (1990) welfare state typologies minimized the significance of the third sector in contemporary industrial welfare regimes, it is impossible to ignore the contribution this sector makes to public welfare in developing countries. As Part III of this Handbook illustrates, organizations as varied as international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), religious groups, locally based civil society groups, trade unions, co-operatives and think tanks have grown remarkably in the recent decades and are now pivotal actors in policy design and service delivery. One new category of non-governmental actor with particular rising influence in the Global South are the new private foundations, or philanthropists. Though family foundations have always had a role in international aid (the Rockefeller Foundation launched research into yellow fever in Africa as early as 1913), the scale and impact of philanthropic involvement in health and social welfare today is considerable (Jolkkonen 2018). Data shows that the share of philanthropic flows within official development aid (ODA) flows increased tenfold between 2003 and 2013. Amounting to US$19.5 billion in 2013–2015, philanthropic aid now outstrips the bilateral and multilateral ODA received by many countries. Philanthropic foundations are thus key global social policy actors, and their development approaches and ideas ‘have begun to diffuse widely throughout the international development architecture and across organs of global governance’ (Moran 2014). In terms of a distinctive model or paradigm, the literature suggests consensus around various key dimensions: an emphasis on new technical and scientific development solutions, a new philosophy which explicitly marries profit

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making and giving, new instruments such as profitable social investments and new partnerships with global PPPs and epistemic communities, as well as traditional governance networks (Morvaridi 2015). Public–private partnership models capture many of these dimensions and have been embraced by foundations and corporations, especially in areas where the public sector falls short (Jolkkonen 2018). Since the 1990s the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has both exemplified and spearheaded this new phenomenon. Now recognized as the most influential philanthropic corporation in the world and the most influential donor in the health sector, with more than US$36 billion endowment in 2013 (Adelman and Spantchak 2014), the Gates Foundation has considerable influence over agenda setting and the changing social policy landscape of the developing world. With a strong scientific orientation and market-based solutions to development, the Gates Foundation remains largely opposed to state-led initiatives. Instead it provides funding for initiatives by a variety of non-state actors, ranging from research institutes to international NGOs, corporate foundations and international organizations (Moran and Stevenson 2013), and has been recognized to influence the donor community through its new approach to aid delivery (Birn 2014). While these new actors and interventions have generated polarized reactions in both academic and policy forums (with criticisms of lack of transparency and accountability) there is little doubt that in less than a decade this emerging donor group has begun to have a significant impact on the architecture and discourse of global governance as well as on the quantity, distribution and types of aid flowing to individual developing countries. Certainly, the entrance of the of these new development actors has made the system even more fragmented, with a greater diversity of funding sources, delivery modes, and standards and norms. To that extent, it may perpetuate the gap between the established frameworks tried and tested in Western social policy analysis and the changing realities of the developing world. It definitely confirms the view that whereas traditional welfare regime literature is predicated on the idea that the nation state is the primary agent for social policy formulation or implementation, in the context of development, the social policies of developing countries are frequently determined by forces outside their national borders, in this case via large philanthropic donors. Social Policy Institutions: The State The rise of new actors and the critiques outlined by Gough et al. notwithstanding, the state continues to be the primary actor in terms of

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social policy and social development in low income countries (Hall and Midgley 2004). Social protection, financial transfers and service delivery have emerged as fast growing areas of development policy and practice and are increasingly viewed as a core responsibility of the state and an essential component of of an effective development strategy. A growing number of ‘effective states’ – some democratic, some not – have been successful in promoting growth, reducing poverty and enhancing the overall welfare of their populations, often with staggering impact and success. Since the early 1990s two key (though divergent) drivers have fuelled this trend and have brought the state back in to developing country analysis and practice. The first can be traced to the collapse of the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal orthodoxy in the early 1990s which characterized the state as the cause of rather than the solution to most problems. The fundamentalist prototype of deregulation, less governance and free markets finally gave way to a new framework for development thinking, one which recognized the centrality of institutions, regulation and governance. This ‘Post-Washington Consensus’ became quickly reflected in new strategies and approaches by the main development agencies and donors; in particular, one in which the state needed to be fully incorporated. It gave precedence to a focus on ‘equitable’ development, the role of institutions, capacity building and, most importantly, democratic governance. It also called for a greater degree of ownership by developing-country governments of the development policies they pursued (Weeks and Stein 2006). A parallel but different rebuttal to the free market Washington Consensus came from a burgeoning new ‘developmental state’ approach. Crucially the new model challenged the dominant liberal view that states cannot be trusted, and instead positioned the drivers of economic growth and development firmly within state driven domestic policies and government intervention. This developmental state model was located originally in a group of eight or so South East Asian countries which began achieving striking economic transformations in the late 1980s. In direct opposition to the prevailing neoliberal ideas of the time, these so-called ‘tiger economies’ instituted extensive government intervention in the economy, in particular by promoting a national industrial policy and a regulated financial system to deliver subsidies and targeted credit (Ringen et al. 2011; Kwon 1997). Most significantly for the purposes of this discussion, this developmental state model incorporated a prominent role for social policy in driving the goal of rapid industrialization. Though hostile to the traditional Western welfare state example of high levels of welfare expenditure and

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the state as direct financer and provider, the developmental approach nevertheless prioritized social security and social policy programmes as necessary for broader economic advancement. It positioned the state as enabler (encouraging the family and community to engage in mutual and self-help) and regulator (compelling the private sector to assume responsibility for several social benefits) and championed models of ‘enterprise welfare’ and ‘occupational welfare’. Though originating within a small set of South East Asian economies, attempts have been made to broaden the applicability of the developmental state to a number of other developing countries, including Brazil, Chile, Mexico, India and China. More recently, several sub-Saharan African countries including Botswana have actively embraced the model and in the case of South Africa, a new iteration of the model labelled the ‘developmental welfare state’ took hold (Currie-Alder et al. 2014). In its classic formulation, the developmental state model diverged significantly from European welfare states in terms of the normative underpinnings and objectives of policy choices (as well as the instruments, strategies and actors utilized). Nevertheless, the model allowed greater convergence with traditional social policy theoretical frameworks by bringing both the state and the social back in. Moreover, its concern with human capability identified social policy as the link between protection and production. By refuting that the state was either irrelevant or ineffective in developing-country contexts, it allowed a more comprehensive global (rather than Northern Hemisphere) social policy analysis. At the same time, it contributed to a fuller understanding of welfare policy and wider debates about the drivers of policy; in particular, the influence of historical factors and normative goals in determining welfare systems in the context of development. Social Policy Ideas: Citizenship and Social Rights Though contrasting with the normative goals of the developmental state model, the concurrent emergence of the concept of citizenship-based social rights across the Global South also demonstrates a level of convergence and transfer of ideas between North and South. The notion of rights to welfare and social protection is an integral part of the discourse of social policy and can be traced to the twentieth-century post-war United Kingdom and Europe. Embedded in a notion of citizenship as set out in T.H. Marshall’s seminal 1950 analysis, it reflected the growing optimism in a social democratic ideal and a new emphasis on social solidarity. For Marshall, citizenship – that is, human equality and full membership of a community – was contingent not only on a set of

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civil and political rights, but also on social rights. Since poverty and social exclusion prevented individuals and families from full participation in society as citizens, a social right to state provision of welfare was necessary to ensure all citizens could be full stakeholders. Most crucially, it reconfigured a new social contract between the state and the individual, and redefined welfare from being an act of charity or philanthropy to something that was a formal and legal entitlement. In recent years many low and middle income countries, including several across the continent of Africa, have initiated institutional changes in favour of constitutional rights to social welfare. Rights to health, education, social security, employment and housing, as well as for target populations such as children, the elderly or women, are prominent throughout the Global South. This rights-based approach has been actively supported by international donor and development organizations as essential for economic and social development, as illustrated by the remarks of World Bank President Jim Kim, ‘We fully embrace the rights based approach to health care. In fact we’ve gone very far in that direction’, and ILO Director General Guy Ryder, ‘Social protection is both a human right and sound economic policy’. The approach has been advanced as potentially improving the level of fairness and effectiveness of social protection systems as well as increasing transparency and participatory engagement with the policy process (World Bank Institute 2013). It has led to citizens litigating their rights across a wide spectrum of policy sectors, and courts responding favourably to petitions and holding states accountable for their (in)action. The expanded role for social assistance (discussed in Chapter 19 of this volume) has been accompanied by a push to embed such programmes in a framework of ‘rights, claims and entitlements’ (Ellis et al. 2009). It is argued that giving social benefits the status of legally enforceable citizen rights protects them from ‘discretionary interventions that are implemented by unaccountable actors such as donors and INGOs [international NGOs]’. Inspired as much by Amartya Sen’s notion of ‘entitlements’ as by post-war British welfare state discourses, this current understanding of social protection mechanisms throughout the developing world is undoubtedly being redefined from that of charity to one of entitlement. Social pension schemes throughout southern Africa (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Malawi) are prime examples of this trend, as are the new ‘Citizen Charters’ and ‘Beneficiary Rights’ for recipients of social assistance in Kenya’s Hunger Safety Net Programme (HSNP) and Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme’s Direct Support (PSNP-DS) (Hickey 2010).

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Advocates and campaigners argue that a rights-based approach to social protection has certain advantages, especially for post-colonial states with legacies of historical and political fragmentation and diversity. Enshrining entitlement as a social contract strengthens the legitimacy of the system by making explicit that ‘everyone is equal under the same law’ and secures greater buy-in from the population. Furthermore, by enabling civil society to organize and mount legal challenges (as demonstrated in the many high profile court rulings) the adjudication of socio-economic rights does have a mobilizing and empowering effect for disadvantaged communities. It emphasizes agency and bottom-up change, encourages disenfranchised individuals and communities to fight for their security and dignity, and provides opportunities for advocacy movements to shape local, national and international debates. Finally, and perhaps most vividly demonstrated in South Africa, embedding social protection in a framework of social rights has allowed for a different conceptualization of social policy from an ‘instrumental’ investment model to an ‘activist’ one (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler 2007). Ahead of the trend of using cash transfers in the context of development, and distinctive in being unconditional, the South African Child Support Grant (SACSG) diverges from most child and family benefits which are conditional on specific behavioural changes and are justified primarily as being the key to wider economic growth (Hanlon et al. 2010). In contrast, the rationale for CSG is posited in terms of redressing historic disadvantage, moral imperatives and social justice, and to this extent fully reflects the transformative potential of a constitutional rights approach to welfare. South African policy makers thus assert that the constitution and citizenship justify social policy in terms of social solidarity and historic redress rather than social investment, risk management or economic growth. It removes social security from only fulfilling ‘need’ or ‘humanitarian assistance’, and instead elevates it to a legal imperative: an obligation of the state, and enforceable if necessary by judicial recourse. The implications of these differences are not merely semantic but, as evidenced in the case of South Africa, impact upon the types of instruments and institutions being promoted. This chapter does not seek to embrace an uncritical rights approach to social protection. As demonstrated in numerous countries, a progressive constitution or bill of rights does not guarantee that a social protection system is fit for purpose, or that there will be an effective response or prompt compliance with court orders if litigants obtain a favourable judgment. And, in the extremely resource-limited settings of developing countries, abstract rights do not provide a strategy for priority setting

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between concrete projects and programmes. Without fiscal and institutional capacity and political will, socio-economic rights litigation can in the worst-case scenario offer only hollow hope to the beneficiaries of a right. It is not the intention of this chapter to engage with these substantive arguments and debates. Rather, it has focused on the issue of rights to welfare, to illustrate the transportability of social policy ideas and concepts from the Global North to the Global South. Until very recently, the prevailing view among analysts would have been that it would be difficult to sustain a universalist account of formal citizenship-based social rights in a Western sense, because these emanate from a legitimated and functioning state. However, in less than two decades, we have witnessed the progressive rights-based agenda being championed by governments, international donors and civil society activists across the developing world. This indicates policy transfer and convergence between South and North, as well as reinforcing the view that the state in developing countries is an increasingly important institution.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS It is unclear whether the evolution of social policy analysis and its interaction with development practice outlined in this chapter will lead to more cohesive theorization about social policy in the developing world. There are many reasons why an obvious path-dependent trajectory may be doubtful, and why ongoing lack of agreement among theorists and practitioners about future directions is likely. Firstly, the meaningfulness of the term ‘developing world’ is increasingly being called into question given the considerable and growing heterogeneity within and between those countries subsumed under the umbrella term. Despite a shared colonial past, and many common post-colonial features (including weak state capacity and labour markets, as outlined here) many differences between developing states now appear in sharp contrast. The distinction between small and ‘micro’ states (constituting approximately 40 per cent of all developing countries and territories), and the new emerging superpowers such as India, with a population that exceeds 1 billion and a nuclear defence system, is of course obvious. Differences in rates of poverty and in economic and technological progress between countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the so-called ‘tiger economies’ of East Asia are also pronounced. However, differences in size and economic performance are not the only – or even key – distinctions for the purposes of this chapter. Variations in ideology,

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the quality of governance, and the role played by civil society and social movements in politics between developing countries are powerful and defy easy categorization. Take just one set of countries, the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), originally clustered due to their fast-growing economies, their escalating visibility in regional and global affairs, and their role in social policy debates and actions. However, even if we exclude Russia for the purposes of this analysis, the remaining four are a highly heterogeneous and diverse cluster: one is authoritarian; three are ‘noisy’ multilingual, multi-ethnic democracies; two are nuclear powers; one has a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and so on (Surender and Urbina-Ferretjans 2013). In terms of social policy approaches, it is also hard to identify a single ‘BRICS brand’ or model. Rather, we see significant ideational differences and consequently variation in terms of the quantity and type of internal domestic welfare arrangements across the four countries, and the instruments and mechanisms used to deliver services. South Africa’s domestic social policy has been characterized as an ‘activist’ approach: driven less in terms of social investment and instrumental economic functions, and more in terms of citizenship, social rights and social justice. To this extent it stands in contrast to the ‘productivist model’ of China (and other East Asian economies), the social insurance and private sector approach in India, and the ‘social investment model’ of conditional social security typical of Brazil (and other Latin American economies). The development approaches of Brazil and South Africa are more similar to those of the Development Co-operation Directorate (DAC) of the OECD and traditional donors than are China’s; and while China continues to be quite state-centric in its approaches, Brazil, India and South Africa utilize relationships with civil society and non-governmental actors far more. It is evident then that even among a small group of nations that have been theoretically classified as a type, heterogeneity and diversity are paramount. Secondly, in addition to the substantial heterogeneity among low income countries, the current fluidity and rapid pace of change means that real-time events are moving much faster than the theoretical frameworks (Midgley 2017). The fact they are moving in all directions and with few discernible patterns also mitigates against easy categorization, or prediction. Again, to illustrate with reference to the small band of BRICS: China’s rapid economic growth and social development during the past 30 years, though defying expectations, has equally defied a clear pattern or path. Despite championing a productivist approach in Africa and other aid recipient countries in its new role as donor, within its own

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borders we have seen an important turning point in terms of social policy, with greater emphasis on social protection and addressing inequality. In the opposite direction, Brazil’s emphasis on the social agenda, social justice and eradication of poverty under President Lula da Siva has been overtaken by social unrest, protests and a new conservative administration committed to overhauling the pension system and labour laws, and curbing public spending. There is little doubt that in less than just two decades the social and welfare policy landscape of South Africa has been radically and unrecognizably transformed, and it is still in a period of flux. The unprecedented scale, nature and boldness of social policy output during the Mandela period was superseded just two years later in 1996 by the more orthodox and conservative approach of the Mbeki government. Its new macroeconomic policy emphasized fiscal restraint, liberalization of the economy, privatization of government assets and, most importantly, for this analysis, the reduction of state spending (Surender 2015). Castigated as neoliberal, this ‘enterprise approach’ as a welfare and development strategy generated strong debate in South Africa within both academic and policy forums, and led to strong criticisms. The backlash ushered in the populist Zuma administration, committed to reversing these policies and instead embracing the concept of the new growth path and the developmental state. At the time of writing in 2018, volatility continues to be the South African hallmark, with the recent overthrow of President Zuma and the election of Cyril Ramaphosa, ushering again renewed focus and debate about the appropriate balance between the state and the market, and between economic development and the social agenda. It is evident that for all the reasons presented in this chapter, the social policy environment in the global South represents a more ‘porous ecology’ (Kanbur and Spence 2010) than traditional social policy frameworks. Not only do the simultaneous trends of ongoing diversity, growing convergence and dynamic change challenge existing theoretical frameworks, but they also challenge us to question whether grand overarching theories are likely to have much utility. Likewise, the new complexity and diversity indicate that single subjects or disciplinary frameworks (whether of social policy or development studies) are also likely to be inadequate for the purposes of understanding and explaining the policy landscape of the developing world. Rather this suggests that stronger integration and cross-disciplinary collaboration is needed if a robust and critical theorization of the study and provision of human welfare in low income countries is to emerge.

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REFERENCES Adeleman, C. and Spantchak, Y. (2014). Foundations and private actors. In B. CurrieAlder, R. Kanbur, D. Malone and R. Mehora (eds), International Development: Ideas, Experience and Prospects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Adesina, J. (2007). Social Policy in Sub-Saharan African Context: In Search of Inclusive Development – Social Policy in a Development Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Birn, A.-E. (2014). Philanthrocapitalism, past and present: the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the setting(s) of the international/global health agenda. Hypothesis 12. https://doi.org/10.5779/hypothesis.v12i1.229. Burnell, P., Rakner, L. and Randall, V. (eds) (2014). Politics in the Developing World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie-Alder, B., Kanbur, R., Malone, D. and Mehora R. (eds) (2014). International Development: Ideas, Experience and Prospects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, P. (2001). Rethinking the welfare regime approach. Global Social Policy, 1, 79–107. Deacon, B. (2007). Global Social Policy and Governance. London: SAGE. Devereux, S. and Sabates-Wheeler, R. (2007). Debating social protection. IDS Bulletin, 38 (3), 2–3. Ellis, F., Devereux, S. and White, P. (2009). Social Protection in Africa. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hickey, S. (2010). The politics of social protection: what do we get from a ‘social contract’ approach?. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 32 (4), Social Protection in International Development, 426–438. Gough, I. (2005). European welfare states: explanations and lessons for developing countries. World Bank Conference Paper. New Frontiers of Social Policy, Arusha, 12–15 December. Gough, I. and Wood, G. (2004). Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, A. and Midgley, J. (2004). Social Policy for Development. London: SAGE. Hanlon, J., Barrientos, A. and Hulme, D. (2010). Just Give Money to the Poor. London: Kumarian Press. Jolkkonen, R. (2018). Big philanthropy and social policy transfer: a case study on the Gates Foundation in Tanzania. DPhil thesis, University of Oxford. Kanbur, R. and Spence, A.M. (2010). Equity and Growth in a Globalizing World. Washington, DC: World Bank for the Commission on Growth and Development. Kwon, H.-J. (1997). Beyond European welfare regimes: comparative perspectives on East Asian welfare systems. Journal of Social Policy, 26 (4), 467–484. Leftwich, A. (2014). Theorising the state. In P. Burnell, L. Rakner and V. Randall (eds), Politics in the Developing World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mares, I. and Carnes, M. (2009). Social policy in developing countries. Annual Review of Political Science, 12, 93–113. Marshall, T.H. (1950). Citizenship and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Midgley, J. (2013). Social development and social welfare: implications for comparative social policy. In P. Kennett (ed.), A Handbook of Comparative Social Policy. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 182–204. Midgley, J. (2014). Social Development: Theory and Practice. London: SAGE.

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52 Handbook of social policy and development Midgley, J. (2017). Social Welfare for a Global Era: International Perspectives on Policy and Practice. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications. Mishra, R. (2004). Social protection by other means: can it survive globalization? In P. Kennett (ed.), A Handbook of Comparative Social Policy. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 68–88. Mkandawire, T. (2004). Social Policy in a Development Context. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Mkandawire, T. (2010). From maladjusted states to democratic developmental states in Africa. In E. Omano (ed.), Constructing a Democratic Developmental State in South Africa: Potentials and Challenges. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Moran, M. (2014). Private Foundations and Development Partnerships: American Philanthropy and Global Development Agendas. Routledge Global Institutions series. London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge. Moran, M. and Stevenson, M. (2013). Illumination and innovation: what philanthropic foundations bring to global health governance. Global Society, 27, 117–137. https://doi. org/10.1080/13600826.2012.762343. Morvaridi, B. (2015). New Philanthropy and Social Justice: Debating the Conceptual and Policy Discourse. Bristol: Policy Press. Myrdal, G. (1971). The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Outline. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Patel, L. (2015). Social Welfare and Social Development, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ringen, S., Kwon, H.-J., Yi, I., Kim, T. and Lee, J. (2011). The Korean State and Social Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, F. (1985). Basic Needs in Developing Countries. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Streeten, P. and Burki, S.J. (1978). Basic needs: some issues. World Development, 6 (3), 411–421. Surender, R. (2015). South Africa: a different welfare and development paradigm?. In R. Hasmath (ed.), Inclusive Growth, Development and Welfare Policy: A Critical Assessment. London: Routledge. Surender, R. and Urbina-Ferretjans, M. (2013). South–South cooperation: a new paradigm for global social policy? In R. Surender and R. Walker (eds), Social Policy in a Developing World. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 237–257. Walker, A. and Wong, C.-K. (2005). East Asian Welfare Regimes in Transition. Bristol: Policy Press. Weeks, J. and Stein, H. (2006). The Washington Consensus. In D. Clark (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Development Studies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Wood, G. (2004). Informal security regimes: the strength of relationships. In I. Gough and G. Wood (eds), Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woods, N. (2006). The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank and their Borrowers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. World Bank Institute (2013). Priority Setting and Constitutional Mandates in Health. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yeates, N. (2008). Understanding Global Social Policy. Bristol: Policy Press.

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PART II KEY ISSUES AND DEBATES

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3. Shaping society from below: social movements, social policy and development Laura Alfers

One of the lasting legacies of Marxist thought for the study of state and society is the idea that social change – and the way this change is institutionalized through the state, in its regulations, laws and policies – is a result of the contestation of social forces. Running through this are questions about the interplay of structure and agency, power and the response to power, and debates about whether, how and under what conditions organized groups of the less powerful can use their relative numerical dominance to engage with more powerful interests to improve their situation. The concern with how forces from below initiate, engage with, challenge and/or resist social change has characterized a wideranging academic literature, crossing multiple disciplinary boundaries. The result has been a large and diverse body of scholarship on what are known as social movements, which are broadly defined by Tilly (2004) as groups of ordinary people who mobilize around a common interest to make collective claims on others. While much social movement scholarship is focused on groups of people organizing for greater social and economic inclusion, it is important to acknowledge that social movements can also mobilize around issues that are considered exclusionary (for example, neo-Nazi groups, anti-immigration and religious fundamentalism). This chapter aims to provide an overview of some of the key debates surrounding social movements as they appear in both the social policy and development literatures. It begins with a review of the place of social movements within development, highlighting the major theoretical shifts which have occurred, and which have led to significant changes in the way social movements are understood within processes of social change. The chapter then moves on to a discussion of social movements and social policy in the development context, concluding with a reflection on the possibility for cross-disciplinary learning between the fields of development and social policy. Ultimately it argues that the development literature may benefit from the use of tools developed within the study of 54

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social policy in order to produce closer and more nuanced understandings of the ways in which social movements are able to contribute to material social change. At the same time, there is much for social policy to take from the development literature focused on social movements. Its ability to grasp a difference from the modernist world in which the discipline of social policy originally developed brings with it a challenge to more deeply consider the ways in which the very different realities of the Global South may impact on the theoretical assumptions which have underpinned social policy scholarship.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT Traditionally the major theories of development have given little scope to understand the agency of groups of ordinary people to challenge and impact on changes in the way in which society operates. Modernization theory, structuralism and dependency theory are all theories which foreground large scale political and economic processes – globalization, economic crisis, international relations – as the driving forces of social change. Within the large literature on the developmental state, for example, social movements are noticeably absent (Gibbon 1997). Partly this is because of the way in which society was organized under developmental states, with the state wielding tight control over how civil society was organized (labour movements, peasant co-operatives, student organizations, and so on), often incorporating these groups into the state itself (Gibbon 1997). It is also the result of the institutionalist nature of this approach which led to a greater focus on the shape and form of the state itself in explaining social change (Saraswati et al. 2013). Where organized forces from below do emerge as actors, it is either the nationalist movements of the decolonization period and/or the labour movement which predominate. Within these theoretical traditions: politics is centred around traditional actors like parties, vanguards and the working class who struggle for control of the State, and to a view of society as composed of more or less immutable structures and class relations that only great changes (massive development schemes or revolutionary upheavals) can alter in a significant way (Escobar 1992)

In this respect these theories of development follow a Marxist-inspired social analysis, rooted in the analysis of capitalist development arising

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out of the industrial revolution in Europe, and giving primacy particularly to the role of the labour movement as a central driver of social change. During the late 1960s and 1970s, this perspective was challenged as the social compacts that had developed during the modernist industrial period came under increasing pressure and critique. In Europe and the United States, the rise of ‘new left’ student politics, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and the peace movement amongst others started to challenge the idea that the only type of significant social mobilization was that linked to labour. These forms of mobilization were termed ‘new social movements’. It is often pointed out that new social movements were not in fact new, and had existed as long as, if not longer than, the labour movement itself. However, while the term may not always be thought appropriate, it continues to be considered useful as a way in which to signify the difference between these movements and the ‘old’ labour movement. Precisely what it is that differentiates the new social movements from the old is a source of much debate. In general, new social movements are considered to diverge from the labour movement in several key respects. Their organizational forms and modes of action differ significantly. They are not institutionalized within the state as social partners and may actively be opposed to any form of incorporation or alliances with political parties, instead ‘reclaiming autonomous spaces’ for collective action (Della Porta and Diani 1999, p. 9). They are also considered to be more loosely organized than the highly structured trade unions, based on network structures with more horizontal leadership (Rucht 2017). Their sources of solidarity – which vary across multiple areas – do not fit neatly into the class-based lines of division on which the labour movement was built (Melucci 1980; Steinmetz 1994). Their concerns, it is often argued, are post-material. Social movements have moved away from a critique of the material and economic order of society, and instead focus on a critique of the social order, challenging exclusions based on race, gender, disability and sexuality located within the sphere of reproduction, rather than on the more material concerns in the sphere of production with which the labour movement is traditionally concerned (Della Porta and Diani 1999; Rucht 2017). This last argument in particular is a controversial one, particularly when it is applied to movements operating in the Global South. It is far easier to talk seriously about post-materialism in contexts of widespread affluence than it is to discuss it in contexts where most people’s lives are characterized by poverty and material deprivation. Scholars working in the development sphere have pointed out that in many cases identitybased forms of mobilization are simultaneously connected to economic

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questions (Omvedt 1994; Mohan and Stokke 2000; Bebbington 2007; Habib and Opoku-Mensah 2009; Silva 2015). Bebbington (2007) cites the case of indigenous people’s organizations in Ecuador who mobilize around their identity as indigenous people, whilst also challenging economic processes such as the negotiations around the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In India, Omvedt (1994) cites the example of the environmental movement, which has incorporated a critique of capitalist economic development into its campaigns; and the women’s movement, which has shifted from an earlier single-issue focus on violence and the family to include property rights and alternative economic development models. In doing so, scholars frequently link into a Marxism which emphasizes economic sources of conflict beyond class, focusing instead on questions of non-wage-related capitalist accumulation and dispossession (Harvey 2004; Whitehead 2013). A significant proportion of this literature has looked at the privatization of natural resources such as water and land, and the resistance that has developed around these processes (Spronk and Webber 2007; Benjaminsen and Bryceson 2012; Hall 2013). This shift in theoretical focus is important to flag and it brings up the point that the discovery of new social movements was a result of not only their increasingly noticeable presence, but also the development of new theoretical frameworks for understanding social conflict that moved away from a narrow and economistic Marxist class analysis. Post-structuralism provoked an emphasis on deconstructing social structures, rather than assuming their presence and power, and a greater focus on identity, culture and ideology. Leading new social movement (NSM) theorists such as Melucci (1980) argued that society had shifted into an era where material production had been replaced by ‘cultural production’ (signs, symbols and social relations) and that this cultural arena was the new site of contestation. Foucauldian analysis shifted the terrain towards studies of power and domination as separate from capitalism and class. Feminist and race theorists challenged the primacy of class as the central social fault line, arguing that social identities such race, gender and sexuality were equally important relations through which conflict and solidarity could emerge (Crenshaw 1991). The post-Marxism of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) drew on the work of Antonio Gramsci to foreground ideology (hegemony), rather than material production, as a major source of oppression and site of resistance. In a similar way, traditional Marxist theories of development – and the foregrounding of nationalist and labour movements within that – also started to be challenged. In the Global South the economic crises of the late 1970s reversed much of the economic gains that had been made

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during the post-independence period. This led to a questioning of modernist development models and theories. Neoliberal theory, embodied in the so-called Washington Consensus, brought with it an agenda not only of economic liberalization, but also of political liberalization. While some scholars stressed the ‘atomizing’ effects of neoliberal policies on the weakening of the class-based labour movements, others challenged this, arguing that market reforms had led to resistance against the reforms, albeit in the form of the new social movements, focused on issues such as gender, the environment and the rights of indigenous people (Omvedt 1994; Arce and Bellinger 2007; Silva 2015; Anria and Niedzwiecki 2016; Wasserman 2017). These trends later intersected with the rise of participatory development: the critique of the top-down forms of modernist development which, it was argued, had failed to enable better outcomes in the developing world because it was driven by Northern technocrats and divorced from the voices and experiences of the ordinary people whose lives were impacted upon by development programmes (Chambers 1997). Within development theory, the cultural turn of the social sciences was closely intertwined with the post-colonial critique which not only foregrounded questions of identity and culture, but also deconstructed social norms within a specific set of power relations: that existing between colonizer and colonized. This critique is typified in the post-development school of thought, whose leading proponent is Arturo Escobar (1992, 2010). Escobar critiqued modernist development as a form of violence imposed by the West which ‘suppressed local cultures, women, identities and histories’ (Mohan and Stokke 2000). Announcing that development had failed, he argued that the proliferation of grassroots social movements in Latin America during the 1980s – representing identities that had been violated by modernist development: peasant farmers, indigenous people – was a form of resistance and a search for an alternative to development (Mohan and Stokke 2000). In India, although not specifically focused on a critique of development, Ranajit Guha (1997) and the subaltern studies school brought attention to the politics and voices of groups existing outside of (and even in opposition to) capitalist class relations and Western modernity in general. In both cases an emphasis on localized resistance, self-sufficiency and a suspicious attitude to the state and the market became an antidote to the large-scale Marxist analytic focused on revolutionary forces, the interplay of macro-structures governing society, and an unwavering belief in the state (Mohan and Stokke 2000). The consequence of this confluence of forces – participatory development, political liberalization, the post-colonial critique of development – was to usher in a much more positive account of the potential of social

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movements to transform politics in developing countries. As Oommen (1997) argues, the idea of development shifted to an idea that the ‘critical inputs are not capital and technology, but mobilisation and protest’. For Escobar (2010) it was (and still is) social and, particularly, indigenous movements that hold the key to redefining development away from the forced imposition of modernity, and towards something more closely resembling the realities and values of people whose ways of doing and being in the world differ from modern Western norms. This foregrounding of the redefinition of development led also to a shift in understanding the successes and failures of social movements. Whereas formerly the success of a movement’s activities may have been measured against whether there had been a significant improvement in living standards, now success could be claimed if established orthodoxies and ideas about ‘how things should be’ had been challenged. As Bebbington (2007) points out, the shift was away from seeing the significance of social movements as related to how they changed material realities, towards a perspective which focused on how social movements change the ways in which these realities are understood and represented in the discourses which structure social life. This again brings up the key point that, within the wide literature on social movements, the question of their significance to broader social change and development is often as dependent on the theoretical prism through which they are viewed, as it is a question of empirical observation. Post-development thinking therefore established a more positive view of the role of social movements in development. It led to a celebration of ‘local political actors and their difference and diversity, rather than their common relationship to the means of production’ (Mohan and Stokke 2000, p. 248). However, as is common in the development of social theory, the post-colonial critique of the Marxist class-based perspective on development has itself come in for critique. Critics of postdevelopment have pointed out that its suspicious attitude towards the state, and its celebration of localism and self-sufficiency as the antidote to modernist development, allow it to segue uncomfortably well with cultural chauvinism (Pieterse 1998; Jakimow 2008). For example, fundamentalist religious movements such as Hindutva in India may be firmly rooted in (one interpretation of) local tradition, but the growth of this movement in recent times has fed into an increasing intolerance of difference and has had particularly damaging consequences for the country’s Muslim minority. Post-development has also been criticized for its potential to feed into models of social provision which download responsibility onto communities (and often onto individual women) and away from the state. In India, Gandhian organizations which promote

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both social and economic self-sufficiency have been criticized for letting the state off the hook, and not doing enough to advocate for wider public provision and more inclusive economies (Whitehead 2013). It is also argued that its celebratory view of social movements has exaggerated their potential to initiate social change on any meaningful scale. Despite the increase in social movement activity during the 1990s and 2000s, for example, there is still growing global inequality, even if the struggles of women, indigenous people and ethnic minorities have gained increasing representation and attention. Fraser (2009) has made this argument in relation to the feminist movement, arguing that under neoliberal capitalism the two arms of the movement – that which sought recognition for women, and that which sought economic redistribution for women – have become separated. Whilst the recognition element has been relatively successful, with the importance of gender equality now widely recognized, this has not been matched with a simultaneous transfer of economic resources. Consequently, while women are now entering the labour market in greater numbers, the fact remains that the jobs which await them are generally low paid and menial. In a similar way, other critics have pointed out that the focus on new social movements, and the view of the labour movement as both elitist and old has fed into a wider demonization of trade unions in countries of the Global South. This again fits uncomfortably well with a neoliberal project to deregulate labour markets, flexibilize the labour force and reduce social policy to minimalist safety nets (Tendler 2004). Post-development inspired thinking around social movements – which originated largely in Latin America – has also interestingly been critiqued for its own contextual bias. Whilst social movement activism does not ‘seem to have much of a history’ in Africa, Eckert (2017) suggests that this is more a result of the inadequacy of the frameworks for understanding social movements that have been imported from North and South America and Europe than it is a sign of the paucity of political agency on the continent. In his review of social movements in Africa (outside of South Africa), Eckert (2017) contends that the organization, engagement and resistance of informal workers is central to understanding political agency and struggle in the African context. The hawkers, market traders, shoe-shiners, fishermen and owners of homebased micro-enterprises have on the one hand been written off by Marxist theorists as part of a ‘lumpenproletariat with no clear revolutionary role to play’ because they are not industrial waged workers (Robertson 1988, p. 180). On the other hand, because of the bias towards more identitybased formations and the conceptual separation which is often drawn between the labour movement and new social movements, organizations

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of informal workers – who mobilize around material, work-related concerns, but do so in very different ways from the traditional labour movement – have been paid little attention by mainstream social movement theorists. As a result, there has been little understanding of ‘the complex organizational forms’ that exist and the agency that these may channel into political struggles. Eckert (2017) argues that in bringing out the African perspective it would be essential not only to incorporate the formal labour movement into a ‘long history of social movements’, but also to include the history of work-related associations operating outside of the formal economy, which have been central in defining the ways in which ordinary Africans engage with the state. The global network of grassroots informal worker organizations – Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) – demonstrates the wideranging forms of organization and political agency of these groups, with many examples of activism from the African continent (Skinner 2008; Bonner and Carré 2013; Webster et al. 2017).

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND SOCIAL POLICY IN A DEVELOPMENT CONTEXT There has been a resurgence of interest in the study of social policy in development contexts since the turn of the twenty-first century (Mkandawire 2004). Within this there have been important attempts to question some of social policy’s basic assumptions in a context very different from that in which the discipline first developed. One such example is the volume by Gough and Wood (2004) on welfare regimes in Africa, Asia and Latin America, which argues that the assumptions of social policy in the Global North – a legitimated state, widespread formal employment and developed financial markets – do not apply in the Global South. Nevertheless, the role of social movements in social policy development has not been a central focus. Partly this is because of what Li (2007, p. 278) refers to as the strong ‘vanguardist’ theme of much of the social movement and development literature which takes an extremist view of post-development, arguing that social movements ‘should lead the way in autonomous, authentic, post-development thinking that is anti-capitalist, anti-state and grounded in local traditions and cultural diversity’. This approach, for obvious reasons, does not foreground policy development or even engagement with the state as a key concern (Bebbington 2007).

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Partly as well, however, it is because the study of social policy, as Anria and Niedzwiecki (2016) point out, has drawn on its own dominant theoretical models which, as with modernist development theory, have not viewed social movements as powerful agents of policy change. Scholars of social policy, even those working in the development context, have drawn disproportionately on one of two theoretical models. The first is the institutionalist school, which places emphasis on the impact of political institutions in determining the trajectory of social policy. While social movements may be of interest as one of many political actors, their impact is understood to be conditioned and limited by existing institutions and policies (Skocpol and Amenta 1986; Amenta et al. 2010). It is therefore the institutions themselves, and the ways in which they mediate social conflict, which are often the main point of interest. Other schools of thought emphasize the role of policy ideas and ideology in the structuring policy outcomes (Beland 2005). Again, social movements – as purveyors of ideas and ideologies – may be of interest, but they are not necessarily a central focus of study. Power resources theory, which has become a dominant paradigm within the study of, particularly, European social policy (Myles and Quadagno 2002), does provide more of a space for understanding how policy may be impacted upon by social mobilization. However, in general, it follows a broadly Marxist tradition which emphasizes the role that class struggle, and particularly labour mobilization, has played in the development and expansion of welfare regimes (Lenski 1966; Huber and Stephens 2001). A key argument is that it is the relative strength of left wing parties and their trade union allies which explains the shape and extent of welfare regimes. Countries with a strong labour movement tend towards more generous and redistributive welfare regimes, whilst countries with a weaker or less independent labour movement are characterized by less generous welfare policies (Myles and Quadagno 2002). In the Latin American context Niedzwiecki (2015), through an analysis of data from ten countries, has shown a relationship between labour union density and increased social spending. From this theoretical perspective, social movements are often not given much credence as agents of policy change because they are considered to lack the necessary power resources. For example, because such movements are often not directly mobilized around economic production, it is argued that they lack the power to disrupt economies in the same way as the labour movement. Even where they are mobilized around economic issues, however, due to their size, manner of organization (which may be ad hoc and dispersed), the fact that there are few institutionalized mechanisms for them to participate in policy processes, and that they are

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often made up of groups of people who occupy a marginal position within the economic system, they are easier to dismiss than organized workers and as a result their impact on policy formation is weaker (Bonoli 2005; Li 2007). However, more recently there have been attempts to approach the analysis of the role of social movements in social policy development from a more positive perspective. A number of these have drawn on the political process and policy process approaches to the study of social movements which first arose during the 1970s in the United States. As with NSM theory, these approaches arose as a reaction to theoretical orthodoxies; in this case, the structuralist-functionalist idea that positioned new social movements as merely a chaotic side effect of social change. Collective action, resource mobilization (McCarthy and Zald 2002) and political process theories (Piven and Cloward 1979; Tilly 2001), whilst differing in significant ways, all attempted to show that, rather than being chaotic, social movements were rational and proactive drivers of change. These theories sought to understand the conditions under which collective action was made possible and could create political change. Piven and Cloward (1979), for example, argued in an iconic study of social policy expansion in the United States that it was the mass unrest led by social movements between 1964 and 1969 which led to the expansion of welfare in that country. They emphasized the key role of the new social movements whose mobilizations, they argued, had the ability to disrupt the status quo and force through more inclusive social policies, precisely because their actions were less constrained than those of the bureaucratic labour movement which had been co-opted by formal politics. However, their optimism about the possibilities for driving change from below was also tempered by their institutionalist approach: they argued that it is only in times of instability and division amongst the political elites that social movements are able to have such an impact. Policy process approaches focus in on the close details of the stages of policy making, ranging from agenda setting through to implementation and feedback, trying to ascertain the exact points at which social movements may have an impact on policy development (Silva 2015). Breaking the policy process down in this way provides a more nuanced and fine-grained analysis of ‘the mechanisms by which social movement protest affects policy outcomes’ (Silva 2015, p. 27). While these process models first developed in the United States and have been most commonly used in this context, there have been more recent attempts to apply them in Latin America.

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Silva (2015), for example, draws on the policy process approach to argue that social movements in Latin America have influenced policy in three different ways. They have had a direct impact on policy. For example, the piqueteros (movement of the unemployed) in Argentina during the 1990s had a direct effect by pressuring the government (and then becoming directly involved in policy development) to enact social policies which aimed to provide relief during the economic crisis. Social movements have also had an indirect impact on policy. Here Silva (2015) uses the example of the Chilean student movement which used public protest to highlight the need for free higher education. The students created strong public pressure for education reform, but ultimately did not actively engage with the state on the actual reform of the policy, preferring to remain at a distance. Finally, according to Silva (2015), social movements have had an impact on policy through the cumulative impact of their actions over time. The example he gives is the indigenous people’s movements of Ecuador and Bolivia which have since the 1980s worked on a broad range of issues, from anti-privatization to protection of the environment, to the provision of social services. Through this, these movements forged broad-based alliances which have ultimately had an impact on the trajectory of politics. In both those countries governments sympathetic to the cause were elected into power. Rafael Correa’s government in Ecuador and the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia have both institutionalized much of the prior social movement activism and turned it into state policy. For example, in Ecuador the constitution was amended in 2008 to include the protection of the environment, and in 2006 Morales nationalized Bolivia’s oil and gas industries. Bolivia, in particular, has also included a number of important social policy reforms in which social movements have been involved. Anria and Niedzwiecki (2016) argued that social movement activism in Bolivia was central to the passing of legislation to enact the Renta Dignidad universal pension scheme in 2007, something which has significantly and directly improved the lives of many older Bolivians. Their analysis reveals that this success was achieved by high levels of social movement coordination and mobilization. Importantly as well, the left movement-based government of Evo Morales created an opening, as did cross-movement alliances which incorporated both new and old social movements. Indeed, as Silva’s (2015) analysis also reveals, cross-movement alliances are central to whether social movements are able to have an impact on policy. Broad-based alliances were also present in the push for Thailand’s 30-Bhat (later Universal Coverage) Health Scheme, which provides health care for all Thai citizens at minimal (and later no) cost. The

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scheme has its roots in what Nitayarumphong (2011, p. 74) has called ‘the triangle that moved a mountain’: an alliance between public health professionals, nine different social movements (including the labour movement and an organization of informal workers) and a political party. Crucial here, as in several of the Latin American examples given above, was the timing of the drive for free health care which coincided with a hotly contested election. This suggests that Piven and Cloward’s (1979) thesis – that the success of social movements in influencing policy depends on the stage of the political cycle – is also true in the development context. However, it is important to point out that the direction of theoretical influence may not simply run from the Global North to the South. As Silva (2015) has argued, scholars working on social movements and social policy in development have something to learn from the policy and political process theories first developed in the United States. Yet, there may also be something for the North to learn from the South about mechanisms of political influence outside of more traditional conceptions of political process. One example is that of the co-production of social services and programmes (such as health services, housing, waste management, and so on) by social movements. Such strategies have been used to great effect by both slum or shack dwellers and informal workers around the world to deal with pragmatic concerns around the delivery of basic services, as well as to generate more reliable incomes (Bhatt 2005; Mitlin 2008; Samson 2015). Although co-production is by no means limited to the Global South, it does differ in the manner in which it is used. As Mitlin (2008) points out, when entered into by social movements, co-production is often as much a political strategy as it is about service provision. It is an effort by grassroots organizations to work with rather than against the state, in order to make practical gains for themselves. At the same time it can also be an attempt to influence and exert some control over the shape, form and reach of state policies. Cautions have been raised about such strategies because they may in some contexts simply be a shifting of responsibility for social provision away from the state and onto poorer people (Chen 2006; Meagher 2013). At the same time, however, co-production provides an interesting example of the diverse ways in which social movements in the development context are impacting on state practices outside of what are traditionally considered policy processes.

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REFLECTIONS ON SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, SOCIAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT This review reveals some of the possibilities for two-way learning between the fields of social policy and development. Indeed, the idea of co-production as a political strategy, mentioned at the end of the previous section, is an excellent example of how the study of development – within which many of the discussions around co-production are in fact framed – and the study of social policy may intersect and learn from one another. It shows how social movements in the Global South are thinking innovatively about influencing the practices of state in a way that diverges from traditional models for understanding policy development and change. The strength of the post-development literature, in particular, is its emphasis on how social movements have been implicated in challenging and redefining accepted norms about social and economic life that are not rooted in the local realities, beliefs and practices. It demands that real attention is paid to these alternative realities, and provides a critique of modernist theories which may not be fully able to apprehend them. The study of social policy, despite its adaptation to the development context, is a discipline rooted in modernism. It originated as an area of study at the height of welfare state development in post-war Europe and in many respects continues to be dominated by theoretical models inherited from this era. There have now been serious attempts to question some of its basic assumptions in the development context, but as Anria and Niedzwiecki (2016) point out, there is still work to be done, particularly when it comes to understanding the role of social movements in policy development. In doing so, social policy scholars can draw inspiration from the development literature which, although also rooted in modernist visions, has for a much longer period of time challenged these assumptions and has developed its own theoretical models. Bringing different ways of ordering the state and society (and the interactions between the two) to light has been an important contribution of the post-development literature which has sought to advance theory ‘from below’, grounded in the realities of societies that operate within alternative logics, and often involving forms of social organization which have challenged Western norms. Due to this orientation there has been sufficient (although critics might say too much) space to understand the important contribution that social movements (outside of the traditional labour movement) have been able to make as drivers of social change. Bringing these insights closer to the study of social policy may well be

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an important contribution towards increasing the discipline’s ability to comprehend a context which is very different from that in which it first developed. At the same time, the study of social policy in development contexts may add a much needed answer to the ‘so what?’ critique of the social movement and development literature. Critics have pointed out that changing ideas about culture, identity and challenging inherited norms may all be very well, but they question the point of such activity if it fails to lead to material changes that improve people’s lives on a wider scale. While social movement scholars working in the Global South have argued that identity-based social movements often include material components in their activism, the idea that ‘new’ social movements have limited ability to influence the improvement of living standards on any meaningful scale continues to be a critical theme. The anti-statist orientation of some of the post-development literature has in many ways contributed to this by writing off social movements’ engagements with the state as mere ‘accommodation’ with an oppressive system, failing to pick up on the detail and nuance of state–social movement interactions, and in that way itself contributing to the idea that social movements do not contribute to policy change. Yet, as Silva (2015) has shown through his use of policy process approaches in Latin America, social movements have had an important impact on state policy in a way that is meaningful, has reached large numbers of people, and cannot simply be seen as a capitulation to an oppressive state. Silva (2015) argues that policy process approaches may therefore assist social movement scholars working the Global South to develop finer-grained and more nuanced understandings of the different mechanisms by which social movements impact on the practices of the state, its institutions and policies. In this way the tools of social policy may be a useful complement to those produced within the field of development.

REFERENCES Amenta, E., N. Caren, F. Chiarello and Y. Su (2010), ‘The Political Consequences of Social Movements’, Annual Review of Sociology 36, 287–307. Anria, S. and S. Niedzwiecki (2016), ‘Social Movements and Social Policy: the Bolivian Renta Dignidad’, Studies in Comparative International Development 51, 308–327. Arce, M. and P.T. Bellinger (2007), ‘Low-Intensity Democracy Revisited: The Effects of Economic Liberalization on Political Activity in Latin America’, World Politics 60, 97–121. Bebbington, A. (2007), ‘Social Movements and the Politicization of Chronic Poverty’, Development and Change 38(5), 793–818.

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68 Handbook of social policy and development Beland, D. (2005), ‘Ideas and Social Policy: An Institutionalist Perspective’, Social Policy and Administration 39(1), 1–18. Benjaminsen, T.A. and I. Bryceson (2012), ‘Conservation, Green/Blue Grabbing and Accumulation by Dispossesion in Tanzania’, Journal of Peasant Studies 39(2), 335–355. Bhatt, E.R. (2005), We Are So Poor but So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India, New York: Oxford University Press. Bonner, C. and F. Carré (2013), ‘Global Networking: Informal Workers Build Solidarity, Power and Representation through Networks and Alliances’, WIEGO Working Paper (Organization and Representation) No. 31, Cambridge, MA: WIEGO. Bonoli, G. (2005), ‘The Politics of the new Social Policies: Providing Coverage Against New Social Risks in Mature Welfare States’, Policy and Politics 33(3), 431–449. Chambers, R. (1997), Whose Reality Counts: Putting the First Last, London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Chen, M. (2006), ‘Rethinking the Informal Economy: Linkages with the Formal Economy and the Formal Regulatory Environment’, in B. Guha-Khasnobis, R. Kanbur and E. Ostrom (eds), Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crenshaw, K. (1991), ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review 43(6), 1241–1299. Della Porta, D. and M. Diani (1999), Social Movements: An Introduction, Oxford, UK and Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell. Eckert, A. (2017), ‘Social Movements in Africa’, in S. Berger and H. Nehring (eds), The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Escobar, A. (1992), ‘Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development and Social Movements’, Third World and Post-Colonial Issues 31/32, 20–56. Escobar, A. (2010), ‘Latin America at a Crossroads: Alternative Modernizations, PostLiberalism, or Post-Development’, Cultural Studies 24(1), 1–65. Fraser, N. (2009), ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’, New Left Review 56, https://newleftreview.org/II/56. Gibbon, P. (1997), ‘Civil Society, Politics and Democracy in Developmentalist States’, in S. Lindberg and A. Sverrisson (eds), Social Movements in Development: The Challenge of Globalization and Democratization, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Gough, I. and G. Wood (eds) (2004), Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guha, R. (1997), Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge, MA, USA and London, UK: Harvard University Press. Habib, A. and P.Y. Opoku-Mensah (2009), ‘Speaking to Global Debates Through a National and Continental Lens: South African and African Social Movements in Comparative Perspective’, in S. Ellis and I. Kessel (eds), Movers and Shakers: Social Movements in Africa, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Hall, D. (2013), ‘Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossesion and the Global Land Grab’, Third World Quarterly 34(9), 1582–1604. Harvey, D. (2004), ‘The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession’, Socialist Register 40, 63–87. Huber, E. and J.D. Stephens (2001), Development and Crisis of the Welfare State, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jakimow, T. (2008), ‘Answering the Critics: The Potential and Limitations of the Knowledge Agenda as a Practical Response to Post-Development Critique’, Progress in Development Studies 8(4), 311–323. Laclau, E. and C. Mouffe (1985), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London, UK and New York, USA: Verso (New Left). Lenski, G.E. (1966), Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification, New York: McGraw-Hill.

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Shaping society from below 69 Li, T.M. (2007), The Will to Improve, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCarthy, J.D. and M.N. Zald (2002), ‘The Enduring Vitality of Resource Mobilization Theory of Social Movements’, in J.H. Turner (ed.), Handbook of Sociological Theory, New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenium Publishers. Meagher, K. (2013), ‘Unlocking the Informal Economy: A Literature Review on Linkages Between Formal and Informal Economies in Developing Countries’, WIEGO Working Paper No 27, Cambridge, MA: WIEGO. Melucci, A. (1980), ‘The New Social Movements: A Theoretical Approach’, Theory and Methods 19(2), 199–226. Mitlin, D. (2008), ‘With and Beyond the State – Co-production as a Route to Political Influence, Power and Transformation for Grassroots Organizations’, Environment and Urbanization 20(2), 339–360. Mkandawire, T. (2004), ‘Social Policy in a Development Context: Introduction’, in T. Mkandawire (ed.), Social Policy in a Development Context, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mohan, G. and K. Stokke (2000), ‘Participatory Development and Empowerment: The Dangers of Localism’, Third World Quarterly 21(2), 247–268. Myles, J. and J. Quadagno (2002), ‘Political Theories of the Welfare State’, Social Service Review 76(1), 34–57. Niedzwiecki, S. (2015), ‘Social Policy Commitment in South America. The Effect of Organized Labor on Social Spending from 1980 to 2010’, Journal of Politics in Latin America 7(2), 3–42. Nitayarumphong, B. (2011), Struggling Along the Path to Universal Care for All, Nonthaburi: National Health Insurance Office. Omvedt, G. (1994), ‘Peasants, Dalits and Women: Democracy and India’s New Social Movements’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 24(1), 35–48. Oommen, T.K. (1997), ‘Social Movements in the Third World’, in S. Lindberg and A. Sverrisson (eds), Social Movements in Development: The Challenge of Globalization and Democratization, Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishing. Pieterse, J.N. (1998), ‘My Paradigm or Yours? Alternative Development, PostDevelopment, Reflexive Development’, Development and Change 29, 343–373. Piven, F.F. and R.A. Cloward (1979), Poor People’s Movements: How They Succeed, How They Fail, New York: Vintage Books. Robertson, C. (1988), ‘Invisible Workers: African Women and the Problem of the Self-Employed in Labour History’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 23(2), 180–200. Rucht, D. (2017), ‘Studying Social Movements: Some Conceptual Challenges’, in S. Berger and H. Nehring (eds), The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Samson, M. (2015), ‘Forging a New Conceptualization of ‘The Public’ in Waste Management’, WIEGO Working Paper No. 32, Cambridge, MA: WIEGO. Saraswati, J., B. Fine and D. Tavasci (eds) (2013), Beyond the Developmental State: Industrial Policy into the Twenty-first Century, London: Pluto Press. Silva, G.E. (2015), ‘Social Movements, Protest, and Policy’, European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 100(50), 27–39. Skinner, C. (2008), ‘Street Trade in Africa: A Review’, WIEGO Working Paper No. 5, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Kennedy School. Skocpol, T. and E. Amenta (1986), ‘States and Social Policies’, Annual Review of Sociology 12, 131–157. Spronk, S. and J.R. Webber (2007), ‘Struggles against Accumulation by Dispossession in Bolivia’, Latin American Perspectives 34(2), 31–47. Steinmetz, G. (1994), ‘Regulation Theory, Post-Marxism, and the New Social Movements’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 36(1), 176–212.

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70 Handbook of social policy and development Tendler, J. (2004), ‘Why Social Policy is Condemned to a Residual Category of Safety Nets and What to Do about it’, in T. Mkandawire (ed.), Social Policy in a Development Context, Basingstoke: Palgrave/UNRISD. Tilly, C. (2001), ‘Mechanisms in Political Processes’, Annual Review of Political Science 4, 21–41. Tilly, C. (2004), Social Movements, 1768–2004, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Wasserman, C. (2017), ‘Social Movements in Latin America: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century’, in S. Berger and H. Nohring (eds), The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Webster, E., A.O. Britwum and S. Bhowmik (eds) (2017), Crossing the Divide: Precarious Work and the Future of Labour, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Whitehead, J. (2013), ‘Accumulation through Dispossession and Accumulation through Growth’, in M. Ekers, G. Hart, S. Kipfer and A. Loftus (eds), Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

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4. Gender: toward gender equality and poverty reduction Leila Patel

A CHANGING GLOBAL LANDSCAPE The literature on social welfare in colonial and post-colonial societies paid scant attention to the gendered nature of social provision and how gendered assumptions undergird social care in the private and public spheres (Razavi 2011; Lewis 2011). Gender-unequal norms and relations between men and women were invisible in analyses of welfare systems in these countries as well as how they reproduced gender inequality (Patel 2009). This paradigm, however, began to change in the 1970s when feminist scholars challenged the dominant androcentric welfare approach, leading to new approaches to women in development (WID) and gender and development (GAD) over the ensuing years. These ideas were influential in the formulation of national social and welfare policies and programmes that were also a response to international instruments such as the United Nations (UN) Fourth World Conference on Women adopted in Beijing in 1995, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015, also known as the 2030 Agenda. Global consensus now leans towards a gender equality and a women’s rights agenda anchored in human rights principles and the prioritization of social, economic, political and environmental policies. A gender-specific goal (Goal 5 of the SDGs) to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls is an advance on the narrow focus of the MDGs on ‘gender parity in education as the all-purpose key that would unlock gender inequality’ (Razavi 2016, p. 29). Instead, the 2030 Agenda with its all-encompassing goals on eradicating poverty, reducing inequality, strengthening employment and decent work, improving education, health, infrastructure development, ensuring sustainable consumption and production of resources, climate change and building inclusive and accountable institutions, is a multidimensional, inclusive, non-discriminatory and rights-based approach to development. Gender equality and women’s rights are integral to this vision, a specific development outcome, and 71

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central to a wider development agenda (Kabeer 2015, p. 203). The 2030 Agenda departs from the earlier micro-level focus on women’s empowerment programmes in development and places greater emphasis on addressing the structural and institutional barriers that perpetuate gender inequality (Kabeer 2015). Although there is agreement that this new global agenda, informed by consultation with women’s organizations and movements, is an advance over the MDGs, challenges of implementation remain a major concern (Razavi 2016). These include questions about what specific policies are required to achieve the goals and targets; what accountability mechanisms will be needed to monitor the achievement of the goals; and, finally, whether the goals could be achieved in the dominant economic model that undergirds its implementation (Razavi 2016). Other feminist scholars are more cautious and question whether this agenda is not simply reinforcing gender stereotypes (Chant 2016), and whether the post-2015 agenda will deliver gender justice (Cornwall and Rivas 2015). The growth of social protection policies worldwide, and the availability of research and scholarly literature on their achievements and shortfalls, provide some evidence on how gender and development issues are being addressed currently. It should however be noted that different social policy paradigms, including feminist perspectives, inform the assumptions and the points of debate about how best to advance gender equality in the twenty-first century. The chapter is structured as follows. This introduction has outlined the changing global social policy landscape, its relationship to gender and development, and some of the issues and debates. A discussion follows of the gender and human development context and how gender inequality and human development are assessed. Thereafter the evolution of gender in the social policy literature, from the welfare and the gender and development perspectives, are reviewed. Next, cash transfers, a contemporary social policy instrument to reduce poverty, empower women and promote gender justice, are examined with reference to how far these social policies go in being socially transformative. Finally, while the new global agenda is relevant as it reframes social development priorities to be more gender sensitive, significant questions remain relating to policy implementation, state capacity to deliver, power inequalities in the structure and organization of partnerships, and the application of a gender lens in the design and in the monitoring and evaluation of programmes.

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Gender: toward gender equality and poverty reduction 73

GENDER AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Feminists’ contribution to an understanding of gender and poverty draws attention to the different ways in which men and women are impacted upon by poverty, economic shocks, natural disasters and other social forces such as communicable diseases. Women’s experiences and lived realities of poverty and inequality are well documented, drawing attention to intra-household dynamics such as power inequalities between men and women over decision making and control over the allocation of resources. Class, gender, race and other social divisions between groups tend to intersect in ways that lead to multiple and overlapping inequalities which partly explain the persistence of poverty and inequality among marginalized groups of people in different country contexts (Kabeer 2015). These ideas are pertinent in uncovering the gender dynamics in human development assessments, and are considered below. Despite progress made in halving extreme poverty over the past two decades, one in eight people still live in extreme poverty and struggle to meet their basic needs to survive such as food, health, education, access to water and sanitation (UN 2015). Extreme poverty is concentrated in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa where the world’s poorest reside, with one in four children under five years of age being of inadequate height for their age (UN 2014). Although improvements have been noted in access to primary education since the introduction of the MDGs, large numbers of children who should be in school are not, with those in the bottom two quintiles being more likely to be out of school in low and middle income countries. Between 2000 and 2014, the proportion of girls of primary school age who dropped out of school decreased from 58 per cent to 53 per cent. Globally, 10 per cent of girls of primary school age were out of school compared to boys (8 per cent). This was more marked in sub-Saharan Africa (23 per cent), which had the highest rate of girls not in school compared to boys (19 per cent) (UIS 2017). Educational disadvantage constrains social mobility and limits the life chances of both boys and girls. Consequently, inequality gaps are firmly established in the early years of life and learning, thereby limiting their long term prospects (Heckman 2008). Young people, and young women in particular in low and middle income countries with limited education and skills, are over-represented among the working poor and end up in low skilled employment with inadequate access to social assistance or social protection (UN 2015). Economic globalization has also resulted in rising economic inequalities and has increased in close to two-thirds of countries since 2000. Income inequality grew more sharply following the

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economic crisis of 2008. Inequalities are of both a vertical nature (referring to class inequality) and a horizontal nature (such as social discrimination based on sex, age, disability, race, ethnicity, religion and unequal access to opportunity). Accordingly, poor and marginalized groups are likely to experience multiple privations, such as in the case of a poor young woman with a disability, or in cases where household hierarchies based on age serve to limit the life chances of young women and girls. Furthermore, socio-cultural beliefs about gender underlie decisions and practices that curb the development of the full potential of women and girls, such as whether girls should attend school, marry at an early age or are exposed to harmful practices such as female genital mutilation. Time use surveys in selected countries found that women bear the main burden for unpaid care work and domestic responsibilities compared to men, which limits their opportunities to engage in paid work and social participation beyond the home (Edström et al. 2017). Resistance by men against sharing responsibilities in the home and family, together with cuts in welfare services or under-expenditure on welfare services, as well as a lack of investment in infrastructure such as water, sanitation and electricity, transport and child care services, result in women carrying the main burden of poverty in developing countries (Chant 2016). This has undermined women’s coping capacities. High rates of mental health problems associated with poverty have been documented in countries such as South Africa (Patel et al. 2017; Plagerson et al. 2011). Genderbased violence (GBV) did not feature in human development assessments in the past, but advocacy by women’s rights activists has contributed to GBV now forming part of the new more encompassing gender and development agenda. Other new focus areas for social policy in development contexts include gender and sexuality, and the need to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of climate change on gender and poverty. Despite advances in women’s labour market participation the gender gap remains, with women earning between 10 per cent and 30 per cent less than men (Morton et al. 2014). High HIV prevalence in many African countries such as Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia has increased women’s care burdens due to rising numbers of orphans and maternal mortality. Finally, the division of tasks between men and women has opened up spaces for female employment, but this has confined women to low wage work, and often in the informal sector with limited access to social benefits and protection (UN 2015). Globalization has also been accompanied by large-scale population movements within countries, urbanization, and migration between countries marked

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by increasing female migration. While migration is an important livelihood and coping strategy, it presents new challenges for family cohesion, caregiving and the provision of social and monetary support. Migrant women face particular challenges as they are employed in low wage and precarious work with limited labour protections. How best to assess gender and human development remains contested. The Gender and Development Index (GDI) is widely used as a comparative index to measure gender gaps in human development. The three dimensions of the Human Development Index (HDI) – namely health, knowledge and living standards – are assessed by gender and were calculated for 160 countries in 2015. The GDI shows how far women lag behind on each of these three dimensions. For example, Norway has a very high GDI of 0.993, compared to Afghanistan with a very low score of 0.606. This means that women in Norway have an HDI that is 99.3 per cent that of men, while in Afghanistan women have an HDI that is 60 per cent that of men. However, the HDI is limited in that it does not measure gender inequality in other domains such as the extent to which women enjoy political and civil rights and freedoms, empowerment in relation to the proportion of women representatives in parliament compared to men, and their economic status and participation in the labour market. The Gender Inequality Index (GII) is used to assess countries’ performance in advancing gender equality by including these additional dimensions, although some critical aspects are not taken into account such as time use, access to assets, and domestic violence, among others. These indices are however useful tools for assessing gender and human development and gender inequality between countries and regions with different levels of economic and social development. Table 4.1 provides the overall GDI and GII scores for 2015. Very high GDI and low GII scores are positively correlated in developed countries, whilst in the least developed countries both scores are at the lower end. The distribution by region shows that the Arab states, despite being high income countries, have scores that are slightly lower than the least developed countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Historical determinants of gender inequality such as legislation, religious and cultural beliefs also influence the GDI and GII scores (Dilli et al. 2015). The table provides an indication of the overall levels of gender inequality, and also by region. This overview deployed a gender lens to deconstruct the different experiences of men and women in development and the complexity of tracking progress that takes into account other social factors and dynamics in societies and their intersection. A multidimensional approach that draws the links between social, cultural, economic, political and environmental issues is critical in making sense of gender asymmetries. How

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Table 4.1 GDI and GII per HDI level and region (2015) HDI Level Very high High Medium

GDI 0.98 0.958 0.871

GII 0.174 0.291 0.491

Low

0.849

0.590

0.913

0.469

0.874

0.555

Developing countries Least developed countries Source:

Regions Arab states East Asia and the Pacific Europe and Central Asia Latin America and the Caribbean

GDI 0.856 0.956 0.951

GII 0.535 0.315 0.279

0.981

0.390

South Asia

0.822

0.520

Sub-Saharan Africa

0.877

0.572

UNDP (2016).

gender and human development issues are framed, and interventions defined, implemented and evaluated, depends largely on the theoretical perspectives that inform practice. A country’s history and context in relation to the status and position of women is also important to consider. In the next section, these perspectives are discussed.

GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES As indicated above, colonial and post-colonial social policies in developing countries did not question the gendered assumptions and constructions informing welfare policies. This was most evident in the formulation of rudimentary social assistance policies, relief of distress, and child and family welfare policies. One of the core assumptions undergirding social assistance for children and families was that social support in cash and in kind was provided largely to women whose spouses and/or partners were unable to contribute financially to the upkeep of the family due to loss of income, for a variety of reasons such as unemployment, disability, abandonment or imprisonment. These programmes were fashioned on the ‘male breadwinner’ or nuclear family model borrowed from British and North American welfare systems that were inappropriate in many developing countries where extended families and more communal systems of family support existed and continue to do so despite contemporary challenges facing families in the twentyfirst century. Child welfare policies and legislation in the South mirrored

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this maternalist orientation where usually the mother was constructed as the primary caregiver of children and the target of remedial interventions to respond to child neglect, abuse or abandonment. Fathers did not feature in this approach and children were conceived of as gender neutral, with limited agency, and as vulnerable and in need of protection (Schmid 2012). Popular social development responses included mother and child health and fertility reduction, literacy and food aid programmes. At the macroeconomic level, policies to promote economic growth were based on the belief that this would automatically lead to poverty reduction and social improvements in people’s lives. Feminist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s began to challenge the dominant residual welfare approach based on maternalist social policies to address poverty and its gendered nature in developing countries. The women in development (WID) approach promoted by the ‘new anthropologists’ such as Ester Boserup disputed the notion that modernization was good for women and that economic development would automatically lead to improvements in their lives (Momsen 2004). Her research showed that technological developments in agriculture in Africa and Asia marginalized women and failed to come to grips with the economic contribution of women to society. This work also pointed out how power inequalities in intra-household distribution of resources perpetuated women’s marginal position in the private domain such as the household. Women were considered to be an untapped resource, leading to a shift towards their productive contribution to economic growth and development planning (Moser 2012). The move from women’s reproductive (care) roles to their productive (economic) roles paved the way for a renewed focus on their lack of access to formal employment and how this forced them into the informal economy. Consequently, livelihood strategies, entrepreneurship, microfinance and strategies to support women’s efforts in the informal economy gained precedence over earlier remedial interventions. The latter turn in development policy relating to gender was criticized for its piecemeal and what were termed ‘band aid’ solutions to address structural inequalities, and for not paying sufficient attention to how socio-cultural beliefs and practices reinforced gender inequality. Studies on microfinance pointed out that monies earned by women were more likely to be spent on children, such as for nutrition, health and education (Thomas 1990); an assumption that has informed subsequent international thinking on social protection, discussed in the next section. Despite some advances in supporting women’s initiatives to improve their material well-being and that of their families, WID was criticized on different counts. First was the sole focus on women, which led to a shift

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to gender which is defined as socially constructed notions of the superiority of men over women, founded on embedded beliefs about unequal social and power relations between them in both the private and public spheres. Second, Marxist feminists and dependency theorists argued that the WID approach was essentially a pro-market approach, and reinforced mass poverty and underdevelopment between the North and South (Beneria and Sen 1981). Third, instead of a focus on materiality, postcolonial and postmodern feminists were critical of the WID construction of women as helpless, vulnerable, passive participants in development, and as victims. There was a call to foreground gender analyses in understandings of the lived experiences of women’s lives, women’s agency, as well as the important role that culture plays in development contexts (Marchand and Parpart 1995). These ideas framed the gender and development (GAD) approach, which was a new paradigm. Proponents of GAD pointed to the limits of focusing on women’s needs due to sex rather than gender. Instead of ‘improving access to resources for individual women’, the GAD approach advocated addressing the structural causes of women’s subordination to men and how this underlies gender inequality. Working for the achievement of more equitable gender relations emerged as an important indicator to assess development outcomes and bringing men into development thinking and processes. The GAD approach advocated, among others, gender mainstreaming and the integration of these ideas into policies and programmes. It attempted to shift the focus from Western feminist viewpoints to participatory development and the diversity of women’s experiences (Momsen 2004). Participatory approaches to development found expression in the Women’s empowerment approach that gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. While earlier notions of empowerment aimed to increase individual women’s power and control over their lives through personal and collective empowerment (Rowlands 1997), it was criticized for not challenging the status quo. Consequently, the accent shifted to transforming power inequalities, the assertion of gender rights and challenging structural factors that underlie gender inequalities. From this point of view, empowerment refers to facilitating women’s control over material assets, intellectual resources and ideology. Thus, a transformative approach to empowerment strives to enhance women’s control over resources (physical, human, intellectual and the self) and control over ideology (beliefs, values and attitudes). Sandler and Rao (2012) argue that in order for genuine transformative change to occur, it needs to be effected at individual and institutional levels as well as in the formal and informal spheres of women’s lives. Meeting women’s needs without influencing change at

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these levels, and without collective power gained through ‘consciousness raising’ to champion women’s human rights, is considered to be unlikely to lead to social transformation (Cornwall 2016). It is evident from this overview that different theoretical approaches to gender in development exist that are informed by different strands of feminist theory, ranging from residual welfare approaches on the one hand, to WID, Women’s empowerment and GAD on the other hand. The field does not seem to have moved much beyond the GAD framework and women’s empowerment approach that informs social transformation. In this regard, Jaquette (2017) suggests that this is due to the widening gap between theory and practice (referring to responses to women’s everyday needs), the constraints of bureaucracies in implementing gender mainstreaming, and the dominance of the ‘anti-neoliberal critique’ which, she argues, has ‘become the default explanation for all our current ills’ (Jaquette 2017, p. 251). The author also calls for more pragmatic ways of improving women’s everyday lives through engaging with ‘beneficiaries’ about how their needs may be best met, and about new ways of empowering women in the changing global economic, social and political environment. Although the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals reflect a shift to a macro focus on structural factors that underlie sex discrimination and gender inequality globally, there is also pressure to respond to women’s lived experiences as an excluded group and to create opportunities to improve their lives. Finding a bridge between these perspectives to gender and social policy in development contexts remains a key challenge. One way in which contemporary welfare policies in many countries in the Global South have attempted to respond to child and family poverty, and issues of gender, poverty and inequality in development, has been via social protection policies. In the next section, social protection policies are reviewed briefly, drawing on evidence from different countries. The focus is the question of how far these policies go in advancing women’s empowerment and, by implication, gender equality and social transformation.

ARE CASH TRANSFERS A PATHWAY TO THE EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN? Since the late 1990s, developing countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia have designed and implemented social assistance programmes in the form of cash transfers to address poverty. This marked a fundamental shift in poverty reduction strategies from the residual and remedial welfare

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approach of the past to more developmental welfare policies (Patel et al. 2014). These new social development strategies are conceived of as social investments in human capital development and address the intergenerational transmission of poverty. In many countries in the early years of the growth of social protection in the South, gender equity was not an explicit objective. However, the majority of beneficiaries were women, as was the case in Brazil and South Africa, two of the countries with the largest publicly funded, means tested cash transfer programmes for children and their families. Brazil and other Latin American countries such as Mexico, Argentina and Chile pioneered unconditional cash transfers that emphasized the principle of co-responsibility of state and beneficiaries (UNDP and ILO 2011). This meant that specific behavioural conditions were attached to receipt of transfers, such as that a child should attend school or have regular health checks or, in some cases, participate in community development programmes. This resulted in the diffusion of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) to other countries in Africa and Asia. However, not all countries opted for co-responsibility principles in the design of their programmes; such as South Africa, where social assistance was unconditional and a constitutional and legal right. South Africa later incorporated the requirement that grant receipt be conditional on school attendance, despite the fact that more than 90 per cent of primary school children were enrolled in school. Although many countries in Africa and Latin America subsequently adopted these policies, they were configured differently based on country conditions, historical legacies and the direction of social policies. This new generation of social protection policies are often not referred to as welfare policies, although they build on social assistance programmes that emerged in the 1930s as a response to poverty and unemployment in the depression and post-world war periods. In 2017, 130 low and middle income countries were identified to have at least one non-contributory unconditional cash transfer that include poverty transfers and old age pensions (Hagen-Zanker et al. 2017). These programmes are now more expansive in their remits and intent than earlier social assistance policies. Social protection is broadly defined as public and private provision to reduce poverty and bring about tangible improvements in people’s lives and in promoting human development. Many programmes claim to tackle the structural causes of poverty and resonate with the 2030 Agenda (SDG 1) and the promotion of gender quality and the empowerment of women (SDG 5). There is a growing interest in the gender dynamics of these transfers and their impact on both poverty reduction and gender empowerment and inequality.

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Limited cross-national studies have been conducted to rigorously assess the social and economic impact of these policies where the same indicators were used, and that will allow for rigorous comparisons across different contexts. A review by Bastagli et al. (2016) of 165 studies covering 56 cash transfer programmes in low and middle income countries provides some insight into its impact. With reference to cash transfers (CTs) and women’s empowerment, a subset of 88 studies reported impacts for females at the household level across six outcomes based on a literature review between 2000 and 2015 (Hagen-Zanker et al. 2017, p. 1). The findings suggest, first, that cash transfers have positive effects on the well-being of women and girls in relation to education and employment; no major differences in benefits accrued between the sexes. CTs were also found to be associated with increased school attendance, although this did not translate into improved learning outcomes. Decreases in child labour were reported for both boys and girls, but with larger reductions for boys. Female-headed households also made greater investments in assets and productive activity than male-headed households. CTs, however, did not alter the differences in the use of time spent on domestic work between men and women. Second, concerning women’s empowerment, the evidence shows that receipt of a CT improved women’s decision making power and choices such as those relating to early marriage and fertility, as well as reducing physical abuse by male partners. Similar findings emerged from other studies that showed a decrease in domestic violence (Hidrobo et al. 2016; Haushofer and Shapiro 2013); with small numbers reporting increased inter-partner violence due to receipt of a CT (Junior et al. 2016). Finally, there did not appear to be significant differences in the outcomes reported on above between male and female beneficiaries of CTs, although more research is needed in this area (Hagen-Zanker et al. 2017). Other multi-country studies, such as a review of research conducted across the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries, reported reductions in the severity of poverty and in the gender gap, and improvements in women’s nutrition; women also reported greater knowledge, optimism, improved self-esteem and the exercise of agency in addressing their problems (Fultz and Francis 2013). Beyond these improvements, the evidence from the latter review suggests that the findings relating to the impact of CTs on women’s overall empowerment seems to be mixed and less decisive (Fultz and Francis 2013). In some countries there is some evidence of improved financial decision making, which in turn increased women’s status in the home as well as their enhanced engagement in the care of children (Patel et al. 2015). There was also evidence of increased bargaining power of women at household

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level, including evidence of an increased capability to save, obtain credit and invest the funds to offset economic risks (Fultz and Francis 2013). In regard to HIV and adolescent risk behaviour, Cluver and Sherr (2016) reported positive outcomes due to receipt of a CT in South Africa; while a longitudinal study in Zambia showed improvements in the financial empowerment of women, increased household well-being and greater control by women of how transfers are spent (Bonilla et al. 2016). Similar findings emerged from Pakistan’s Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) programme, that resulted in improved consumption and investment spending on children, as well as on women’s decision making power and control over decision making about how resources are spent (Ambler and De Brauw 2017). Overall, the above studies consistently report improved personal well-being of caregivers of children receiving a CT, such as improved confidence, self-esteem and subjective feelings of well-being (Junior et al. 2016), including lowered risk of developing common mental health disorders (Plagerson et al. 2011). Thus, the evidence points in the direction of CTs improving women’s personal empowerment and efficacy in some domains, especially at the micro level. In countries where co-responsibilities form part of the design of CTs, this resulted in increased administrative responsibilities and time burdens to meet these requirements. A major drawback across the different studies that were reviewed was the fact that family caregiving and child care continued to be perceived to be a woman’s primary responsibility, with men being less likely to contribute to care responsibilities or financially. Socio-cultural beliefs about family and parenting seemed to be less amenable to change, while supply-side factors such as access to education and health services was offset by the poor quality of these services that affected the outcomes negatively. A lack of formal employment and the high costs associated with work seeking and working, such as childcare and transport, were other factors that affected poor employment outcomes for women (Patel et al. 2017). Complex family structures and deeply rooted gender roles about caregiving had some impact on a lack of increase in women’s bargaining power in a South African study, although improvements were noted in cases where women received the CT over a long period of time (Holmlund and Sohlman 2016). Critics of CTs from a gender perspective raised the following issues regarding their potential to achieve social transformation. The first is the instrumental way in which women beneficiaries are constructed as conduits for child well-being and social development in general (Cornwall 2016). Second, critics of CTs contend that women’s inferior status and position in society is not challenged by social protection policies,

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and how these will achieve women’s empowerment and gender equality is not clear. Instead, traditional gender roles are reinforced through CTs, with the focus being on ‘how to get women to do their jobs better’ (Concern Worldwide and Oxfam GB 2011, p. 17). Third, CCTs with their attendant co-responsibilities serve to burden women more and increase time pressures on them. Greater attention is needed to lessen the burden of care that women bear in poor households, and their constant struggle for survival (Chant 2008). There are increasing calls for greater complementarity between cash transfers and care services to address the multifaceted and gendered nature of poverty and inequality. Fourth, although the body of research of the effects of CTs where the beneficiary is a male is limited, there is preliminary evidence that the effects do not differ between the sexes (Hagen-Zanker et al. 2017). How to design CTs that engage men in social development policies and strategies remains underdeveloped. Lastly, evaluation studies conceptualize women’s empowerment differently and use different indicators and evaluation methods to assess progress across countries. For example, if the women’s empowerment effects of CTs are positive but limited to micro-level impacts, can it be concluded that empowerment has not occurred? Finally, historical legacies and institutional factors such as legislation, religion and family practices have a bearing on the nature and scope of social transformation and, indeed, on the pace of transformation in different countries. The achievement of some milestones may be critical to gender transformation in a specific country, but this may not be considered an advance in another context with different historical and institutional legacies. In conclusion, this overview of contemporary social protection policies suggests that they are highly relevant in addressing income poverty among the poorest, with the majority of beneficiaries being women. While CTs address some dimensions of women’s empowerment, there is insufficient evidence that overall empowerment is achieved in all domains. Rigorous cross-country research is needed to explore this further. The critics of CTs from a gender and development perspective have identified gaps in the current conceptualization, design and implementation of CTs. Creative ways are needed to develop more gender-transformative ways of combining cash transfers and care services. Complementary policies and social development programmes are advocated. Examples of such strategies range from increased access to quality childcare services, parenting knowledge and skills, and supportive services for persons with common mental disorders and victims of gender based violence, on the one hand, to increased access to basic services such as water, sanitation, electricity, internet, transport, food

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security and economic empowerment opportunities on the other hand. Engaging men in care, overcoming men’s resistance to women’s empowerment, and finding ways to work with men to promote more positive and equitable masculinities are other complementary types of interventions that are indicated (Edström et al. 2017). How beneficiaries of cash transfers view and use public resources to improve their lives can provide valuable insight into how to make these programmes more relevant to their everyday lives (Patel and Ulriksen 2017). In these ways, the potential of CTs to respond more appropriately and effectively to the gendered nature of poverty and inequality may be realized. Bringing together micro-level interventions (individual, household and communitylevel services) with macro social protection policies may lead to more transformative outcomes.

TOWARD GENDER EQUALITY AND POVERTY REDUCTION? Significant shifts occurred in international thinking in prioritizing gender equality as a stand-alone goal to promote global human development and advance social and gender justice. This new and expansive rights-based, multidimensional and multisectoral approach to international development has reframed international development thinking and priorities. It provides new opportunities for harnessing multidisciplinary knowledge, interventions and collaboration. In addition, it requires a review of existing policy responses to integrate new ideas and debates about gender and development. Such reviews could open spaces for innovation in social policy and social development programming. How best to achieve this expansive agenda to promote inclusive growth and human development is likely to shape policy discourse, research and practice in future. In relation to achieving the twin goals of poverty reduction and gender equality, complementary strategies to combine social assistance policies with interventions to address inequalities in the care economy will need to gain traction. The diffusion of policy ideas from other countries and regions played a key role in driving social protection policy adoption in developing countries, especially in relation to the implementation of cash transfers. These are likely to continue to inspire innovation and reforms where social protection policies are limited, or where they have not been implemented at scale. There is scope for greater South–South policy learning and knowledge exchange in this field. However, in order for these strategies to yield results, successful adaptation to country conditions and social and economic realities is required.

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The 2030 Agenda also advocates a partnership approach and the engagement of not only governments but also the private sector, civil society organizations, community organizations and development agencies in responding to these grand challenges. Much uncertainty and trepidation exists about how this will work in practice, and about whose interests are likely to dominate due to power inequalities between different sectors and constituencies. Enabling policies will be needed at country level to facilitate and incentivize collaborative partnerships in development, such as policies governing government and donor funding for non-governmental organizations to support the 2030 Agenda, and fiscal policies such as taxation policies to fund country programmes are critical. To achieve this expansive agenda and the reframing of gender and poverty reduction policies and strategies, capable states are imperative to implement and deliver on the goals and targets of the SDGs. Government bureaucracies operate mostly in silos due to the way in which government functions are organized and structured. A lack of a culture of collaboration and innovation is a key barrier to progress, including weak governance and corruption that has eroded public trust in political institutions. In countries where there are weak civil society formations which can be both development partners and maintain a ‘critical eye’ over government, there is unlikely to be external pressure to hold governments accountable. Finally, it is not clear how the goal (SDG 8) of sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth with full and productive employment and decent work will be achieved in low and middle income countries where growth rates and productivity have declined, and where female unemployment has increased in some regions of the world. Whilst the new development agenda provides the opportunity to find solutions to the intractable problems of poverty and gender inequality, key challenges will need to be addressed if the SDGs are to be realized. In conclusion, this review of gender and social policy in development contexts illustrates the need for cross-disciplinary interactions between scholars from different disciplines to find solutions to the complex and multifaceted nature of poverty and gender inequality. Researcherpractitioners in the fields of social welfare services and policy and social work often do not engage with scholars in the development field, but have much to contribute to the search for complementary interventions that go beyond social assistance policies. How to harness knowledge and practice solutions across disciplines remains a significant challenge.

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REFERENCES Ambler, K. and A. De Brauw (2017), ‘The impacts of cash transfers on women’s empowerment: learning from Pakistan’s BISP Program’, Social Protection and Labor Discussion Paper No. 1702, Washington, DC: World Bank, accessed 13 March 2018 at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/26272. Bastagli, F., J. Hagen-Zanker, L. Harmon, V. Barca., G. Sturge., T. Schmidt and L. Pellerano (2016), ‘Cash transfers: what does the evidence say? A rigorous review of programme impact and the role of design and implementation features’, London: Overseas Development Institute. Beneria, L. and G. Sen (1981), ‘Accumulation, reproduction, and “women’s role in economic development”: Boserup revisited’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7(2), 279–298. Bonilla, J., R. Castro Zarzur, S. Handa, C. Nowlin, A. Peterman, H. Ring and D. Seidenfeld (2016), ‘Cash for women’s empowerment? A mixed-methods evaluation of the Government of Zambia’s child grant programme’, Innocenti Working Paper, 2016-01, Florence: UNICEF Office of Research. Chant, S. (2008), ‘The “feminisation of poverty” and the “feminisation” of anti-poverty programmes: room for revision?’, Journal of Development Studies, 44(2), 165–197. Chant, S. (2016), ‘Women, girls and world poverty: empowerment, equality or essentialism?’, International Development Planning Review, 38(1), 1–24. Cluver, L. and L. Sherr (2016), ‘Cash transfers – magic bullet or fundamental ingredient?’, Lancet Global Health, 4(12), e883–e884. Concern Worldwide and Oxfam GB (2011), ‘Walking the talk: cash transfers and gender dynamics’, accessed 13 March 2018 at http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/ walking-the-talkcash-transfers-and-gender-dynamics-131869. Cornwall, A. (2016), ‘Women’s empowerment: what works’, Journal of International Development, 28(3), 342–359. Cornwall, A. and A-M. Rivas (2015), ‘From “gender equality and women’s empowerment” to global justice: reclaiming a transformative agenda for gender and development’, Third World Quarterly, 36(2), 396–415. Dilli, S., A. Rijpma and S.G. Carmichael (2015), ‘Achieving gender equality: development versus historical legacies’, CESifo Economic Studies, 61(1), 301–334. Edström, J., D. Chopra, C. Müller, S. Nazneen, P. Oosterhoff, S. Wood, et al. (2017), ‘Reframing gender justice in an unequal, volatile world’, IDS’ Directions for Future Research on Gender and Sexuality in Development, Brighton: IDS, accessed 13 March 2018 at http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/12855. Fultz, E. and J. Francis (2013), ‘Cash transfer programmes, poverty reduction and empowerment of women: a comparative analysis: experiences from Brazil, Chile, India, Mexico and South Africa’, GED Working Paper 4, Geneva: International Labour Office. Hagen-Zanker, J., L. Pellerano, F. Bastagli, L. Harmon, V. Barca, G. Sturge, et al. (2017), ‘The impact of cash transfers on women and girls: a summary of the evidence’, ODI Briefing, London: Overseas Development Institute. Haushofer, J. and J. Shapiro (2013), ‘Policy brief: impacts of unconditional cash transfers’, accessed 12 April 2018 at http://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Haushofer_ Shapiro_Policy_Brief_2013.pdf. Heckman, J.J. (2008), ‘Schools, skills and synapses’, Economic Inquiry, 46(3), 289–324. Hidrobo, M., A. Peterman and L. Heise (2016), ‘The effect of cash, vouchers, and food transfers on intimate partner violence: evidence from a randomized experiment in Northern Ecuador’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 8(3), 284–303.

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Gender: toward gender equality and poverty reduction 87 Holmlund, T. and S. Sohlman (2016), ‘Do cash transfers have the ability to empower women? A case study on the child support grant in South Africa’, Bachelors thesis, Lund University. Jaquette, J.S. (2017), ‘Women/gender and development: the growing gap between theory and practice’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 52(2), 242–260. Junior, J.A., A.M. Katz and R. Ahn (2016), ‘The perspectives of young women in rural western Kenya on unconditional cash transfers’, Poverty and Public Policy, 8, 72–94. Kabeer, N. (2015), ‘Gender, poverty, and inequality: a brief history of feminist contributions in the field of international development’, Gender and Development, 23(2), 189–205. Lewis, J. (2011), ‘The British Empire and world history: welfare imperialism and soft power in the rise and fall of colonial rule’, in J. Midgley and D. Piachaud (eds), Colonialism and Welfare: Social Policy and the British Imperial Legacy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 17–35. Marchand, M. and J. Parpart (1995), Feminism/Postmodernism/Development, New York: Routledge. Momsen, J. (2004), Gender and Development, London: Routledge. Morton, M., J. Klugman, L. Hanmer and D. Singer (2014), ‘Gender at work: a companion to the world development report on jobs’, Washington, DC: World Bank Group, accessed 13 March 2018 at http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2014/02/ 19790446/gender-work-companion-world-development-report-jobs. Moser, C.O.N. (2012), Gender Planning and Development. Theory, Practice and Training, New York: Routledge. Patel, L. (2009), ‘The gendered character of social care in the non-profit sector in South Africa’, UNRISD and Centre for Social Development Research in Africa, Johannesburg: University of Johannesburg, accessed 13 March 2018 at https://www.uj.ac.za/faculties/ humanities/csda/Documents/UNRISD%20Monograph.pdf. Patel, L., T. Knijn, D. Gorman-Smith, T. Hochfeld, M. Isserow, R. Garthe, et al. (2017), ‘Families, the child support grant, and child well-being outcomes’, Johannesburg: Centre for Social Development in Africa. Patel, L., T. Knijn and F. Van Wel (2015), ‘Child support grants in South Africa: a pathway to women’s empowerment and child well-being?’, Journal of Social Policy, 44(2), 377–397. Patel, L., J. Midgley and M. Ulriksen (eds) (2014), Social Protection in Southern Africa: New Opportunities for Social Development, London: Routledge. Patel, L. and M. Ulriksen (eds) (2017), Development, Social Policy and Community Action, Cape Town: HSRC Press. Plagerson, S., V. Patel, T. Harpham, K. Kielmann and A. Mathee (2011), ‘Does money matter for mental health? Evidence from the child support grants in Johannesburg, South Africa’, Global Public Health, 6(7), 760–776. Razavi, S. (2011), ‘Rethinking care in a development context: an introduction’, Development and Change, 42(4), 873–903. Razavi, S. (2016), ‘The 2030 Agenda: challenges of implementation to attain gender equality and women’s rights’, Gender and Development, 24(1), 25–41. Rowlands, J. (1997), ‘Questioning empowerment: working with women in Honduras’, Oxford: Oxfam. Sandler, J. and A. Rao (2012), ‘The elephant in the room and the dragons at the gate: strategising for gender equality in the 21st century’, Gender and Development, 20(3), 547–562. Schmid, J. (2012), ‘Child welfare and children’s mental health needs in the context of development: an integrated (South African) approach’, in U. Nayar (ed.), International Handbook on Mental Health of Children and Adolescents: Culture, Policy and Practices, Delhi: SAGE, 200–215.

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88 Handbook of social policy and development Thomas, D. (1990), ‘Intra-household resource allocation: an inferential approach’, Journal of Human Resources, 25(4), 635–664. UN (2014), ‘The Millennium Development Goals Report 2014’, New York: United Nations. UN (2015), ‘Sustainable Development Goals: 17 goals to transform our world. Factsheets’, accessed 13 March 2018 at http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainabledevelopment-goals/. UNDP (2016), ‘Human Development Report 2016 – human development for everyone’, New York: UNDP. UNDP and ILO (2011), ‘Sharing innovative experience: successful social protection floor experiences’, New York: Special Unit for South–South cooperation, UNDP. UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) (2017), ‘eAtlas of gender inequality in education’, accessed 13 March 2018 at https://tellmaps.com/uis/gender/#!/tellmap/78041830.

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5. Global social policy in a development context: ideas, actors and implementation Huck-ju Kwon*

The concept of global social policy has been elaborated to understand global efforts for social protection in a systematic manner and to devise more effective policy instruments for social protection in developing countries (Deacon 2007; Kaasch and Martens 2015; Yeates 2018). There has been considerable growth in the literature on global social policy for the last couple of decades, and many significant theoretical as well as practical questions have emerged in the literature. Global social policy is certainly different from national social policy, but what constitutes global social policy? How is it made and implemented at global and local levels? In this chapter I first discuss the conceptual issues of global social policy in order to answer these questions. I then use it as an analytical framework for an examination of the global social policy that the global community has conceived and implemented over the last six decades. Drawing on such conceptual and analytical discussions, this chapter seeks to answer a set of practical questions: what kinds of policy ideas and actors have influenced global social policy, and what kinds of policy instruments have been implemented? More importantly, this chapter discusses a question about the link between global social policy and development; in other words, it looks into whether these global social policy ideas and instruments are conducive to economic and social development in developing countries.

GLOBAL SOCIAL POLICY AND EFFECTIVE OUTCOMES Even though there is a growing body of literature on global social policy, there is still a great need for discussion in order to elaborate the concept * The author would like to acknowledge the Research Grant 2018 from the Asian Development Institute, Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University.

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of global social policy. At the onset, it is necessary to create a more precise definition of global social policy than has so far been presented. Yeates sees global social policy as a field of academic study and practical practice (Yeates 2018, pp. 7–16), but such an understanding is too broad to provide an analytical framework to examine the complex dynamics of global social policy. Yeates nevertheless points out the distinctive nature of global social policy. Contrasting it with social policy set at the national level, Yeates maintains that it is necessary to adopt a methodological transnationalism for the analysis of global social policy, paying special attention to institutional dynamics cutting across national boundaries (Yeates 2018, p. 3). In a similar vein, Deacon sees global social policy as social policy prescriptions for national social policy being articulated by global actors (Deacon 2007, p. 1). Deacon’s concept highlights an important dimension of global social policy: that is, the predominant role of global actors in influencing global social policy. Nevertheless, there is still a large gap in terms of policy formulation and implementation. Global social policy is not only about the influence of global ideas on national social policy; global actors can also exercise power and influence on social policy decisions and implementation over national governments. They can use a variety of tools to this end, such as conditional loans and grants for special purposes. At the same time, it is important to note that national governments, which still hold sovereignty over national boundaries, are not mere acceptors of global influence. They can resist or change global recommendations for social policy. Tackling other aspects of global social policy, Deacon argues that global social policy comprises supranational mechanisms of global redistribution, global social regulations and global social rights (Deacon 2007). This recognizes the various dimensions of global social policy: that is, policy goals, instruments and outcomes. However, Deacon does not provide a clear and logical chain of global social policy, but rather juxtaposes rights, regulations and redistribution. To have a clear definition of global social policy, let us first turn to social policy in a national setting. Social policy can be defined as systematic state intervention to protect citizens against poverty, illness and other social and economic contingencies (Fitzpatrick et al. 2006; Ringen 1987). As a kind of public policy, social policy shares the main characteristics of public policy in a national setting. A standard definition of public policy based on a rational model is a course of government actions to achieve public goals (Knill and Tosun 2012, p. 4). This definition emphasizes three constitutive elements of public policy:

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1. 2. 3.

the national government as a main actor to decide public policies; a national boundary within which policy instruments are implemented; and national citizens as the main beneficiaries of public policies.

These constitutive elements of public policies are derived from the assumption that public policies stem from sovereign authority within a national territorial boundary. It is true that these constitutive elements are only the main core of public policy. Other social actors, such as non-governmental actors including civil society groups, are involved in policy formulations. National policies are often implemented across national boundaries, and non-citizens can benefit from public policies. Social policy in a national setting has these three core elements that define its national nature. In contrast to this methodological nationalism of (national) social policy, global social policy is set in a global context. For this reason, it is necessary to adopt a methodological transnationalism for the analysis of global social policy, paying special attention to institutional dynamics cutting across national boundaries (Yeates 2018, p. 3). If we superimpose public policy on a global setting, an ideal form of global social policy would comprise three constitutive elements in contrast to social policy in a national setting: 1. 2. 3.

the global government as a main actor to decide public policies; a global community in which policy instruments are implemented; and global citizens as the main beneficiaries.

It is immediately clear that the ideal form of global social policy defined as parallel to national social policy does not reflect the reality of the global governance of social policy, which essentially lacks sovereign authority to enforce policy decisions with legitimate power. Some commentators argue that global social policy without a global government that has the authority to enforce it cannot be qualified as proper public policy. International agencies such as the United Nations (UN) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have certain powers of enforcement, but their political power on the global stage cannot be compared to the sovereign power that national governments can exercise over their national boundaries. Nevertheless, a certain structure of governance has taken shape over recent years at the global level, though it is too complex to pinpoint, that makes certain decisions in an authoritative manner. The notion of

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multi-level governance was proposed to capture the emerging governance structure at the global level (Bache and Flinders 2004). According to the idea of multi-level governance, various policy stakeholders at the global and national levels participate in global decision making (Peters and Pierre 2004). While global agencies such as the UN, International Labour Organization (ILO) and IMF, as well as regional institutions such as the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have managed global and regional policy issues, national governments actively participate in policy discussion and decision making in these fora of global institutions. According to Marks and Hooghe, the global governance that has emerged since the turn of the millennium is complex and chaotic at times. It is not a form of governance with well-defined jurisdictions and a system-wide architecture (Marks and Hooghe 2004). In this complex mode of governance, a variety of stakeholders such as local governments, international and national nongovernmental organizations as well as transnational business interests are actively engaged in policy discussions and decision making. There is, however, a clear imbalance in power and influence among these stakeholders, global agencies and national governments, some of which have stronger influence than others. Powerful nations such as G7 countries and international financial institutions exercise stronger influence than others, while developing countries have less influence. In addition to political power and financial resources, policy ideas have strongly influenced policy discussions and the decision making of global social policy. Deacon points out the importance of epistemic communities in global social policy making (Deacon 2011). The policy ideas of predominant epistemic communities often set policy goals and basic parameters for global social policies. For instance, there has been an enduring competition of ideas between the neoliberal and Keynesian paradigm on the role of the state in social protection. These ideas have influenced global social policy debates and decision making in different historical conjunctures. Through this multi-level governance, global influence over national policy making can be exercised, although such influence is not always unidirectional. From the viewpoint of global social policy, political dynamics among global and national stakeholders should be carefully examined in order to fully understand global social policy making. It will also be of great interest to study how ideas that emerged in local settings have influenced global social policy making, as well as how global ideas have influenced national policy making. In terms of implementation, according to the ideal form of global social policy, policy instruments are to be implemented at the global

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scale, but this is not always the case: globally influenced policies are often implemented at the regional, national or local level. Public agencies with a mandate of implementation can be both global and local. In the case of primary education, global agencies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and local educational authorities are engaged in delivery. In some countries where public institutions are too weak to implement public policies, global agencies and international non-governmental organizations often take the role of implementation. In the short term it could be more effective than the case in which national public institutions implement policy instruments. In the longer term, however, the predominant role of global agencies can significantly undermine the development capacity of local public institutions. This issue of implementation is not only about public policies under implementation, but also about institution building, which would be a necessary basis for development in the long run. In terms of the beneficiaries of global social policy, the ideal form of global social policy presupposes that citizens around the world would benefit from global social policy. In practice, however, globally influenced public policies are by and large implemented nationally rather than at a global scale, and consequently beneficiaries are confined to the national boundaries within which public policies are implemented. Some public policies which can be considered global social policy are implemented within regions. For instance, the distribution of anti-viral drugs for HIV/AIDS was implemented across the sub-Saharan region where the HIV/AIDS pandemic was the most severe. For the viewpoint of global social policy, it would be very important to set boundaries and beneficiary rights to achieve policy goals. From the discussion so far, global social policy can be defined as systematic interventions by global and national policy actors to protect people against poverty, illness and other social and economic contingencies. Three main components constitute global social policy, as follows: 1.

2. 3.

global actors such as international institutions, national governments and civil society groups interact with each other to influence global policies; the global community and national boundaries are the policy locus in which social policy instruments are implemented; and global and national citizens are the main beneficiaries.

With this definition and conception of global social policy, three main questions can be raised for the following section. First, whose ideas, power and resources influence policy decisions on global social policy?

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In order to answer this question, it is necessary to examine competing epistemic communities which present diverse and sometimes opposing ideas of social policy (Béland 2016). It is also necessary to shed light on the relationship between global institutions and donor governments on the one side, and national governments and local actors on the other. In addition to ideas on social policy, global institutions and donor governments transfer policy instruments of global social policy to national governments. As Dolowitz and Marsh inform us, there could be a wide range of pathways for policy transfer among global policy actors, ranging from technical assistance and active policy learning to imposition by conditionalities (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000). Second, who implements global social policy? Due to their global nature, some global social policies may well be implemented by global institutions. Nevertheless, global social policy programmes need to be implemented in national settings, and in such cases the question of implementation agencies is a significant issue. This leads to another important question about the institutional capability of developing countries: are national public institutions able to deliver global social policies? A third group of questions is related to the outcomes and impacts of global social policy. An intrinsic goal of global social policy is to provide citizens with social protection without constraints of nationality. Nevertheless, when it is delivered in national settings a large part of the population is left outside of protection. Inclusion is a huge challenge for many developing countries in delivering global social policy. Together with the reach of global social policy to the population, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of global social policies in terms of development impact on society and economy. If we see development has an impact in terms of not only economic and social development but also social transformation, it is necessary to examine the extent to which global social policy brings about social transformation and enables people to participate in the mainstream of social change (Midgley 1995).

IDEAS OF GLOBAL SOCIAL POLICY FROM INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE POST-WAR PERIOD After World War II, the United Nations was established in October 1945 by the 46 nations that adhered to the UN Declaration in order to maintain stable global order to promote peace (Bennett and Oliver 2002, p. 54), together with the international monetary and financial system (Kennedy

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1988). After the establishment of the UN, the General Assembly of the UN consisting of 51 member countries promulgated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 (Morsink 1999). The UDHR recognized human dignity, freedom and equality as inalienable rights of people. It included 30 articles promoting civil and political rights, and also clearly specified the social rights necessary for human dignity: the right to work (article 23), the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being (article 25) and the right to education (article 26). Following the lead of the UDHR, a number of international organizations concerned with social and economic affairs within the UN system declared a range of policy goals which aimed to enhance the social welfare of human beings. The constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) set the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health as a guiding principle for its efforts. The Food and Agriculture Organization, launched in 1945 in Quebec, continued efforts to achieve an end to hunger, which was a goal set two decades earlier by the League of Nations. In the area of education, UNESCO convened a series of regional conferences to help member countries plan for the expansion of access to primary education in late 1950 (Jolly et al. 2009). The International Labour Organization (ILO), established in 1919, continued to advocate for labour rights and social justice after World War II. It recommended that newly independent member countries establish social security systems. In 1952 the ILO adopted the Social Security (Minimum Standards) Convention (No. 102) and the Maternity Protection Convention (No. 103). The Social Security Convention recommended a comprehensive range of social policies that members should introduce to establish social security systems. The nine areas of social policy included in Convention 102 were medical care, sickness, unemployment, old age, employment injury, family, maternity, invalidity and survivors’ benefits. While Social Security Convention 102 specified these nine branches of social policy, it required that only three of these branches be ratified by member states at the beginning. Member countries could introduce other branches of programmes in a step-by-step manner (ILO 1984, p. 8). In the post-war period, it is clear that the early UN ideas of global social policy were based on universal human rights, and UN agencies promoted their sectoral policy goals. They played an active role in promoting social policy to developing countries at the global level. Although the extent to which policy actors exercised influence on global ideas varied widely, policy makers from Chile, China, Czechoslovakia, Lebanon, Mexico and the Philippines made their mark, as did those from

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powerful nations in the policy formulation at the UN (Morsink 1999, p. 4). From the analytical framework of global social policy, the UN and other international agencies began to formulate various ideas and goals of global social policy such as universal human rights and rights to health, education, social protection and freedom from hunger. Whether these ideas of global social policy were carried through by substantial policy instruments for implementation is questionable. Despite international agencies’ global efforts for social policy, newly independent countries did not place social policy high on their list of policy priorities in the 1950s and 1960s. For instance, Table 5.1 shows the number of countries adopting various social policy programmes following the ILO Social Security Convention. Between 1949 and 1967 the number of countries with at least one type of social policy programme increased twofold. In Table 5.1, it is worth noting that most countries very swiftly introduced social benefits for injured workers, while they were very slow to adopt unemployment benefits. Old age benefits – that is, pensions and lump-sum benefits – were active in 92 countries in 1967, but these were largely confined to small groups of public and formal sector workers. Table 5.1 Number of countries adopting various social policy programmes Programmes Old age (including survivors) Sickness and maternity Employment injury Unemployment Family allowance Any type of programme Source:

1949 44 36 57 22 27 58

1967 92 65 117 34 62 120

1981 127 79 136 37 67 139

ILO (1984, p. 6).

Such a policy orientation was strongly influenced by the development paradigm at the time. Many newly independent countries in the 1960s launched national development plans, under which governments would make a strong push for economic development, especially through industrialization and urbanization. The policy paradigm of state-led development was informed by Keynesian economics in which capital investment and employment were regarded as effective stimuli for economic growth (Midgley 1995, p. 4; Mkandawire 2001). In this

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context, social policy was only recognized as one policy instrument for economic development. Social policy must provide protection to a rising army of industrial workers. Hence, compensation for work injuries was first adopted in many developing countries, while unemployment protection remained a low priority (Kwon and Yi 2009). There was a wide range of criticisms of this approach in national development plans. One of the main criticisms was the narrow focus on economic development. Myrdal argued that development plans must take a unified approach to development, integrating economic and social development into one framework (Midgley 2014, p. 202; Myrdal 1958). Top policy makers in national governments tried to achieve a grand vision of national development in which economic development with industrialization was at the top of the agenda. They believed that poverty would be eradicated by economic development. In consequence, social policy instruments were not effectively integrated into national development planning (Hulme 2015, p. 11). As shown in Table 5.1, only the social policy programmes necessary for economic development were introduced, and health care and social assistance for the poor were never mainstreamed in national development plans. In the case of the Global Malaria Campaign, for instance, which the WHO embarked upon in 1955 to combat threats of malaria in many developing countries, the global goal to eradicate malaria was not achieved. This was partly because the WHO global campaign was never integrated into national health systems (Jolly et al. 2009, p. 139). Nájera et al. (2011, p. 2) argued that the failure of global agencies to take local challenges into consideration amounted to an ineffective outcome in the sub-Saharan African region. Following the paradigm of state-led development, however, it was true that many developing countries made good progress in economic development during the 1960s (Mkandawire 2001). This was further boosted by the UN initiatives of the development decade championed by the Kennedy administration in the United States (US). Nevertheless, except for a small number of developmental states in East Asian countries, the economic growth witnessed in the 1960s was not sustained and did not trickle down to the wider population; the expected social development did not materialize as envisaged by national planners in most developing countries. In the 1970s, many developing countries fell into economic downturn, if not, as in some countries, serious economic crises. To break through the sluggish progress in social development, some UN agencies attempted to launch new global initiatives. The ILO launched a new initiative for social development: the basic needs approach. The ILO

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advocated for meeting basic needs such as food, clean drinking water, housing and education for the poor in developing countries, in contrast to concentrating on raising the level of income. The basic needs approach, which was taken on board by the World Bank as well as other UN agencies, promoted a holistic idea of social development including social, physical, mental and income dimensions (Streeten 1979). In 1978, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the WHO convened a historic International Conference on Primary Health Care at Alma-Ata in the former Soviet Union, which set another milestone for global social policy. In a nutshell, global institutions such as the UN, ILO and WHO promoted the ideas of global social policy in the post-war period in order to influence national policy making, although they did not explicitly use notions of global social policy. Nevertheless, global social policy was not well integrated into the national policy framework and was not successfully implemented. Despite innovative global ideas, national implementation proved to be a serious bottleneck for effective outcomes.

STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT AND ITS IMPACTS ON SOCIAL POLICY INSTITUTIONS As the state-led approach failed to sustain economic development, the neoliberal paradigm of economic management began to rise to ascendency as a policy paradigm throughout the Global South, with enthusiastic support from international financial institutions. Especially regarding developing countries with unsustainable amounts of debt, international financial institutes prescribed structural adjustment programmes to sort out the balance of payments according to the neoliberal paradigm of economic management. In this paradigm, social development was juxtaposed as a trade-off for economic development: either efficiency or equity must be chosen (Okun 1975). The international financial agencies maintained that state intervention for economic development inevitably causes inefficiency due to the state’s inability to see individual preferences, as well as due to rent-seeking behaviour in taking advantage of state intervention (Kruger 1974). The international financial agencies strongly recommended market solutions to developing countries, in which the different and often conflicting preferences of individuals could find equilibrium and lead to economic efficiency (Freedman 1962). Such advice came in a policy package aiming at the structural adjustment of the economy. The fiscal restructuring of government was also high on the

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agenda in this package and there was little room for the state to provide social services for the public or social assistance to the poor (UNRISD 2000). In this framework of neoliberal economic management, social provisioning should be made through market transactions; household demand should be met by willingness or ability to pay. User fees were applied even to basic health and education services (Cook 2018). Those who were not able to pay for such privatized services could not get necessary support. The social cost of market-oriented policy became apparent through social indicators such as infant mortality, hunger and education enrolment. The tragedy, in terms of the human cost, caused by structural adjustment implemented in highly indebted countries was documented by the UNICEF publication entitled Adjustment with a Human Face (Cornia et al. 1987). In Africa and Latin America where structural adjustment policy was implemented in the 1980s and 1990s, economic performance was poor and social conditions deteriorated sharply. By contrast, East Asian countries, where the developmental state intervened in the economy in a strategic manner for economic development, were able to extend social security systems as they made good progress in economic development. From the perspective of global social policy, the neoliberal reform in developing countries was a kind of discommendation of social policy. It was imposed by international financial institutions with a conditionality for financial support. On top of the immediate social cost, which was documented by the UNICEF publication, structural adjustment seriously undermined national capacity for social policy because it dismantled fledgling public institutions. It also led to serious challenges for many developing countries when they attempted to implement social policy in later years.

GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT GOALS AS GLOBAL SOCIAL POLICY Since the collapse of the Cold War triggered by the reforms in the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s, global economic integration was accelerated with unprecedented speed in the 1990s. Globalization, as a process interconnecting the economic, social, political and cultural lives of people in different societies and transcending national boundaries across the globe (Scholte 2003; Yeates 2001), has taken place over the last few hundred years. But it has happened on an unprecedented scale in our time in terms of intensity and speed, due to the development of transportation and

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communication technology. Some commentators predicted that marketdriven globalization would render state institutions marginal to economic life (Ohmae 1995, pp. 19–20), while others believed that the governments of nation states would still play a vital role in national economies, although they would need to negotiate with other national and global actors (Hirst and Thompson 1999). Despite the differences among scholar opinions on the role of the state in relation to globalization, it was largely expected that globalization would bring about economic gains in terms of capital due to enhanced mobility across the globe and strengthened negotiation power over the state and labour (Scholte 2003). In terms of social protection, there were serious concerns that globalization would undermine the welfare states in affluent societies because international competition for capital would erode the basis of the welfare states. Based on the liberal idea of global trade, the United States government, the international financial institutions, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) pursued the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’, which put further pressure on developing countries to open their economies and carry out regulatory reforms to provide favourable business environments for multinational enterprises. On top of the structural adjustment programmes, developing countries were under pressure to reduce public spending to provide competitive conditions for international investors. Consequently, globalization increased inequality not only between rich and poor countries, but also between rich and poor people within countries (Stewart and Berry 2000). Many commentators warned that the ruthless pursuit of the Washington Consensus would bring about disastrous social consequences (Gray 1998). To counter the negative social impacts of globalization there were a number of international efforts throughout the 1990s and 2000s, including world summits organized by UN agencies. The culmination of such efforts was the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). After all member states of the UN signed the Millennium Declaration in 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted eight development goals as the Millennium Development Goals, to be realized within the framework of the Millennium Declaration by 2015 (UN General Assembly 2001). The MDGs were a set of global social policies more comprehensive than any other previous efforts. They were not a sudden invention of global social policy, but an outcome of numerous previous global ideas and efforts. For instance, the International World Summit for Children set up seven major goals in 1990. The fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 also had a strong influence on the development of the MDGs. At the World Social Summit, which was convened in Copenhagen in

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1995, political leaders agreed that the global community should mobilize efforts to pursue social development to counter economic liberalization. Among the international and global conferences and documents produced, the international development goals prepared by the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) had the most direct link to the MDGs. The publication entitled ‘Shaping the 21st century: the contribution of development co-operation’ proposed measurable targets in the areas of economic well-being, social development and environmental sustainability (OECD 1996). Four years after the publication, the OECD, the IMF, the World Bank and the UN were able to publish a joint report, ‘A better world for all’ (OECD et al. 2000), in which a full list of the MDGs was first presented. Although the MDGs were influenced by globally discussed ideas such as Sen’s human capability, international bureaucrats played a key role in preparing the MDGs. Because of the technocratic origin of the MDGs and the lack of wide consultation, the MDGs attracted a fair share of criticism. They were packaged in soft words and good intentions so that well-meaning persons in the West could have a sense of solidarity, but critical issues such as inequality and social injustice were not adequately addressed for transforming developing countries (Saith 2006, p. 1171). The MDGs were also criticized because they focused on a fairly narrow set of policy goals. As shown in Box 5.1, eight MDGs were divided into four groups of goals: poverty reduction (Goal 1); social goals including education, gender equality and health goals (Goals 2–6); environmental sustainability (Goal 7); and global partnership (Goal 8). There was a wide gap in terms of social problems and challenges that should have been tackled at the global level in the MDGs.

BOX 5.1 + + + + + + + +

Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal

1: 2: 3: 4: 5: 6: 7: 8:

UN MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS (MDGs) Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Achieve universal primary education. Promote gender equality and empower women. Reduce child mortality. Improve maternal health. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. Ensure environmental sustainability. Develop a global partnership for development.

Despite the criticisms, the strength of the MDGs was their solid shape as public policy with clear policy goals and time-bound targets. In terms of

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finance, it was estimated that the MDGs would require an additional US$50 billion per annum to achieve the specific targets. At the Monterrey Summit in 2002, the US promised financial commitment and boosted global efforts to mobilize the development finance required for the MDGs. In 2005, United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair was able to maintain the G8 countries’ financial commitment at the Gleneagles Summit. As shown in Figure 5.1, overseas development assistance (ODA) financing from the OECD DAC members increased throughout the period from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, during which the MDGs were implemented. The MDG framework was also equipped with a policy rationale that links policy goals and instruments. Kofi Anan, UN Secretary-General, and Mark Malloch Brown, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Director, launched the Millennium Development Project in order to provide guidance to national governments for implementation. The Millennium Development Project pointed out that good governance was crucial for the governments of developing countries to achieve the MDGs. The UNDP defines good governance in terms of participation, transparency, accountability, equity and the rule of law (UNDP 1995). The World Bank also embraced the idea of good governance in its policy framework and included the rationale of good governance in the poverty 140 120

Billion USD

100 80 60 40 20

Source:

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

0

OECD statistics (https://data.oecd.org/oda/net-oda.htm).

Figure 5.1 ODA finance by DAC members

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reduction strategies for developing countries, a sort of mid-term development plan (Grindle 2004). Compared to previous global efforts, the MDGs were implemented with strong planning and a subsequent implementation process at the national level. Although the World Bank played a key role in preparing mid-term development plans in many cases, the national governments of developing countries integrated their MDG process into their development plans. It is also important to note that influence on policy making is not always a one-way street from global actors such as the World Bank and UNDP to national policy makers. The MDG process presented good opportunities for the governments of developing countries to receive international financial support. Ministries of finance attempted to secure more international funding through the MDG process. In Cambodia, for example, the government was very keen to launch a poverty reduction plan which would lead to international funding opportunities. The government established ad hoc working groups, which included national bureaucrats and international experts, for such purposes (Kwon et al. 2015). The implementation of the MDGs provided a genuine opportunity to improve governance and to reduce poverty. However, the MDG outcomes including poverty reduction were very uneven among developing countries. An empirical analysis which studied poverty data from 98 developing countries indicated that middle income countries showed better performance in poverty reduction than the least developed countries (Kwon and Kim 2014). During the 2000s, other international organizations made efforts to reduce poverty in order to push poverty reduction efforts at the global level. The ILO initiated the Social Protection Floor in ILO Recommendation 202 in the late 2000s. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) and the ILO, together with global civil society organizations, convened international conferences such as ‘A New Deal for People in a Global Crisis: Social Security for All’ (Ortiz 2009). It resulted in a basic set of guarantees for everyone, especially those with minimum resources (Elliott 2013). People in developing countries often fall into poverty when they are struck by economic and social shocks because there is nothing to fall back on in such situations. The Social Protection Floor was intended to prevent poverty in the wake of hardship. The World Bank initiated conditional cash transfer programmes in many developing countries. They were first implemented in Mexico and Brazil and were then transferred to many developing countries by the World Bank. Other regional development banks such as the Asian Development Bank were actively engaged in introducing conditional cash

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transfer programmes in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008. Conditional cash transfer programmes were implemented in Indonesia and the Philippines as well as in other developing countries (Bauchet et al. 2018; Kim and Yoo 2015; Kwon and Kim 2015). Social Protection Floor initiatives and conditional cash transfers were all in line with the efforts to achieve the MDGs. Compared to previous global social policy, in the case of the MDGs there were well-structured policy chains from global ideas and policy instruments to national implementation. The MDGs, in other words, have a full shape in terms of global social policy. This observation leads to the question of outcomes. In 2015 the global community arrived at the deadline for the MDGs, and the global leaders who again gathered at the UN General Assembly signed another set of global policy goals for the next 15 years, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Before moving on to the SDGs, it is necessary to discuss the outcomes of the MDGs. Upon the publication of the MDG Report, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said the following (United Nations 2015a, p. 3): The global mobilization behind the Millennium Development Goals has produced the most successful anti-poverty movement in history … The MDGs helped to lift more than one billion people out of extreme poverty, to make inroads against hunger, to enable more girls to attend school than ever before and to protect our planet.

Indeed, the target of Goal 1, the centrepiece of the MDGs, was achieved: the number of people living in extreme poverty was halved, from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in 2015. Most poverty reduction had taken place since 2000. The number of out-of-school children of primary school age worldwide fell by half, to about 57 million in 2015, down from 100 million in 2000 (Goal 2). Other MDGs showed similar results (United Nations 2015b). The crucial weakness in this impressive outcome is that poverty reduction was achieved very unevenly across countries and global regions. Figure 5.2 shows the poverty headcount across global regions, including the case of China. Compared to 1990, which is the baseline year of poverty reduction, poverty was in fact halved at the global level, and all other regions witnessed poverty headcounts halved except subSaharan Africa. While China’s performance in poverty reduction was accounted for by China’s own impressive economic development, the

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Global social policy in a development context 105 2013 [YR2013]

1990 [YR1990]

World China Europe & Central Asia Sub-Saharan Africa South Asia Lan America & Caribbean East Asia & Pacific 0 Note:

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

Poverty headcount ratio at US$1.80 a day (2011 PPP; % of population).

Source:

Generated from World Bank data (poverty and equity).

Figure 5.2 Poverty reduction by global region in 1990 and 2013. failure of the sub-Saharan African region to achieve the poverty reduction target turned out to be a critical blind spot of global efforts toward the MDGs. Other developing countries in which social structures were unequal did not make good progress. The MDGs, despite their emphasis on good governance, were hampered by the low capacities of governments and unequal social structures in terms of poverty reduction and development processes in general. During the late 2010s, many developing countries experienced political and economic crises and fell into fragile situations (Hearn 2016). As global social policy, the MDGs have been successful in improving the well-being of poor people in the world. However, the MDGs were not successful in contributing to building the state–society nexus for inclusive development. In October 2015, global leaders gathered at the UN General Assembly and signed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which would be pursued for the next 15 years. In response to earlier criticisms of the MDG process, the UN carried out a wider consultation process across the different sections of global society, from national governments and

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international agencies to civil society organizations. There were numerous conferences and workshops in different global regions (United Nations 2015a). The SDGs cover a much wider scope of development aspects than the MDGs, including the issues of social justice and rigorous institutions (see Box 5.2). They are a significant response to the weakness of the MDGs, which were focused on a narrow set of social development goals. It is also important to note that affluent industrialized societies as well as developing countries are obliged to prepare SDG plans for implementation, and reports about their progress. Such wide breadth can be considered a strength for the SDGs, but it could also be a critical weakness of the SDGs in terms of implementation.

BOX 5.2 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal

Source:

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (SDGs)

1: No poverty. 2: Zero hunger. 3: Good health and well-being. 4: Quality education. 5: Gender equality. 6: Clean water and sanitation. 7: Affordable and clean energy. 8: Decent work and economic growth. 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure. 10: Reduced inequality. 11: Sustainable cities and communities. 12: Responsible consumption and production. 13: Climate action. 14: Life below water. 15: Life on land. 16: Peace and justice, strong institutions. 17: Partnership to achieve the goals. www.un.org/development/desa/.

CONCLUDING REMARKS This chapter has discussed global social policy in terms of theoretical conception and practical implementation in a development context. Drawing on the literature of public policy and social policy, it has formulated global social policy in terms of ideas, actors, instruments and implementation. Global and national actors interact in formulating ideas

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of social policy and devising policy instruments. This chapter has shed critical light on the literature of global social policy, pointing out that focusing only on the global dimensions of policy will not be sufficient to understand global social policy, although it is vital to be engaged in global debates on social protection. This chapter has argued that the integration of global social policy into the policy framework at the national level has proven to be critical for the effective implementation of global social policy. Building institutional capacity as well as removing social barriers and discrimination are necessary conditions for successful outcomes. The early ideas of global social policy, although not explicit, were promoted by the specialized UN agencies with their respective goals based on the idea of universal human rights in the post-war period. The national governments of many developing countries, however, did not fully integrate them into their development plans. Such a lack of integration was a critical weakness of global social policy in terms of building institutions of social policy and producing the desired social outcomes in the post-war period. This indicates that students of global social policy need to pay attention not only to the global ideas of different epistemic communities but also to local capacity for implementation. It is true that power struggles between epistemic communities at the global and national levels influenced the paradigm of global social policy. During the 1980s, the ascendency of neoliberal ideas as the paradigm of economic and social management made a huge impact on the well-being of people in many developing countries, especially with programmes for structural adjustment. The global community responded with various ideas and instruments, and the MDGs were the culmination of such efforts. The MDGs were a product of accumulated global efforts in the preceding years, such as UN’s World Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995. From the perspective of global social policy, the global policy community including the UN, OECD and the World Bank set up an expansive chain of policy framework for the MDGs following the rational model of public policy from policy ideas, instruments and implementation. In terms of financing, the global community was able to mobilize a significant amount of funding for the MDGs. Global and national actors managed collaboration for the implementation of policy instruments at the local level. In 2015 the UN Report claimed that the MDGs had achieved the most successful anti-poverty outcome ever. This is certainly true at the global level, but the records are mixed at best, if not meagre, in places where poverty reduction is needed most, such as in sub-Saharan Africa. The MDGs were structured for sizeable success but were not intended to

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address structural transformation for development, which has hindered development for many developing countries. It is fair to say that the MDGs were not able to contribute to building a state–society nexus for inclusive development despite their visible success in poverty reduction and other development goals. In the process of creating the SDGs, many weaknesses in the MDGs were identified and addressed, but it is also feared that the SDGs may have been too overloaded to be effective. Social justice and inequality within and across nations were set as important goals, as were environmental sustainability and building productive infrastructures for inclusive development. Yet it is not clear how these political, social and economic challenges are to be addressed. To tackle such a difficult task, a comprehensive but feasible strategy based on a precise understanding of the dynamics of global social policy will be necessary.

REFERENCES Bache, Ian and Matthew Flinders (2004), Multi-Level Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Bauchet, J., E.A. Undurraga, V. Reyes-Garcia, J.R. Behrman and R.A. Godoy (2018), ‘Conditional cash transfers for primary education: which children are left out?’, World Development, 105, 1–12. Béland, Daniel (2016), ‘Ideas and institutions in social policy research’, Social Policy and Administration, 50 (6), 734–750. Bennett, A. LeRoy and James K. Oliver (2002), International Organizations: Principles and Issues (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall). Cook, Sarah (2018), ‘Making growth inclusive: perspectives on the role of social policy in developing economies’, in Christopher Deeming and Paul Smyth (eds), Reframing Global Social Policy: Social Investment for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (Bristol: Policy Press), 77–99. Cornia, Giovanni, Richard Jolly and Frances Stewart (1987), Adjustment with a Human Face (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Deacon, Bob (2007), Global Social Policy and Governance (London: SAGE). Deacon, Bob (2011), ‘Global social policy responses to the economic crisis’, in Kevin Farnsworth and Zoe Irving (eds), Social Policy in Challenging Times (Bristol: Policy & Politics), 81–100. Dolowitz, D.P. and D. Marsh (2000), ‘Learning from abroad: the role of policy transfer in contemporary policy-making’, Governance, 13 (1), 5–20. Elliott, H. (2013), ‘Financing social protection floors: considerations of fiscal space’, International Social Security Review, 66 (3/4), 111–143. Fitzpatrick, Tony, Huck-ju Kwon, Nick Manning, James Midgley and Gillian Pascal (2006), International Encyclopedia of Social Policy, 3 vols (London: Routledge). Freedman, Milton (1962), Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). Gray, John (1998), False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (London: Granta Books).

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Global social policy in a development context 109 Grindle, M.S. (2004), ‘Good enough governance: poverty reduction and reform in developing countries’, Governance, 17 (4), 525–548. Hearn, S. (2016), ‘Independent review of the new deal for engagement in fragile states’ (NYU Center on Cooperation International/International Dialogue on Peacebuilding & Statebuilding). Hirst, Paul Q. and Grahame Thompson (1999), Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press). Hulme, David (2015), Global Poverty: Global Governance and Poor People in the Post-2015 Era, 2nd edn, Vol. 100 Global Institutions series (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis). ILO (1984), Introduction to Social Security (Geneva: ILO). Jolly, Richard, Louis Emmerij and Thomas G. Weiss (2009), UN Ideas that Changed the World, United Nations Intellectual History Project (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Kaasch, Alexandra and Kerstin Martens (2015), Actors and Agency in Global Social Governance, 1st edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kennedy, Paul M. (1988), The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Unwin Hyman). Kim, E. and J. Yoo (2015), ‘Conditional cash transfer in the Philippines: how to overcome institutional constraints for implementing social protection’, Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies, 2 (1), 75–89. Knill, Christoph and Jale Tosun (2012), Public Policy: A New Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Kruger, A. (1974), ‘The political economy of the rent seeking society’, Americal Economic Review, 64 (3), 291–303. Kwon, H.J., S. Cook and Y. Kim (2015), ‘Shaping the national social protection strategy in Cambodia: global influence and national ownership’, Global Social Policy, 15 (2), 125–145. Kwon, H.J. and E. Kim (2014), ‘Poverty reduction and good governance: examining the rationale of the millennium development goals’, Development and Change, 45 (2), 353–375. Kwon, H.J. and W.R. Kim (2015), ‘The evolution of cash transfers in Indonesia: policy transfer and national adaptation’, Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies, 2 (2), 425–440. Kwon, H.J. and I. Yi (2009), ‘Economic development and poverty reduction in Korea: governing multifunctional institutions’, Development and Change, 40 (4), 769–792. Marks, G. and L. Hooghe (2004), ‘Contrasting visions of multi-level governance’, in Ian Bache and Matthew Flinders (eds), Multi-level Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 15–30. Midgley, James (1995), Social Development: The Developmental Perspective in Social Welfare (London: SAGE). Midgley, James (2014), Social Development: Theory and Practice (London: SAGE). Mkandawire, T. (2001), ‘Thinking about the developmental states in Africa’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 25 (3), 289–313. Morsink, Johannes (1999), The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins and Intent, Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press). Myrdal, Gunnar (1958), Rich Lands and Poor: The Road to World Prosperity, 1st American edn, Vol. 16 World Perspectives series (New York: Harper). Nájera, J.A., M. González-Silva and P.L. Alonso (2011), ‘Some lessons for the future from the global malaria eradication programme (1955–1969)’, Plos Medicine, 8 (1), 1–7. OECD (1996), ‘Shaping the 21st century: the contribution of development co-operation’ (Paris: OECD).

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110 Handbook of social policy and development OECD, IMF, World Bank and UN (2000), ‘A better world for all: progress towards the international development goals’ (Washington, DC: IMF). Ohmae, Kenichi (1995), The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Regional Economies (London: HarperCollins). Okun, Arthur M. (1975), Equality and Efficiency, the Big Trade Off (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution). Ortiz, I. (2009), ‘A global new deal for people in a global crisis: social protection for all’, UNDESA report (New York: UNDESA). Peters, Guy B. and Pierre, Jon (2004), ‘Multi-level governance and democracy: a Faustian bargain’, in Ian Bache and Matthew Flinders (eds), Multi-level Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 75–92. Ringen, Stein (1987), The Possibility of Politics: A Study in the Political Economy of the Welfare State (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Saith, A. (2006), ‘From universal values to Millennium Development Goals: lost in translation’, Development and Change, 37 (6), 1167–1199. Scholte, Jan Aart (2003), ‘The source of neoliberal globalization’ (Geneva: UNRISD). Stewart, F. and A. Berry (2000), ‘Globalization, liberalization, and inequality: real causes: expectations and experience’, Challenge, 43 (1), 44–92. Streeten, P. (1979), ‘Basic needs: premises and promises’, Journal of Policy Modeling, 1, 136–46. UNDP (1995), Public Sector Management, Governance and Sustainable Human Development (New York: UNDP). UN General Assembly (2001), ‘Road map towards the implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration: report of the Secretary-General’, United Nations Documents A/56/326 (New York: UN). United Nations (2015a), ‘The world we want: report of public consultation’ (New York: United Nations). United Nations (2015b), ‘The Millennium Development Goals report 2015’ (New York: United Nations). UNRISD (2000), Visible Hands: Taking Responsibility for Social Development (Geneva: UNRISD). Yeates, Nicola (2001), Globalization and Social Policy (London: SAGE). Yeates, Nicola (2018), Understanding Global Social Policy, 2nd edn, Understanding Welfare series (Bristol: Policy Press).

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6. The SDGs: towards a social development approach in the 2030 Agenda? Marian Urbina-Ferretjans

The views and opinions expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of PAHO/WHO. The new 2030 global development Agenda, operationalized in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), reflects how welfare and social policy issues have been transformed in recent years in the development discourse. While inheriting from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the global fight against poverty to remain as one of the prime concerns, the SDGs move the development agenda towards more universal perspectives, epitomized by the idea that ‘no one is left behind’ (United Nations 2015). A focus on poor nations and poor individuals in the developing world has been replaced with a concern for the whole planet, in order to address social inequalities and environmental degradation that affects people in any part of the world. Another important shift has been to move beyond a narrow focus on the social sectors, to emphasize instead multi-sectorality as stronger links between the social, the economic and the environmental dimensions of sustainable development, in an attempt to address synergies, complementarities and tradeoffs among them. These changes in the development discourse have coincided with an increasing participation of Southern countries in the constitution of the international development agenda, as their strategies have broadened the possibilities of how to address a variety of common challenges. The SDGs and the Agenda formulation resulted in an unprecedented and significantly open and participatory global policy making process, where Southern governments, civil society organizations, private sectors and academia were actively involved. This formulation process has taken place in a context of change in the North–South power relations, with new circumstances related to the emergence of global development actors from the South. A set of influential Southern players, in which the best known are perhaps the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), are distinguished by their rapidly expanding economies, by reductions in their poverty rates, and by the increasing visibility that 111

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they receive in regional and global affairs. Their influence is also evident in their reputation as powerful ‘Southern donors’ which have so far largely sustained South–South development cooperation (Surender and Urbina Ferretjans 2013). However, South–South cooperation financing is no longer limited to them, as an increasing number of Southern countries are becoming development providers. For example, another group of emerging-market countries engaged in South–South exchanges includes Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa (known as the CIVETS) (Schulz 2010), and some of the Arab countries, in particular Saudi Arabia (Zimmermann and Smith 2011), among others. From an academic perspective, the links between development studies and social policy have been limited, which has resulted in an inadequate investigation of issues belonging to the remit of social policy within the development literature. In development studies, social policy issues have largely been outweighed by the economic dimensions of development, partly driven by a strong influence of North-based global financial institutions which have tended to dominate the ideas, the practice and the discourse of development (de Haan 2010; Deacon 2007; Deacon et al. 1997). Social policy research, on the other hand, has paid limited attention to the realities in the developing-country settings, and has mainly focused on the developed world, with most attention going towards comparative studies of welfare models of European and North American nation states (Hall and Midgley 2004; Mkandawire 2004; Yeates 2008). This has led to a questioning of whether the analytical tools developed for the context of industrialized nations are suitable for examining social protection matters in countries of the South (Hall and Midgley 2004; Yeates 2008; Mkandawire 2004). The shift into the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda, due to its universal and multisectoral approach, further accentuates the need to examine the fit of these analytical approaches for the contemporary study of social policy and development. Against this background, this chapter examines how welfare and social policy issues are defined and understood in the new SDGs, and compares it with the social policy approach supported by the MDGs. The chapter argues that the new global development framework is shifting beyond the pro-poor redistributive paradigm subscribed by the MDGs, as it incorporates universal and productivist elements. To put it differently, SDGs are moving towards a social development approach, which has been defined as an ‘attempt to harmonize social policies with measures designed to promote economic development’ (Midgley 1995, p. 1). Related to this, it investigates the extent to which these new ideational and normative changes in international development coincide with perspectives and

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practices advocated by South–South cooperation players. As a consequence, this study also claims that the scholarly analysis of these issues needs to combine elements from the hitherto separate agendas of social policy and development studies frameworks, in order to capture the breadth of current global development phenomena. The analysis here has focused on social policy within the SDGs, but it is recognized that the study of social policy and development cannot be limited only to the global development goals. Yet, the new universal Agenda will impact upon the development assistance provided by bilateral and multilateral donors, and thereby will also influence national social policies, in particular in the South. This makes the global policy efforts an appropriate object for analysis, regarding the transformation of social policy and development in the so-called developing world.

A SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL POLICY IN DEVELOPMENT, AND SOUTH–SOUTH COOPERATION The understanding of the role of social policy in the development process has often been polarized between two long-standing perspectives: on the one hand, a neoliberal view that considers social spending as a cost in conflict with economic growth and prosperity; and on the other hand, a Keynesian approach in which social policy is perceived to play a central and a positive role, essential for boosting the economy and for counterbalancing market failures (Morel et al. 2012; Midgley 1995). Positioned between these two approaches are social policy ideas that emphasize ‘the importance of social interventions that are compatible with economic development objectives’ (Midgley 1995, pp. 1–2; see also Midgley 2013b, 2006). Various terms have been used to refer to these ideas, including ‘social investment’, ‘social development’, ‘developmental welfare state’, ‘inclusive liberalism’, ‘enabling state’ and ‘new welfare state’ (Morel et al. 2012). These terms do not share a unified theory, or a single intellectual source (Morel et al. 2012), nor is there agreement on a single definition (Jenson 2010). However, they (and other similar labels) share the central idea about ‘the productive potential of social policy, thus providing a new economic rationale for social policy provision’ (Morel et al. 2012, p. 5). Here, the label ‘social development’ is considered most appropriate, as it captures two central interests of the SDGs as ‘social’ and ‘development’. This social development approach not only aims at protecting people from the market, but also intends to allow their integration into the

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market (Jenson and Saint-Martin 2003). Social programmes seek to promote economic participation, to raise employment levels, to increase productivity and the quality of work, thereby generating positive returns to the economy in the form of growth. One underlying objective here is to shift the attention of social policy from consumption and maintenanceoriented programmes to investing in people, in order to enhance their capacity to take part in the productive economy (Jenson and Saint-Martin 2003; Midgley 1995). For this reason, the social development approach places a particular focus on human capital development (Jenson 2010). A highly skilled and educated workforce is more likely to be able to quickly adjust to the demands of an endlessly changing economy. ‘The focus is on public policies that “prepare” individuals, families, and societies to adapt to various transformations’ (Vandenbroucke et al. 2011, p. 5) in order to be worthwhile and effective, and not only address the short term current needs (Jenson 2010). From this perspective, Keynesian systems of social protection are considered to be ‘too passive, too present-oriented, and insufficiently focused on anticipated returns to investment’ (Jenson and Saint-Martin 2003, p. 83). Therefore, instead of focusing on ‘repairing’ present inequality through redistribution, this approach emphasizes addressing equality of life chances, and making investments to produce benefits in the future. Despite the assumption within the social development model that the market is the most effective means, the state plays an important role in ensuring appropriate economic and social outcomes (Perkins et al. 2005). As in the Keynesian approach, the social development perspective is based on the principle of the state’s legitimacy to act in the area of social affairs (Jenson 2010). In the social development view, the state has a key role not only of protecting against misfortune, but also of supporting proactive policies which invest in people’s capabilities and promote their realization. The state has the responsibility to guarantee that there is an adequate supply of social services, and to facilitate access. In addition, the state is expected to provide benefits for the working poor to supplement their low incomes (Jenson 2012). Yet, similarly to the neoliberal approach, the social development approach focuses on the supply side and calls for non-state actors such as individuals, families and communities to assume the social responsibility of investing in their own human capital, so as to be able to succeed in the labour market (Jenson 2012). Hence, security is provided partly by the state’s social protection mechanisms, but also by the capacity of communities and individuals to adapt to change and to secure and build their own future (Jenson and Saint-Martin 2003). Thus, the social development approach differs from both the social protection logic inspired by the Keynesian

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model, and from the neoliberal view of safety-nets by combining elements from both perspectives (Jenson 2010). One central theme common to the social development approach is universality as a priority for advancing social welfare. At the national level, the term ‘universality’ implies that the state social interventions are directed not only at the poor and the most disadvantaged, but also at the middle classes (Jenson 2010, 2012). At the global level, universality refers to the idea that ‘the social development approach is relevant to all societies where efforts are under way to promote economic development’ (Midgley 1995, pp. 1–2). This approach relies primarily on the experience of developing nations where the compatibility of social policies with economic development is critically important. Social development perspectives have been widely disseminated in the Global South (Midgley 1995), but have also been introduced in the United States and Europe, such as the Third Way in the United Kingdom (Giddens 1998). They have also been taken up by international organizations; for example, in 1995, the United Nations World Summit for Social Development held in Copenhagen, in which 117 heads of state or government agreed on the adoption of the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development, and the Programme of Action of the World Summit for Social Development (United Nations 1996). Consequently, as Midgley (1995) also notes, in contrast to Keynesian and neoliberal approaches, the social development approach has been designed to be applicable to all nations and individuals. South–South cooperation is acknowledged to be an important instrument for social development in the 1995 Programme of Action. The social development approach is recognizable in the South–South development cooperation, even if the notable diversity in the experiences of this cooperation makes it difficult to generalize and identify one single pattern or approach (Surender and Urbina-Ferretjans 2013). Yet, even if South– South cooperation players constitute a heterogeneous group, they share some common features in their provision of social aid to other developing nations. One of these features is that the South–South development cooperation typically incorporates aid, trade and investment. Development aid is seen as to be embedded in economic activity rather than being separate from it, with stronger and more explicit links between the two in the South–South than in the Western donor aid (Woods 2008; Surender and Urbina-Ferretjans 2013). A strong consideration is given to national sovereignty, as well as to the principles of ‘solidarity’, ‘mutuality’, ‘win–win’ and ‘partnerships among equals’ (UNCTAD 2010; Morais de Sá e Silva 2005). South–South cooperation is primarily state-led, with limited engagement of non-governmental organizations, civil society or the private sector. However, this cooperation is gradually shifting to

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include relationships at the supranational level through subregional, regional and inter-regional exchanges (Deacon et al. 2010; Morais de Sá e Silva 2010). Progressively, South–South development cooperation is thus evolving from a primarily state-led affair to complex, multi-actor cooperation with links across different geographical levels of policy making (Van Langenhove and Macovei 2010). South–South development cooperation in the area of social issues consists of a wide range of instruments and mechanisms. As Surender and Urbina-Ferretjans (2013, p. 246) describe, they include ‘training and capacity building programmes, scholarships, technical cooperation, knowledge-sharing and exchange of experiences in the social sector, humanitarian assistance, building of social infrastructure, provision of equipment and material goods, volunteer programmes, or team of doctors, generally given through projects’. However, despite the fact that these could be targeted and redistributive interventions, much South– South cooperation still consists of supporting the infrastructure and economic or productive sectors more than the social sectors (UNCTAD 2010). More specifically, the South–South approach is primarily based on a rationale in which social welfare and poverty reduction are ultimately attained through the promotion of productive activities that, in turn, contribute to advance employment and economic development (Surender and Urbina-Ferretjans 2013). Traditionally, global welfare and social policy models supported by international development organizations have been dominated and inspired by Western ideas, perspectives and interests (Hall and Midgley 2004; Deacon et al. 1997). The process that led to the SDGs has represented a change in global policy making, which is more open, transparent and Southern-driven than ever before. It allowed voices from a large number of global stakeholders, in particular from the South, to be heard. In the world of international development, there has been an expansion in the number and diversity of actors involved (Severino and Ray 2009), with multiple driving forces and a plurality of objectives (Burnell 2007). Consequently, this process, reflecting also a change in North–South power relations to some extent, has enabled an infusion of new social policy thinking from the Global South. As will be evident from the following, these new ideas and South–South cooperation in practice have combined to reposition international development debates about core issues of protection and production within social policy.

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FROM THE MDGs TO THE SDGs: INCREASINGLY PRODUCTIVIST SOCIAL POLICY NARRATIVES The way welfare and social policy issues are addressed in the global development agenda has evolved since the MDGs were adopted in 2000. The new global development Agenda and the post-2015 SDGs that followed the MDGs reflect how the conceptualization of the social dimensions of development has been transformed in the last decades. The analysis of the MDGs and the SDGs shows significant differences in the way welfare and social policy issues are framed and justified, indicated by the shift in the role that social policy is given in the development process. These differences are observed not only in the goals and targets, but also in the narratives to substantiate and advance the new Agenda. A central move associated with the shift from the MDGs to SDGs is the new emphasis in the productivist elements of social policy in terms of economic growth, employment and human investment. The MDGs did not incorporate growth and were framed to advance basic human rights. The focus was explicitly on poverty alleviation and concentrated on means-tested interventions targeting the poorest. The SDGs, in contrast, contain a new economic rationale for social policy provision which emphasizes the productive potential of social policy while preserving the objectives of social protection and equity. This productivist move in the understanding of the role of social policy in development is discussed here as regards three areas that are central to the social development approach: economic growth, employment and investment; education and human development; and social protection, distribution and reproduction. These elements constitute critical dimensions of both social policy and development literatures which will be examined further in the discussion section. An important observation, in line with the argument of this chapter, is that these ideas and interests clearly have an affinity to South–South cooperation, thereby no longer drawing only on Northern views of social policy and development. Economic Growth, Employment and Investment While the economic dimensions of development were almost absent from the MDGs, the new SDG development framework highlights the importance of economic growth, employment and the productive dimensions of development. The new Agenda emphasizes elements extensively present in South–South exchanges such as production, investments and building, and upgrading of infrastructure as drivers of development. As is apparent

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from the United Nations (UN) Resolution on the 2030 Agenda, the authoritative document of the SDGs, direct statements indicate a significant emphasis on growth: ‘We will seek to build strong economic foundations for all our countries. Sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth is essential for prosperity’ (United Nations 2015, para. 27, p. 8). Moreover, the Agenda embraces market-centred institutional arrangements and business-oriented economic growth, as in the statement: ‘Private business activity, investment and innovation are major drivers of productivity, inclusive economic growth and job creation’ (United Nations 2015, para. 67, p. 29). It also highlights the importance of entrepreneurship and the role of private sector in development: ‘Promote development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, and encourage the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and mediumsized enterprises, including through access to financial services’ (United Nations 2015, para. 8.3, p. 19). (Social) investment is linked to productive activities, and therefore justified by its contribution to economic productivity and employment opportunities. The UN Resolution advocates for activation measures aimed at fostering employability: ‘We will adopt policies which increase productive capacities, productivity and productive employment’ (United Nations 2015, para. 27, p. 8), while ‘ensur[ing] sustainable consumption and production patterns’ (goal 12). In turn, economic growth is tied to the social objectives of development: ‘International trade is an engine for inclusive economic growth and poverty reduction, and contributes to the promotion of sustainable development’ (United Nations 2015, para. 68, p. 29). As advocated by the social development perspective, ‘the critical importance of economic development in rising standards of living is recognized and actively seeks to harness economic development for social goals’ (Midgley 1995, p. 8). While infrastructure was significantly reduced, if not entirely erased, as an area of activity in international development aid during the MDG era, the new development goals have recaptured its potential and promote it as an engine and a goal of development. Goal 9 is most explicit in this: ‘Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation’. Investment and infrastructure are also referred to in Goal 2 as a target (2.a): ‘Increase investment, including through enhanced international cooperation, in rural infrastructure’ (United Nations 2015, p. 16). Hence, incorporating infrastructure in the SDGs, particularly as a vital element for economic growth, highlights also the newly recognized significance of economic activity in development. Incidentally, this emphasis on infrastructure, along with the close

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links between aid, trade and investment, has also until recently been a feature that distinguishes the South–South approach from the North– South development cooperation. However, the SDGs now incorporate them into the new universal development Agenda for all countries. Emerging and developing nations allude to the concept of ‘common, but differentiated responsibilities’ (United Nations 2015, para. 12, p. 5), by which they seek to safeguard their national economic growth from broader global social and environmental targets and considerations. This claim for economic licence by emerging and developing nations is reflected in the resolution of the SDGs in the references to ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘win–win cooperation’, also core pillars of the South– South cooperation: We are setting out together on the path towards sustainable development, devoting ourselves collectively to the pursuit of global development and of ‘win–win’ cooperation which can bring huge gains to all countries and all parts of the world. We reaffirm that every State has, and shall freely exercise, full permanent sovereignty over all its wealth, natural resources and economic activity. We will implement the Agenda for the full benefit of all, for today’s generation and for future generations. (United Nations 2015, para. 18, p. 6)

Thus, this language captures the general spirit of the SDGs: there is a broader commitment to sustainable development, but all countries, and in particular countries from the South, are to maintain their autonomy on economic development. Social, environmental and economic dimensions of development are interrelated, but the importance of national economic growth is explicitly recognized. Arguably, economic growth can even be considered here as a precondition for further development, while remaining closely tied to social policy. Education and Human Development The SDGs stress the productive potential of investing in education and people’s skills and capacities to participate in economic activities: ‘All countries stand to benefit from having a healthy and well-educated workforce with the knowledge and skills needed for productive and fulfilling work and full participation in society’ (United Nations 2015, para. 27, p. 8). The SDG targets on education have acquired a more comprehensive and economy-linked approach. For example, target 4.4 makes this idea explicit: ‘By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship’ (United Nations 2015, para. 4.4, p. 17). Unlike the MDGs, which focused

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on ensuring access to primary education for girls and boys, the SDGs go beyond formal education, emphasizing the importance of life-long learning, technical and vocational skills development: ‘We commit to providing inclusive and equitable quality education at all levels – early childhood, primary, secondary, tertiary, technical and vocational training’ (United Nations 2015, para. 25, p. 7). From the social development perspective, then, investing in human capital via education and training is considered to be a central driver for growth and job creation. It is assumed that with education and practical skills people are more likely to be able to adapt to a challenging and changing social and economic environment, and consequently to avoid unemployment. The social development approach not only addresses the issue of equal opportunities in the present, by ‘correcting’ current inequality through redistribution, but also urges investment that produces benefits in the future: All people, irrespective of sex, age, race or ethnicity, and persons with disabilities, migrants, indigenous peoples, children and youth, especially those in vulnerable situations, should have access to life-long learning opportunities that help them to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to exploit opportunities and to participate fully in society. (United Nations 2015, para. 25, p. 7)

The human investment effect of better education is expected to enhance long-term growth and contribute to social inclusion. From a social development perspective, these outcomes in turn are seen to promote political stability, which contributes to long-term economic growth (Mkandawire 2005, p. 8). Unlike the MDGs, the SDGs recognize explicitly that investing in human capital for development could be promoted through South–South, in addition to North–South and triangular forms of cooperation: ‘Enhance international support for implementing effective and targeted capacitybuilding in developing countries to support national plans to implement all the Sustainable Development Goals, including through North–South, South–South and triangular cooperation’ (United Nations 2015, para. 17.9, p. 27). This is done through references to ‘science, technology and innovation’ in which South–South learning and knowledge sharing receive a specific acknowledgement in this area of capacity building: ‘Enhance North–South, South–South and triangular regional and international cooperation on and access to science, technology and innovation and enhance knowledge sharing on mutually agreed terms, including through improved coordination among existing mechanisms, in particular

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at the United Nations level, and through a global technology facilitation mechanism’ (United Nations 2015, para. 17.6, p. 26). These statements acknowledge that the South–South cooperation is a distinct channel for advancing productivity and human development. The reference to ‘science, technology and innovation’ again highlights the close link established between economic and social development in SDGs. Social Protection, Redistribution and Reproduction While the SDGs place significant emphasis on productivist elements, they also incorporate social protection dimensions and urge countries to ‘implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, and by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable’ (United Nations 2015, para. 1.3, p. 15). Measures are advocated in favour of redistribution, in order to ensure greater equality. Furthermore, the SDGs address social reproduction by enhancing gender equality and the redistribution of the burden of care. Thus, key social policy elements such as production, protection, redistribution and reproduction appear more integrated in the SDGs than in the earlier MDGs, which mainly focused on the protection of rights and on the guarantee of social justice. One of the major shifts as regards the MDGs and SDGs is in the area of social protection. The MDGs advocated for a social protection targeted at the poorest and the most vulnerable groups of the population. In contrast, the SDGs promote a universalistic approach, covering the population as a whole and ‘leaving no one behind’. This universal coverage includes access to social services and the establishment of protection systems against a variety of risks for all, instead of the prior targeted pro-poor interventions. The equality measures are described in terms of not only a fairer redistribution of resources to ‘adopt policies especially of fiscal, wage, and social protection and progressively achieve greater equality’ (United Nations 2015; target 10.4, p. 21), but also of equality of opportunities to ‘ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome’ (United Nations 2015; target 10.3, p. 21). Nonetheless, it is unclear whether countries are left to implement these measures by themselves, with the aim of strengthening their national legislation and policies, or whether they are to enact them together through redistributive and regulatory global or regional policy and governance. Along with the issues of redistribution and inequality, the expansion in the range of actors beyond government players reflects another change in focus. In the SDG context, the state continues to play a key role:

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122 Handbook of social policy and development We emphasize the responsibilities of all States, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations, to respect, protect and promote human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, without distinction of any kind as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, disability or other status. (United Nations 2015, para. 19, p. 6)

However, in the pursuit of creating sustainable livelihoods, the resolution also recognizes the importance of the capacity and resilience of several previously less prominent non-state actors, such as individuals, households, families and communities. Their role in advancing sustainable development is highlighted, for example, in areas of migration, refugees and displaced persons (para. 29, p. 8); in the area of urban development and management (para. 34, p. 9); and in the area of climate change (target 13.b, p. 23). The SDGs frame issues of redistribution and inequality not only at the individual level, but also between nation states. This is illustrated specifically by Goal 10, to ‘reduce inequality within and among countries’. The MDGs emphasized welfare and social policy as global public goods that have an impact on each and every individual in the world, and in particular on the poor (‘The equal rights and opportunities of women and men must be assured’; United Nations 2000), but they also made reference to equality between nations. The SDGs expand the agenda of reduction of inequality to greater prominence by promoting a more egalitarian and just international system, in the context of international relations. Thus, the Global South discourse about social justice, framed around the concept of solidarity among nations, is reflected in the SDGs. This SDG focus on equality between nations is displayed in South–South cooperation, where the main unit of analysis is the nation (or region) in the international order rather than the individual within society (Breslin 2011). Lastly, a reproductive dimension within social policy is recognized in the SDGs, mainly through the promotion of gender equality, and the recognition of the value of unpaid care and domestic work. Goal 5, to ‘attain gender equality, empower women and girls everywhere’, introduces the redistribution of unpaid care and domestic work through shared responsibility. The goal emphasizes the importance of sharing responsibilities of reproduction and care between members of the household, and the significance of reconciling those responsibilities with paid employment and professional life. The SDGs focus not only on the reproductive role and care work by women, but also on their broader contribution to society, including women’s economic involvement: ‘Ensure women’s full

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and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life’ (United Nations 2015, para. 5.5, p. 18). These details in the area of gender reflect how the SDGs embrace the significance of equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes, which are core elements in the social development approach.

SOCIAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF NEW GLOBAL ACTORS: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR SYNTHESIS AND FURTHER COLLABORATION The primary argument of this chapter is that the new global development Agenda, enshrined by the international community as the SDGs, has taken a turn towards a social development approach. The essence of the new Agenda is to build upon the previous MDGs as the SDGs strengthen human rights perspectives and social protection measures, while incorporating new productivist elements that emphasize stronger links between the economic and social dimensions of development. This global framework aims at reconciling growth and equality, considering that ‘social policy can be instrumental to economic development while maintaining its intrinsic goals of social protection and equity’ (UNRISD 2009, p. 1). Compared to the MDGs that focused primarily on social protectionrelated instruments and mechanisms of cooperation, the new regime of the SDGs complements those with social policy instruments that relate to production, redistribution and reproduction. It is noteworthy that this more developmental Agenda shares more principles and mechanisms of the South–South development cooperation than previous frameworks. This indicates that the global agenda for development is increasingly a combination of different perspectives, and specifically recognizes the South as an important source of social policy and development innovation. Social development ideas advocated by emerging and developing economies appear to be guided and inspired by their own development perspectives and experiences at home. Their new status as global actors in development cooperation has contributed to gradually gained further impetus and positioning of their views in regional and global fora. While the levels of South–South cooperation financing involved are still relatively small compared to OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) official development assistance (ODA), this cooperation has become one increasingly important source of funding in international

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development assistance (Zimmermann and Smith 2011). More importantly, the trend has generated new, alternative ideas and models that complement and even challenge the practices of the DAC donors, which have traditionally dominated the multilateral institutions (Davies 2011). As a consequence, South–South cooperation is clearly expanding, even if some definitional complexity and heterogeneity mean that this phenomenon is still conceptually developing (Morais de Sá e Silva 2010). In the context of academic analysis, the new global focus requires a reassessment of the applicability of scholarly frameworks for the study of social policy and development issues. The repositioning of the social into the development discourse, in the form of the new SDGs, has revealed a shift from ‘poverty reduction’ to ‘development’. The narrower understanding of social policy in the MDGs, as well as the separation and marginalization of social policy issues, resulted in an inadequate analysis of the role of social policy, in particular in the developing-country context (Mkandawire 2005; UNRISD 2014). There have been calls for more attention to structural factors, including institutional, policy, political and cultural dimensions, impacting upon the causes of poverty and inequality, as well as on what are the possible solutions or obstacles for the reduction of these outcomes (UNRISD 2014; Morel et al. 2012). Such analysis requires a more intersectoral and interdisciplinary perspective to examine the ‘societal and economic relations that sustain exclusion’ in the development process (de Haan 2010, p. 218). The SDGs provide fruitful opportunities for strengthening closer collaboration between academics in the fields of social policy and development. The collaboration has so far been limited (Midgley 2013a; de Haan 2007), even though there is considerable overlap in the interests of these two areas. For example, development scholars have experience researching low-cost interventions which could be a valuable contribution for the social policy field. Likewise, social policy experts have extensively examined the cost of social protection, and what may be an affordable social protection floor, which is a particularly relevant topic for the development studies field (Midgley 2013a). However, significant challenges for dialogue and exchange still remain. Terminologies in both fields are not standardized. Although these two disciplines share common goals, they provide different means and instruments (policies and programmes) to achieve them. This contrast is apparent in the interests of the respective fields, for example with statutory social security schemes in Western ‘welfare states’ as the focus of social policy, while household and community-based interventions in the developing world are a central concern for social development studies (Midgley 2013a). The idea of ‘universality’ in the SDGs may alleviate the geographical dichotomy

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between North-focused social policy and South-focused development studies, and contributes to a unified ‘one world’ perspective (Midgley 2013a) that characterizes the social development approach. The inclusion of actors of macro (state) and micro (families, households and communities) levels also further link these two disciplines. Hence, the new approaches that the SDGs offer to sustainable development present improved circumstances for the scholars of the two disciplines to engage in joint learning and cooperation, towards collaboration that transcends academic boundaries. This universal development Agenda does not imply that all countries will be guided by a sole and distinct social development policy regime, since the diversity of contexts will engender variation, and this will also require careful attention to local context in the scholarly analysis. While the SDGs might appear to go towards a global convergence at the normative level, the way social policy making will take place on the ground will reflect a wide variety of instruments, actors and mechanisms. In the North and the South, social policies of countries will be constructed upon various combinations of universalism, targeting and affirmative action, thereby taking distinct positions on the role of the state and social policy objectives, whether welfarist or productivist (de Haan 2010). Social policy and development processes are often reduced to technocratic exercises dictated by levels of economic development and the allocation of resources (de Haan 2010). However, political, ideological and cultural dimensions constitute major facilitating or impeding factors for the advancement of social and development outcomes, and then there is also a need to conduct context-sensitive study on social policy and development (Mkandawire 2001, 2005). Increasing scholarly work on the South–South social cooperation, possibly guided by the stipulations of the SDGs, may serve to illustrate how to integrate a strong contextual dimension in the study of, while also addressing the interests of, both social policy as well as development scholarship. Nevertheless, the call for greater attention to the national context should not lose sight of the universal vision of the SDGs. While the SDGs introduce a single universal umbrella guided by a social development approach, the practical policy agenda also contains significant diversity. The SDGs reflect a set of global social policy aspirations, redefining objectives of social policy and governance at the global level, but they also reaffirm the role of national policies and the sovereignty of individual states. There is a tension between these two levels of concern, exhibited as an ‘internationalist’ and a ‘globalist’ view. The internationalist view perceives the world as made up of different nation states responsible for their territories and citizens. The globalist

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perspective, in contrast, sees the world as an integrated system, in which the welfare and social well-being of individuals is interdependent and jointly determined (Yeates 2008). These two views are manifested in the strategies that countries have in international cooperation on social policy and development. For example, while South–South cooperation is beginning to engage with supranational constituencies beyond nation states, it remains mainly a government-to-government affair, and guided by an internationalist perspective (Surender and Urbina-Ferretjans 2013). Another disjunction of the SDGs is displayed in the combination of elements of a ‘residual’ social policy approach which underlines efficiency and risk management, and an ‘institutional’ approach which emphasizes social rights and social justice. The choice of one approach or the other, or the combination of the two, may ultimately impact upon the objectives of social policy, and the instruments and institutions being promoted. Concepts such as universality, equity, productive and unproductive expenditure may generate different understandings that might ‘determine what is to be allocated and to whom and for what reasons’ (Mkandawire 2005, p. 16). There is a delicate balance between protection and activation measures and the management and trade-offs between social and economic investments. Due to the tensions between the residual and institutional approaches, the global social governance institutions are likely to face an increasing fragmentation of actors and agendas. In order to ensure their relevance, these governance institutions may be required to develop more open and comprehensive mechanisms to manage this growing diversity (Severino and Ray 2009; Zimmerman and Smith 2011; Paulo and Reisen 2010). Managing the diversity in this Agenda is a challenging endeavour, even if variation does also provide opportunities for new openings. Indeed, the assemblage of perspectives in this new development Agenda may cater to many tastes, and thus should appeal to scholars on a quest for a more integrated practical and academic cooperation. A social development approach embraces the idea of combining both social policy and development beyond ideological battles, positioned at the extremes of the spectrum. For scholars, the wide embrace of interests in this Agenda should be its advantage, making it more feasible to design studies that serve a variety of interests, and to enhance cooperation across disciplines. The agreement among the signatories of the 2030 Agenda resolution may serve as an analogy here. As Jenson notes for the social development perspective, it has probably been the ‘polysemic character that increased its diffusion’ (Jenson 2010, p. 71). It is arguably the ambiguity of the role of social policy in the SDGs that has allowed the different sides to appeal to their preferred understanding and policy

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thinking, thereby contributing to its acceptance across the international community at the United Nations level. Thus, in addition to increasing policy alliances and collaboration, this new universal development Agenda provides significant potential for interdisciplinary work in the fields of social policy and development.

REFERENCES Breslin, S. (2011), ‘The “China model” and the global crisis: from Friedrich List to a Chinese mode of governance?’, International Affairs, 87 (6), 1323–1343. Burnell, P. (2007), ‘Foreign aid: reports of its death greatly exaggerated’, in A. McGrew and N.K. Poku (eds), Globalization, Development and Human Security, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 47–65. Davies, P. (2011), ‘Toward a new development cooperation dynamic’, in North–South Institute (ed.), Transnational Issues, Multilateral Solutions? The Future of Development Cooperation. The Canadian Development Report 2011, Ottawa: North–South Institute, pp. 77–93. Deacon, B. (2007), Global Social Policy and Governance, London: SAGE. Deacon B., M.C. Macovei, L. Van Langenhove and N. Yeates (eds) (2010), World-Regional Social Policy and Global Governance: New Research and Policy Agendas in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, London: Routledge. Deacon, B., M. Hulse and P. Stubbs (1997), Global Social Policy: International Organizations and the Future of Welfare, London: Sage. de Haan, A. (2007), Reclaiming Social Policy: Globalization, Social Exclusion, and New Poverty Reduction Strategies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. de Haan, A. (2010), Towards a New Poverty Agenda in Asia: Social Policies and Economic Transformation, London: SAGE. Giddens, A. (1998), The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hall, A. and J. Midgley (2004), Social Policy for Development, London: SAGE. Jenson, J. (2010), ‘Diffusing ideas for after-neoliberalism: the social investment perspective in Europe and Latin America’, Global Social Policy, 10 (1), 59–84. Jenson, J. (2012), ‘Redesigning citizenship regimes after neoliberalism: moving towards social investment’, in N. Morel, B. Palier and J. Palme (eds), Towards a Social Investment Welfare State? Ideas, Policies and Challenges, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 61–87. Jenson, J. and D. Saint-Martin (2003), ‘New routes to social cohesion? Citizenship and the social investment state’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 28 (1), 77–99. Midgley, J. (1995), Social Development: The Developmental Perspective in Social Welfare, London: SAGE. Midgley, J. (2006), ‘Developmental social policy: theory and practice’, Asian Journal of Social Policy, 2 (1), 1–22. Midgley, J. (2013a), ‘Social development and social protection: new opportunities and challenges’, Development Southern Africa, 30 (1), 2–12. Midgley, J. (2013b), ‘Social development and social welfare: implications for social policy’, in P. Kennett (ed.), A Handbook of Comparative Social Policy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 184–204. Mkandawire, T. (2001), ‘Social policy in a development context’, Social Policy and Development, Programme Paper no. 7, June, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.

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128 Handbook of social policy and development Mkandawire, T. (ed.) (2004), Social Policy in a Development Context, Geneva: Palgrave Macmillan and United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Mkandawire, T. (2005), ‘Targeting and universalism in poverty reduction’, Social Policy and Development, Programme Paper no. 23, December, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Morais de Sá e Silva, M. (2005), ‘South–South cooperation, policy transfer and bestpractice reasoning: the transfer of the solidarity in literacy program from to Mozambique’, Institute of Social Studies, Working Paper Series, no. 406, February, The Hague. Morais de Sá e Silva, M. (2010), ‘How did we get there? The pathways of South–South cooperation’, in International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (ed.), South–South Cooperation: The Same Old Game or a New Paradigm?, Poverty in Focus no. 20, International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, Poverty Practice, Bureau for Development Policy, Brasilia: United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Morel, N., J. Palme and B. Palier (eds) (2012), Towards a Social Investment Welfare State? Ideas, Policies and Challenges, Bristol: Policy Press. Paulo, S. and H. Reisen (2010), ‘Eastern donors and Western soft law: towards a DAC donor peer review of China and India?’, Development Policy Review, 28 (5), 535–552. Perkins, D., L. Nelms and P. Smyth (2005), ‘Beyond neo-liberalism: the social investment state?’, Brotherhood of St Laurence and University of Melbourne Centre for Public Policy Social Policy Working Paper, no. 3, October. Schulz, N.-S. (2010), ‘The G20 and the global governance of development’, Policy Brief, September, Madrid: FRIDE. Severino, J.-M. and O. Ray (2009), ‘The end of ODA: death and rebirth of a global public policy’, Working Paper No. 167, Washington, DC: Center for Global Development. Surender, R. and M. Urbina-Ferretjans (2013), ‘South–South Cooperation: a new paradigm for global social policy?’, in R. Walker and R. Surender (eds), Social Policy in a Developing World, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 237–257. UNCTAD (2010), ‘Economic development in Africa, Report 2010. South–South cooperation: Africa and the new forms of development partnerships’, Geneva: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. United Nations (1996), ‘Report of the World Summit for Social Development’, Copenhagen, 6–12 March 1995, A/CONF.166/9, New York. United Nations (2000), ‘United Nations Millennium Declaration’, Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 8 September 2000, A/RES/55/2, New York. United Nations (2015), ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015, A/RES/70/1, New York. UNRISD (2009), ‘Social policy and development (2000–2009) research’, accessed 10 March 2018 at http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BB128/(httpProgrammeAreas)/ BFA13785EC135F568025718B003C5FA7. UNRISD (2014), ‘Social inclusion and the post-2015 sustainable development agenda’, UNRISD paper prepared by Esuna Dugarova and Tom Lavers for the UNITAR’s Briefing for UN Delegates ‘Post-2015 Development Agenda: Social Inclusion’. Vandenbroucke, F., A. Hemerijck and B. Palier (2011), ‘The EU needs a social investment pact’, European Social Observatory, Paper series no. 5, Brussels. Van Langenhove, L. and M.C. Macovei (2010), ‘Regional formation and global governance’, in B. Deacon, M.C. Macovei, L. Van Lagenhove and N. Yeates (eds), WorldRegional Social Policy and Global Governance: New Research and Policy Agendas in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, London: Routledge, pp. 9–26. Woods, N. (2008), ‘Whose aid? Whose influence? China, emerging donors and the silent revolution in development assistance’ International Affairs, 84 (6), 1205–1221. Yeates, N. (2008), Understanding Global Social Policy, Bristol: Policy Press.

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The SDGs: towards a social development approach in the 2030 Agenda? 129 Zimmermann, F. and K. Smith (2011), ‘More actors, more money, more ideas for international development co-operation’, Journal of International Development, 23 (5), 722–738.

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7. Social and human rights Hartley Dean

The concept of social rights has been central to social policy as an academic subject of the Global North, though the concept of human rights has until recently remained relatively peripheral. But the expanding boundaries of the academic subject and its burgeoning engagement with processes of social development in the Global South (Gough et al. 2004; Surender and Walker 2013) have brought concerns with human rights more to the fore (see Dean 20151). This chapter first addresses differing conceptions of social rights and their place within the human rights framework, before discussing different kinds of rights-based approaches to social development.

CONCEPTS OF SOCIAL RIGHTS Social rights may, on the one hand, be understood as rights of citizenship that pertain in the established welfare states of the Global North: rights specifically created through legislation relating to provision for social security, education and employment, health and social care, and housing. On the other hand, they may be understood as a component of the international human rights framework. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) committed signatory states not only to observe basic (or ‘first generation’) civil and political rights, but also to promote ‘economic, social and cultural rights’ (an expression for which the term ‘social rights’ generally serves as a synonymous contraction): rights that were held to apply throughout the world and which are of critical salience in countries in which social welfare provision is less fully developed. The term ‘social rights’ is relatively new. They are portrayed as a new (or ‘second’) generation of rights that were first explicitly recognised or created in the mid-twentieth century. It may be argued, however, that what we now call social rights pre-dated the concept of rights, having 1 This chapter draws extensively upon this particular source and previous work by this author.

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their origins in customary rules and practices by which all human societies have in part been governed and through which, as interdependent beings, people have sought to ensure their mutual well-being. Social rights are constructed through the struggles by which human beings socially negotiate the naming and claiming of their needs and the legitimacy of the demands that they place upon each other (Dean 2015; Isin 2008). In this sense, the distinction between human and social rights is false. Let us nevertheless consider the way in which contemporary concepts have emerged. Social Rights as Rights of Citizenship At the citizenship level, according to T.H. Marshall (1950), social rights were the achievement of advanced industrial capitalism and the creation of social legislation by modern welfare states. The ancient origins of citizenship as the exclusive status of a patrician male elite had given way, following the so-called European Enlightenment, to new modes of governance commensurate with the development of capitalism (Turner 1986) and eventually to mechanisms by which, in highly complex affluent societies, it was potentially possible for the needs of all citizens to be met through statutory mechanisms for collective distribution (Titmuss 1970). The social rights to which modern welfare states gave birth had been preceded for centuries by a variety of charitable and administrative practices, the nature of which inevitably influenced and shaped the emergence of social rights. But it was the prior development of civil and political rights that characterised modern liberal democracies and made it possible for social rights to be formally constituted as creatures of policy and law. Marshall’s highly influential concept of social citizenship was expressly premised on a liberal ideal of equality not of income, but of status: an equality ‘not so much between classes as between individuals within a population which is now treated for this purpose as though it were a single class’ (Marshall 1950/1992, p. 33). Marshall’s vision that cohered with that of an era in which F.D. Roosevelt (1944/1950) had recognised that ‘necessitous men are not free men’,2 so justifying the establishment of a right in more highly developed nations to a national minimum that nevertheless should always, in Beveridge’s (1942) words, 2 References to ‘men’ and ‘man’ and the associated use of the masculine pronoun in this section are a direct historical reflection of enduring patriarchal assumptions – even in the twentieth century – with regard to the nature and extent of women’s legal and citizenship status.

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‘leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family’. It was a vision that cohered with prevailing Keynesian economic orthodoxies, which sought equilibrium through state intervention, so establishing the hyphenated society of ‘democratic-welfare-capitalism’ in which political, social and civil/legal rights might exist in synergistic harmony (Marshall 1981). Social rights, therefore, were creatures of capitalism and its underpinning legal and ideological doctrines. Notions of ‘natural’ rights had been largely subsumed during the so-called European Enlightenment by notions of inviolable individual rights to ‘life, liberty and estate [that is, property]’ and/or by ‘man-made’ laws crafted in accordance with the emerging principles of political economy. The citizen of a nation state was constituted as an individual proprietor or owner of alienable goods and, for the masses, their principal or only alienable good was their labour power (e.g., Fine 1984; Offe 1984). Social rights and social protection developed in part through evolving doctrines of social liberalism (George and Wilding 1985) and in part through the demands of organised labour (Bottomore 1992). They were compromises that revolved around the commodity status of labour power and the essential human services necessary for the reproduction and maintenance of labour power. The effect of social rights was to bestow certain protections with regard to the terms upon which labour was sold; a measure of security for those excluded from the labour market; and the regulation, subsidy or provision of education, health care and housing upon which the renewal of labour power depended. The outcome could be regarded as a process of partial decommodification. The extent to which decommodification occurred varied between different capitalist states (Esping-Andersen 1990), as individual welfare states managed tensions between the state and the market through the ‘fine-tuning’ of social rights (Lockwood 1996). The neoliberal ideological turn that has been affecting the welfare states of the Global North, largely since the 1980s, may be regarded as a process of recommodification or the ‘recalibration’ of social rights (Fererra et al. 2001) as labour markets have been deregulated, as benefits and services have been privatised, marketised and/or retrenched. But insofar as the administrative apparatuses of the welfare states of the global North retain legitimacy and a formalised labour market remains universally ‘embedded’ (Polanyi 1944) within the social structures of such states, the concept of social rights espoused by Marshall retains a particular meaning and relevance; a relevance that, as we shall see, may not necessarily or readily extend to the Global South.

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Social Rights as Human Rights The international human rights framework emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was a global reaction to the horrific consequences of totalitarianism and amounted to an abstract claim for a person’s ‘right to have rights’ independently of their citizenship of a sovereign state (Arendt 1951). But it was citizenship rights that provided the conceptual model for human rights (Clarke 1996). Though the UDHR bore the stamp of a liberal-individualist interpretation of the human being as a bearer of rights, its emotive force derived in part from an implicitly collective recognition of human vulnerabilities and the need for systems of mutual protection (Turner 1993, 2006; Woodiwiss 2005). It portended, potentially, the translation of social rights to the world beyond the Global North. The inclusion of social rights within the Declaration had been controversial, not least because the states parties’ representatives on the Commission tasked by the United Nations (UN) in 1945 with drafting the Declaration had different understandings of social rights: Western European nations and the United States (US) espoused a notion of social rights broadly consistent with the model that would later be crystallised in Marshall’s account (see above); developing nations, especially the Latin American countries, espoused an approach that linked the cause of social rights development with the demand for economic development; while the Eastern European Soviet bloc espoused a state socialist approach, prioritising state duties to provide for social needs (Davy 2013). The result was an uneasy compromise, though it included rights to work, education and even leisure, and an overarching right ‘to a standard of living adequate for health and wellbeing’ (Article 24). After the United Nations adopted the Declaration in 1948, some 18 years elapsed before international covenants could finally be agreed to bring it legally into force. And, though the Declaration had asserted that civil and political rights on the one hand and social rights on the other were equally inalienable and indivisible, they were inscribed in separate international covenants, and unlike the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) admitted a principle of ‘progressive realisation’ (Article 2), requiring states parties unable immediately to fulfil the rights prescribed to ‘take steps towards’ achieving their realisation. Social rights clauses have since been written into a variety of supranational instruments and treaties and, in a variety of forms, into many national constitutions, including the constitutions of countries throughout the Global South. In some instances, such rights have been rendered

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justiciable (Langford 2008), affording human rights activists and civil society organisations important new avenues for championing social rights (see Dean 2015, Ch. 8), albeit that the effectiveness and validity of bringing legal processes and procedures to bear upon the development and exercise of social rights have been hotly contested (Scheingold 1974/2004; Gearty and Montalouvou 2011). There is an important ongoing debate about the place for legal remedies in the context of rights-based approaches to social development. The focus of this chapter, however, is on a wider debate concerning the place of social rights and rights-based approaches in relation to social policy and development. Scholars and practitioners in the field of international development have turned their attention to human rights in general, not only as a relevant factor in the negotiation and administration of international aid arrangements, but also as a consideration central to the goal and process of development (Uvin 2004). Social Rights in Global Context This begs the question of what is meant by ‘development’. The question is addressed by several other chapters in this volume, but insofar as the term ‘development’ is used as a synonym for human progress, it may be measured with reference to economic or social criteria: to the ideals of advanced capitalism on the one hand, or to levels of social well-being and human fulfilment on the other. It may, of course, be measured by both, but the extent to which either might depend on the other is deeply contested. As we have seen, contemporary understandings of social rights have been largely and substantively shaped by the emergence of capitalism. But how far have those understandings permeated? Older notions of ‘development’ that associated progress with industrialisation divided the globe into three: the capitalist First World, the communist Second World, and the unaligned and less industrialised Third World (Wolf-Phillips 1987). The demise of Soviet communism and the consequences that followed have largely collapsed the so-called First and Second Worlds into one; a diverse world containing a shifting variety of ‘welfare regimes’ (Esping-Andersen 1990; Ferragina and SeeleibKeiser 2011; Cerami and Vanhuysse 2009), albeit that it perhaps loosely shares an overarching understanding of social rights as rights of citizenship. The so-called Third World, which we generally now describe as the Global South, may be subdivided into several regions or parts. Some parts are essentially capitalist: much of Latin America and East Asia include what may be regarded as emerging if incomplete welfare states, with systems of social rights modelled on those of the Global North.

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Communist China, the most populous nation on Earth, has adopted a rapidly developing form of state capitalism and has begun to introduce fragmented social rights systems based selectively on designs from the Global North (Chan et al. 2008). Other parts of the world have been classified as either ‘informal’ or ‘insecurity’ regimes (Gough et al. 2004): the former include South Asian countries, where despite a variety of governmental and non-governmental organisation (NGO) initiatives (and in the case of India, accelerating economic growth), human wellbeing is often ultimately dependent on provision by family and community; the latter includes, for example, much of sub-Saharan Africa, where governance may be systemically weak or unstable and living standards for many may be chronically precarious. Properly detailed accounts of social policies in many of these countries or regions are provided elsewhere in this volume, but it can be seen that in parts of the Global South elements of citizenship-based social rights have been emerging, albeit that full realisation of the social rights proclaimed in the UDHR is far from having been achieved. The question this begs is whether a rights-based approach is universally workable. The charge made against attempts allegedly to ‘impose’ social rights in the Global South relates not only to the obstacles faced by impoverished nations in resourcing provision for social rights, but also to the cultural obstacles and the inappropriateness of the concept of rights, especially in cultures shaped, for example, by Confucian, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic or other ‘non-Western’ religious and philosophical traditions that may value loyalty and obedience above individual rights (Deacon 2007; Uvin 2004; Sen 1999). It may, of course, be contended that the development of essential human rights principles, like foundational mathematical and scientific principles, have universal validity regardless of the cultural context in which they were first discovered or developed (Donnelly 2013). And it can be seen that certain social rights elements have been more or less directly translated from the UDHR into the constitutions of China, India and several Islamic states (Jung et al. 2013). Declarations of Human Rights containing interpretations of social rights were adopted in 1990 by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and in 2012 by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. It is arguable, nevertheless, that the liberal-individualist values and principles that have dominated the human rights agenda can conflict with key tenets of non-Western traditions. And yet, as has been pointed out, the social rights component of the human rights agenda can speak to, or resonate with, solidaristic moralities. In this context we might point to the Confucian idea of Rén (the achievement of full ‘human-ness’), the ancient pan-African belief system, ubuntu (wherein personal identity is

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realised through interpersonal dependency); a pillar of Islamic faith, zakat (the religious obligation to share personal wealth); the Gandhian ideal of sayodaya (‘progress for all’). These examples illustrate what may be referred to as alternative epistemological traditions or ‘axiologies’ (cf. de Sousa Santos 2006), with which a discourse of individual rights may not sit easily, yet which in substance rather than form express a commitment to the fulfilment of the claims of others.

RIGHTS-BASED APPROACHES TO SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT If we focus specifically on the notion of social as opposed to economic development, it is possible to distinguish three broad approaches, each with a different interpretation of a role for social rights. The first regards social development as a process of self-determination; as the means to freedom. The second regards social development as a technical process, by which systemically to reduce the scale of global poverty. The third regards social development as a humanitarian process, by which to achieve global social justice. The Right to Self-Determination In 1986, the UN’s Declaration on the Right to Development (DRtD) gave expression to what was hailed as a ‘third generation’ of human rights. Third generation rights are widely represented as collective, group or solidarity rights: as rights to peace, to a healthy environment and to ‘development’. Central to the concept of development was the principle of ‘self-determination’ (Rosas 2001). The instigation of the demand for a right to development is often attributed to a call not for the right to live, but ‘to live better’ (e.g., M’Baye 1972). The agenda for the DRtD was driven largely from the Global South, with some resistance from parts of the Global North, most especially the US (Marks 2004). The Declaration was primarily aspirational and did not give rise to legally binding covenants. Its supporters contended that it transcended the schism between first and second generation rights (Sengupta 2010) and set them in a broader context. The Declaration expressed the right of ‘every human person and all peoples … to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development’; which implies ‘the full realization of the right of peoples to self-determination’, including ‘the exercise of their inalienable right to full sovereignty over all their natural wealth and resources’ (Article 1).

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The Declaration reiterated rights proclaimed in existing treaties and instruments, while seeking to reframe them in terms of an overarching right to development. But it entailed elements of ambiguity. The DRtD proclaimed the right of peoples (in the plural), but stressed that the human person (in the singular) is the central subject. It proclaimed the duty of nation states to formulate national policies, but required all states to cooperate in the formulation of international policies. The Declaration added nothing specific to the exposition of social rights already contained in the UDHR and ICESCR, other than to call for international assistance in realising them. It thereby exposed the conflict between the interests of the nations of the Global South which championed the right to development, and those of the Global North, which revolved substantially around the challenges such development might pose to the established international economic order. In one sense, the right to self-determination expressed in the DRtD may be thought of as the combination of first generation rights to freedom and democracy, scaled up to the international level. In the current context of extreme global inequalities, democracy between nations premised on an effective right to national self-determination would require a revolutionary upheaval to the global capitalist world order (Andreassen and Marks 2010). In another sense, the DRtD portended a recontextualisation of second generation social rights. The impetus for the elusive idea of a right to development has been sustained in part by Amartya Sen’s (1999) liberal-individualist framing of ‘development’ as freedom. Sen’s approach prioritises ‘individual freedom as a social commitment’ (Sen 1999, Ch. 12) and encapsulates the ‘self-determinist’ approach. It is an approach to, rather than a theory of, development and it attempts simultaneously to embrace potentially contradictory notions of freedom (freedom of individual opportunity and freedom of systemic process), and yet implicitly or explicitly it supports a role for competitive markets (Prendergast 2005; Dean 2009). Though not a supporter of solidarity rights, Sen’s framing of human development resonated with certain underlying purposes of the DRtD, while remaining attractive to international sponsors of developmental aid. He can be credited with shaping certain elements of the work of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). For Sen, human rights provide the means to guarantee basic human freedoms. Human development enhances human capabilities so as to give full expression to individual freedoms. Rights therefore are but a means to that end, rather than a collectively established end in themselves.

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Technocratic Approaches Initial debate around the DRtD had coincided with a realisation that attempts by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to address poverty in the Global South through crude structural adjustment programmes were failing (Deacon et al. 1997). The result in the 1990s was a partial shift of thinking on the part of key UN agencies. While still favouring free markets and restricted public spending, they now espoused a social safety net approach to global poverty alleviation (Deacon 2007; World Bank 1991). The emphasis was on ‘getting the institutions right’ (Yeates 2008, p. 287); on promoting both private sector reform and good governance; on social risk management; on partial re-regulation and the use of ‘smart’ conditionalities; on the tailored use of social funds to promote community level initiatives. The highpoint of this technocratic turn was the publication of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The initiative had been partly inspired by Sen. The first chapter of the Human Development Report 2000 (UNDP 2000) was written personally by Sen and extolled the case for the MDGs as a means for the realisation of human capabilities. But in the rest of the report, in place of Sen’s use of the term and the concept of ‘human capabilities’, the term and the concept of ‘human capital’ were deftly substituted. The latter are concerned with productive capacities, not personal freedoms. Development, the UNDP assumed, self-evidently required economic growth, which could best be engineered in a pluralistic and apolitical social context in which NGOs and civil society groups could play a role as much as governments. The realisation of social rights, according to UNDP, required regulatory mechanisms, and so it began to draw on language bearing the hallmarks of new public managerialist doctrine (Porter and Craig 2004). It spoke of the need for incentive structures, self-assessment techniques, benchmarking and culture change; and for poorer countries to avail themselves of the ‘opportunities’ that globalisation offered. The significance of the language of the UNDP and the World Bank (2001) was that it reflected the context in which the UN’s MDGs had been framed: their purpose was to urge upon the members of the UN the meeting of important goals, but not the realisation of rights. The MDGs prescribed action against poverty, hunger, unmet schooling, gender inequality and environmental degradation, by setting agreed minimal – critics would say minimalist – targets to be met by the year 2015. In 2001, the UN’s Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights asked the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to develop draft guidelines on integrating human rights into poverty

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reduction strategies. The OHCHR published a conceptual framework document (Hunt et al. 2004) and draft guidelines, which were eventually adopted and published as Principles and Guidelines for a Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies (OHCHR 2006). The guidelines required: specific and prioritised norms and defined standards; accessible mechanisms of accountability (that may or may not entail justiciability); democratic participation; particular attention to the wellbeing of especially vulnerable social groups; the identification of immediate, intermediate and long-term targets; the use of indicators and benchmarks to monitor progress (Hunt et al. 2004, p. 21). The end result was a set of ‘rights standards’ (cf. Mishra 1999), with ordered targets. The approach embraced the principle of progressive realisation (see above) and the methods of public managerialism. The document was to all intents and purposes a sister document to the MDGs. Rights to work, food, housing, health and education were specified, though an express right to social security was omitted. The document articulated the links between development and poverty, drawing on the language of rights, but the implied assumption is that poverty and development are antithetical. The document was a response to the UN agenda and its premise that economic development is the sine qua non of poverty alleviation. By 2015 ‘significant progress’ towards meeting the MDGs was claimed (World Bank/IMF 2016) and the MDGs were superseded by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which set renewed goals and targets to be met by 2030. The SDGs are in some respects more closely focused than the MDGs and they have also been extended to encompass issues around social protection, labour standards and the need to combat climate change. And yet the SDGs may yet be regarded as modest in their ambition. One of the key criticisms of the SDGs has been their failure to refer explicitly to the UDHR and the social rights set out therein (e.g., Köhler et al. 2014). The approach is oriented to the setting of technically defined social standards, rather than the realisation of social rights. Humanitarian Approaches The process that led to the formulation of the MDGs had begun with the UN’s Vienna Declaration of 1993, followed by the Copenhagen Social Summit of 1995. The former is often credited with having declared that poverty was a violation of human rights; the latter resulted in a redoubled commitment to social development. At both events the universality and indivisibility of human rights and the principles of DRtD were ritually reaffirmed. What the Vienna Declaration specifically affirmed was that

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‘the existence of widespread extreme poverty inhibits the full and effective enjoyment of human rights’ (Article 14) and that ‘extreme poverty and social exclusion constitute a violation of human dignity’ (Article 25; an affirmation expressly restated by the UN General Assembly 2012). Neither affirmation states that poverty is of itself a direct violation of rights. The report from the Copenhagen Summit committed itself to creating an environment that ‘will enable people to achieve social development’, and to ‘eradicating poverty in the world’ (UN 1995, pp. 11, 13). The means to such ends included provision for a stable legal framework; an enabling economic environment; and dynamic, open and free markets. The report added that the parties to the Summit would ‘reaffirm, promote and strive to ensure the realization of rights set out [in the UDHR, the ICESCR and the DRtD] … particularly in order to assist people living in poverty’ (ibid., p. 12). The UN was in no way retreating from the principle that social rights are progressively, not immediately, realisable and, in this sense, cannot be wholly inviolable. The claims made fell short of declaring a right not to be poor. It was accepted, however, that the scale of global poverty amounted to an injustice, giving rise to obligations on the part of the international community to mitigate the obstacles to, and facilitate the promotion of, the right to development (Salomon 2010). In 2001 the UN’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights finally concluded that: The rights to work, an adequate standard of living, housing, food, health and education, which lie at the heart of the Covenant [the ICESCR], have a direct and immediate bearing upon the eradication of poverty. Moreover, the issue of poverty frequently arises in the course of the Committee’s constructive dialogue with States parties. In the light of experience gained over many years, including the examination of numerous States parties’ reports, the Committee holds the firm view that poverty constitutes a denial of human rights. (ECOSOC 2001, para. 1)

The idea that poverty represents a violation of rights is an important and powerful one (Lister 2004). It brings the symbolic and mobilising potential of rights discourse directly to bear on the process of social development. It can do so, broadly speaking, in two ways: through formal institutional approaches to combat global injustices; or through substantive interventions that give expression to our universal humanity. The principal standard-bearer for the institutionalist approach is Thomas Pogge, for whom social rights are ‘moral claims on the organization of one’s society’ (Pogge 2002, p. 64). His concern is with moral, not legal, rights and here he draws on the authority of the UDHR,

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Article 28: ‘Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized’. He contends that a global institutional order that continues to permit a foreseeable and extensive incidence of extreme poverty is in violation of human rights. By that standard, the commitment under the MDGs merely to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015 was simply not enough. The alternative, according to Pogge, depends first on the entrenchment of democracy. His contention is that the most affluent have shaped the world order to the disadvantage of the poorest and we must hold the powerful to account. It is necessary, first, to obtain international agreement that no kind of financial aid should be provided to non-democratic regimes. Second, he proposes the introduction of some form of international fiscal mechanism with which to fund development aid. One such mechanism would be a currency transfer tax (or Tobin Tax), a globally administered tax on speculative currency transfers. Alternatively, a global resources dividend, funded through a levy on those countries that use or sell limited natural resources extracted from their own territories, could be used to redistribute from those in the world who make the greatest demands on the world’s resources to those who make the least. The third of Pogge’s proposals is for some form of cosmopolitan citizenship. There are similarities here with other proposals for cosmopolitan or global citizenship emanating from a spectrum of authors (Delanty 2000; Falk 1994; Held 2010). The common core of these proposals is a form of institutional cosmopolitanism premised on generalised and universal equality between all individuals and forms of post-national inclusion at both subnational and supranational level. However, none of these proposals contain much, if any, explicit detail as to the role of social rights. The assumption appears to be that the realisation of social rights is somehow assured on the basis of generic cosmopolitan principles that include a commitment to social justice and wholesale reforms to the apparatuses of the UN. Some critics would question the conceptual validity of this interpretation of cosmopolitanism (Braidotti et al. 2013). And James Midgley, while advocating a ‘one world perspective’ in social welfare (Midgley 2017, Ch. 12), highlights practical obstacles to the application of social democratic cosmopolitan ideals to the task of realising global social rights. An approach distinguishable from Pogge’s is that of Tom Campbell (2007). Campbell regards poverty as a violation of rights; not so much because it is unjust, as because it is an affront to the humanity of its victims. Poverty violates human rights in the same sense as torture or slavery does. Poverty should be eradicated or indeed abolished for

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humanitarian, not economic reasons, by enforcing the rights of those who experience it. On this basis, Campbell would prefer a global humanitarian levy to Pogge’s global resource dividend. A global humanitarian levy would replace existing bilateral and multilateral overseas aid arrangements with an international system, under which all national governments would levy a hypothecated tax of on all personal incomes and on all personal wealth in excess of some specified level. Such a mechanism, according to Campbell, would ensure the fulfilment of subsistence rights that are ‘grounded primarily in the universal humanitarian obligation to participate in the relief of extreme suffering’ (Campbell 2007, p. 67). It is possible to conceive of a range of other mechanisms by which to garner resources for poverty eradication or alleviation, but this leaves aside the question of just how such resources should be distributed. Peter Townsend has argued that such funding should provide the basis for establishing an international welfare state (Townsend 2002, 2009; Townsend and Donkor 1996). His argument was that provision for a right to social security was already internationally enshrined through the UDHR and the ICESCR and should be realised, by building on the experiences of the richer Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in developing social security systems. Elements of his argument are reflected in the ILO’s Social Protection Floor initiative (ILO 2012; Deacon 2013). This is an approach that contrasts radically with that of the OHCHR’s guidelines for a rightsbased approach. A concrete and practicable first step in the construction of an international social security system, according to Townsend, would be the introduction of an international universal child benefit, funded by a Tobin tax and rolled out globally, merging with and/or succeeding existing schemes as appropriate (including, for example, the conditional cash transfer schemes currently being developed in parts of the Global South; see Chapter 20 in this volume). Agitation for rights-based action against poverty can be detected at other levels. Callinicos (2003), for example, has suggested that through global networks such as the World Social Forum it might be possible to build campaigns drawing upon diverse constituencies for rights-based demands for basic incomes, reduced working hours and better public services. Some of these demands are also expressed in proposals by Guy Standing for the extension, globally, of a new form of ‘occupational citizenship’ (Standing 2009). Apart from what sceptics might see as their utopian nature, what marks out the various proposals outlined above is an explicit commitment to

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social rights as an expression of human solidarity as opposed to a means to self-determination or the prescription of minimum social standards.

CONCLUSION Social rights, whether framed as rights of citizenship or as human rights, are socially constructed. This does not mean that they are a mere ideological fiction, that they are not real. They result from real social and political processes, from negotiation and struggle (Dean 2015). They have real consequences, the outcomes of which in terms of social development can be measured (e.g., Fukuda-Parr et al. 2015). But, as we have seen, they remain ambiguous constructs. We have seen, firstly, that there are significant issues regarding the translation of rights developed in the Global North to the Global South. In part this relates to the availability of material resources and the relations of power that determine just how such resources are or can be distributed. But it also relates to differences in cultural and epistemological understanding. Secondly, we have seen that there are competing interpretations of the role that social rights can or should play in relation to social development. We have distinguished between normative interpretations based on: (1) principles of self-determination and the idea that poorer countries should be allowed and assisted to develop freely and on their own terms; (2) technocratic principles and the idea that poorer countries should be motivated and assisted to achieve minimum social standards or targets; and (3) humanitarian principles and the idea that poverty is a violation of human rights that demands an effective response from the international community as a whole. Social policy as an academic subject must embrace a critical understanding of these competing approaches. Social development as the development of substantive social policies is a social process by which human needs may be named and claimed, recognised and negotiated, articulated and fulfilled. Such a process need not draw explicitly upon a language of rights, but a concept of social rights provides particular meaning and a way of understanding social development. And, in practice, an explicit language of social rights may, where appropriate, provide a powerful discursive resource upon which to draw.

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Social and human rights 145 Gough, I., Wood, G., Barrientos, A., Bevan, P., Davis, P., and Room, G. (2004). Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Social Policy in Development Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Held, D. (2010). Cosmopolitanism: Ideas and Realities. Cambridge: Polity. Hunt, P., Nowak, M., and Osmani, S. (2004). Human Rights and Poverty Reduction: A Conceptual Framework. Geneva: OHCHR. International Labour Organization (ILO) (2012). Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (No. 202) Recommendation concerning National Floors of Social Protection. Geneva: ILO. Isin, E. (ed.) (2008). Recasting the Social in Citizenship. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jung, C., Hirschl, R., and Rosevar, E. (2013). Economic and social rights in national constitutions. Social Science Research Network. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2349680. Köhler, G., Pogge, T., and Sengupta, M. (2014). Big holes in the SDG draft. CROP Poverty Brief (August). Langford, M. (2008). The justiciability of social rights: from practice to theory. In M. Langford (ed.), Social Rights Jurisprudence: Emerging Trends in International and Comparative Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lister, R. (2004). Poverty. Cambridge: Polity. Lockwood, D. (1996). Civic integration and class formation. British Journal of Sociology, 47(3), pp. 531–550. Marks, S. (2004). The human right to development: between rhetoric and reality. Harvard Human Rights Journal, 17, pp. 137–168. Marshall, T.H. (1950/1992). Citizenship and social class. In T. Marshall and T. Bottomore (eds), Citizenship and Social Class. London: Pluto. Marshall, T.H. (1981). The Right to Welfare and Other Essays. London: Heinemann. M’Baye, K. (1972). Le Droit au Développement comme un droit de l’Homme. Revue des Droits de l’Homme, 5, pp. 503–505. Midgley, J. (2017). Social Welfare for a Global Era. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Mishra, R. (1999). Globalisation and the Welfare State. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Offe, C. (1984). Contradictions of the Welfare State. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) (2006). Principles and Guidelines for a Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies. Geneva: OHCHR. Pogge, T. (2002). World Poverty and Human Rights. Cambridge: Polity. Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. New York: Rinehart. Porter, D., and Craig, D. (2004). The Third Way and the Third World: poverty reduction and social inclusion in the rise of ‘inclusive’ liberalism. Review of International Political Economy, 11(2), pp. 387–423. Prendergast, R. (2005). The concept of freedom and its relation to economic development – a critical appreciation of the work of Amartya Sen. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 29, pp. 1145–1170. Roosevelt, F.D. (1944/1950). State of the Union address to Congress 11 January. In S. Rosenman (ed.), The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Vol. XIII). New York: Harper. Rosas, A. (2001). The right to development. In A. Eide, C. Krause and A. Rosas (eds), Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: A Textbook (2nd edn). Dordrecht: Nijhoff. Salomon, M. (2010). International human rights obligations in context: structural obstacles and the demands of global justice. In B. Andreassen and S. Marks (eds), Development as a Human Right: Legal, Political and Economic Dimensions. Antwerp: Intersentia.

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146 Handbook of social policy and development Scheingold, S. (1974/2004). The Politics of Rights. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sengupta, A. (2010). The human right to development. In B. Andreassen and S. Marks (eds), Development as a Human Right: Legal, Political and Economic Dimensions (2nd edn). Antwerp: Intersentia. Standing, G. (2009). Work after Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Surender, R., and Walker, R. (eds) (2013). Social Policy in a Developing World. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Titmuss, R. (1970). The Gift Relationship. London: Allen & Unwin. Townsend, P. (2002). Poverty, social exclusion and social polarisation: the need to construct an international welfare state. In P. Townsend and D. Gordon (eds), World Poverty: New Policies to Defeat an Old Enemy. Bristol: Policy Press. Townsend, P. (ed.) (2009). Building Decent Societies: Rethinking the Role of Social Security in Development. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan/ILO. Townsend, P., and Donkor, K. (1996). Global Restructuring and Social Policy: An Alternative Strategy – Establishing an International Welfare State. Bristol: Policy Press. Turner, B. (1986). Citizenship and Capitalism: The Debate over Reformism. London: Allen & Unwin. Turner, B. (1993). Outline of a theory of human rights. Sociology, 27(3), pp. 489–512. Turner, B. (2006). Vulnerability and Human Rights. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. United Nations (UN) (1995). The Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action: World Summit for Social Development. New York: United Nations. United Nations Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ECOSOC) (2001). Poverty and the International Covenant on Econonomic, Social and Cultural Rights – Statement adopted by the Committee 10 May. Geneva: United Nations. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2000). Human Development Report 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. United Nations General Assembly (2012). Human Rights and Extreme Poverty (Resolution adopted 20 December on Report of the Third Committee). New York: United Nations. Uvin, P. (2004). Human Rights and Development. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Wolf-Phillips, L. (1987). Why ‘Third World’? Origin, definition and usage. Third World Quarterly, 9(4), pp. 1311–1327. Woodiwiss, A. (2005). Human Rights. London: Routledge. World Bank (1991). Assistance Strategies to Reduce Poverty. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (2001). World Development Report 2000/2001. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World Bank/International Monetary Fund (2016). Global Monitoring Report 2015/16: Development Goals in an Era of Demographic Change. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yeates, N. (ed.) (2008). Understanding Global Social Policy. Bristol: Policy Press.

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8. Social policy and urban development Jo Beall

This chapter discusses the challenges of urban development, paying particular attention to the issues of urban poverty and inequality, and the dilemmas of addressing these conditions in the context of fast-growing cities in developing countries. It first introduces the urban context, tracing the growth of urban poverty and describing its characteristics. It lays out the challenges posed by rapid urbanization and the urbanization of poverty in the context of international development policy, which for many decades has been focused predominantly on agriculture and integrated rural development, or industrialization strategies. Cities as spatial entities home to populations with particular attributes and needs were largely absent from development policy. However, there has been gradual acknowledgement that globally, and for the first time in human history, more people live in towns and cities than in the countryside, heralding what has become known as the first urban century. Urban poverty has also been impossible to ignore and this has implications for social policy and urban development. Against a background that traces processes of urbanization and urban growth in countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the challenges posed by the concomitant growth of urban poverty are explored, including in the absence of economic growth and large-scale unemployment. The implications are explored through those areas of social policy that are historically most commonly associated with urban development: access to shelter and basic services and to livelihood opportunities. This is followed by an analysis of the policy dilemmas facing city governments in developing and middle income countries, and the challenges of implementing urban social policy given the location of cities between local communities on the one hand and national governments on the other. Neither can the role of international agencies and policy trends be discounted, given their profound global influence. The chapter concludes by examining key trends in urban policy and planning that have emerged over recent decades, and the challenges to be overcome if lessons are to be learnt from them. 147

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GROWING URBAN POVERTY Until relatively recently, poverty in developing countries was seen as a mainly rural phenomenon, and the world’s poor are still predominantly rural dwellers. In efforts to get policy makers to recognize and respond to urban poverty, much was made of its very particular characteristics. These broadly fall into one or both of two groupings. First, poor urban dwellers live in a largely monetized economy. They are generally unable to rely on subsistence agricultural production and they pay more for their goods and services. As such, they are more vulnerable to changes in market conditions, price increases and any decline in real wages. The operation of the urban land market is a particular feature of urban areas, where the poor face insecurity of tenure and can be squeezed off land when it rises in value, and forced into peripheral or marginal locations. A second factor distinguishing the day-to-day life of poor urban dwellers from their rural counterparts is their relationship with the built environment. Poor living conditions, such as appalling overcrowding, contaminated water, poor or absent sanitation, lack of services and the constant threat of floods, landslides or industrial pollution, all mean that the urban poor are exposed to severe environmental health risks. It was factors such as these that compelled urban scholars and policy makers to argue for social policy and planning solutions targeted specifically at the urban poor. By the early twenty-first century it became increasingly clear that the ranks of the urban poor were growing apace, and recent research suggests that urban poverty is growing fast. At the World Bank, drawing on household surveys and other sources, a data set was created that aimed to shed new light on whether, and to what extent, poverty was becoming an urban phenomenon, and on the role played by urbanization in reducing poverty overall. Covering about 90 countries and representing more than 90 per cent of the population in the developing world, findings showed that 75 per cent of the developing world’s poor still live in rural areas, albeit with some marked regional differences. However, they also showed that the proportion of poor people living in urban areas was on the rise and rising more rapidly than for the population as a whole (Ravallion et al. 2007). This landmark research concluded that because of the association between urbanization and economic growth, the proportion of the overall global population in poverty has fallen considerably since 1990, but declines in poverty have been more rapid in rural areas (Ravallion et al. 2007). Ravallion (2016) links rising urban poverty to more rural migrants

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coming into the cities and increasing the ranks of the urban poor. It is also due to the positive impact of urbanization on the living standards of those remaining in rural areas, for example through higher remittances from friends and family in the cities, and the result of fewer people competing for available rural resources and employment opportunities. These findings hold enormous significance and have given weight to those wishing to prioritize urban social policy and planning in developing countries.

URBANIZATION AND URBAN GROWTH Many developing countries and emerging markets have experienced an unprecedented growth in their urban populations (see Figure 8.1). Although fertility rates are generally lower in urban centres compared with rural areas, natural increase is the single most important factor in urban growth, being an increase in the absolute numbers of people living in urban areas. Nevertheless, rural-to-urban migration remains significant, particularly in small and medium-sized towns and in peri-urban areas. Moreover, because rural–urban migrants are overwhelmingly

Source:

United Nations (2014).

Figure 8.1 Global trends in the rural and urban population, 1950–2050

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youthful, migration also contributes to natural increase in cities. While ‘urban growth’ refers to a growth in absolute numbers of people living in towns and cities, ‘urbanization’ refers to the proportion of a national population living in urban centres. Urbanization can result from rural– urban migration but usually occurs when rural settlements grow to a certain size and are reclassified as urban, or when the boundaries of cities or metropolitan areas are extended to incorporate areas that were previously classified as rural. The urbanization process not only refers to changes in the size or distribution of a national population, but also relates to accompanying economic, social and political changes (Fox and Goodfellow 2016). There are important regional differences in global patterns of urbanization (see Figure 8.2). During the nineteenth century the share of Europe’s population living in urban settlements began to rise, followed by countries in Latin America, which gained independence and started industrializing much earlier than Africa and Asia. By the beginning of the twentieth century the United Kingdom had an urban population that exceeded the number of its rural inhabitants, although over the course of that century this became a feature of all industrialized countries. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that the majority of countries in Africa and Asia began to urbanize, but when they did it was at an unprecedented pace, particularly in East Asia. So, for example, although proportionally two-thirds or more of the population remains rural in China and Indonesia, in absolute terms the number of urban dwellers in these populous countries is huge. While Africa presently remains the least urbanized continent, it is urbanizing at the fastest rate. Just three countries – China, India and Nigeria – are together expected to account for just over a third of the growth in the world’s urban population between 2018 and 2050, with China projected to add 255 million urban dwellers, India 416 million and Nigeria 189 million (United Nations 2018). These demographic trends have seen the ascendancy of megacities, which are simply very large cities by virtue of their population size. Cities are defined by the United Nations as having more than 100 000 inhabitants, and urban centres are settlements of more than 20 000 people. Large cities have populations of more than 5 million, and megacities more than 10 million. Tokyo is the world’s largest megacity with 37 million inhabitants, followed by Delhi with 29 million, Shanghai with 26 million and Mexico City and São Paulo, each with around 22 million inhabitants. Today Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka and Mumbai are all home to close to 20 million people each (United Nations 2018). What is noticeable is that these megacities are all in developing or middle income

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Note:

LAC = Latin America and the Caribbean.

Source:

United Nations (2014).

Figure 8.2 Urban population growth by major world region, 1950–2050 countries. In 1950, New York was the world’s largest city, followed by Tokyo, London, Osaka and Paris; much has changed since then. Today China alone has 15 megacities while India has six, South America five and Africa, Europe and North America with three each. Despite the growth of large and megacities, it is important to resist alarmist projections portending urban population explosions in cities of unmanageable size. Urban growth is often assumed when in fact the size of an urban centre has simply increased as a result of boundary changes, and often rates of urbanization are not unprecedented but simply are growing off a low base (Satterthwaite 2010). For example, close to half of the world’s urban population resides in settlements with fewer than 500 000 inhabitants, and the fastest growing urban centres are small and medium cities with less than 1 million inhabitants. In Africa they account for 65 per cent of the urban population, and globally they encompass 59 per cent of the world’s urban population. Despite this, policy attention has been disproportionately focused on megacities (UN-Habitat 2016, p. 9). Moreover, some large cities have experienced population decline in recent years. Most are in the low fertility countries of Asia and Europe

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where overall population sizes are stagnating or declining; but more broadly, in some cities population losses occur due to economic contraction and natural disasters (United Nations 2018). The dominant driver of urbanization in most countries is generally thought to be economic change. This is shown by the high concentration of urban populations in the largest cities of the world’s largest economies, as well as the strong association between a country’s per capita income and its level of urbanization. The general view has been that, globally, those nations with the most rapid economic growth are usually those that have urbanized most, and those with the poorest economic performance have urbanized least (Satterthwaite 2010). While there is no doubt that economic expansion stimulates urbanization, a strictly economic explanation fails to account for the phenomenon of late onset urbanization that has occurred in some less developed regions despite economic stagnation. What has been dubbed ‘urbanization without growth’ has been observed principally in sub-Saharan Africa from the last two decades of the twentieth century (Fay and Opal 2000). This has been explained as a historical process driven not only by the economy but also by technological change – such as surplus food production to feed non-agricultural workers, advances in medicine and transport networks – as well as institutional change such as the development of regulated land markets and health care systems (Fox 2014). Recent decades have undoubtedly brought great changes to the nature of human settlements, whether villages, or large or small towns and cities. And the economy has played an important role in these changes. The fact that the international economy is becoming ever more integrated has served to reorder the relative importance of urban centres around the world, and has led to economic, social and political upheavals within them. Some cities have become known as ‘world’ or ‘global’ cities by virtue of the functions they perform in the new global economy; functions that drive the global economy such as providing financial or transport and communications infrastructure and services. Most are in the advanced industrialized countries, but Rio de Janeiro is considered to be a world city and Cairo and Johannesburg are thought to be on their way. Because they are highly visible and economically influential, much attention is paid to world cities and megacities. Nevertheless, from the perspective of urban social policy and planning it is important to recognize that they do not represent the majority of the urban population. Moreover, the experience of poverty can differ hugely between those people subsisting as peri-urban agriculturalists on the periphery of towns and small cities, as compared to those battling the challenges of

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overcrowding and resultant ill health in the slums and informal settlements of large metropolitan agglomerations.

RECOGNIZING AND RESPONDING TO URBAN POVERTY According to modernization theory, urban poverty should have been a temporary phenomenon, but the experience has been very different. Contemporary cities still exhibit extremes of wealth and poverty, with burgeoning informal settlements and slums and vast numbers of people earning their livelihoods in the informal economy. Despite this, until very recently Michael Lipton’s (1977) influential urban bias thesis continued to hold sway. He argued that while most poverty was found in rural areas, the demands of urban economic elites prevailed. His thesis was reinforced in the 1980s when Robert Bates (1981, 1988) extended Lipton’s analysis in his study of agricultural systems in sub-Saharan Africa. That the political power of city elites eclipsed the voice of smallholding agriculturalists is a view that continues to influence many development scholars and policy makers. Nevertheless, Jones and Corbridge (2010) make the point that there is little evidence of coherent rural and urban classes, unconnected and with uniform and diametrically opposed interests. In reality, there is not a hard binary between the urban and rural. Instead, human settlements exist on a nuanced continuum, with clear and positive interlinkages between rural and urban economies. This view was given weight by the World Bank’s 2009 World Development Report, which made extensive use of a new agglomeration index (Uchida and Nelson 2010) and the World Bank (2013) Global Monitoring Report on rural–urban dynamics and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Nor is there much evidence of a systematic bias in public expenditure, particularly since the late twentieth century (Jones and Corbridge 2010). That said, there is evidence of the differential impact of national-level policies on rural and urban populations. A classic example was the structural adjustment policies that characterized the 1980s and 1990s. These had a marked bias towards rural investment, and together with the introduction of privatization and accompanying service and user fees, led towards cost of living increases in urban centres with a disproportionate impact on the urban poor (Moser 1996). Another illustration of rural bias can be found in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers that in the early years of the twenty-first century had to be produced by or on behalf of countries seeking development

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assistance in order to confirm their eligibility. A systematic review of these reports demonstrated that nearly all had a strong emphasis on rural poverty alleviation and demonstrated a generally poor understanding of urban poverty (Mitlin 2004). Further evidence of diminished international support for urban development can be seen in World Bank shelter lending trends for sub-Saharan Africa between 1972 and 2005 (see Table 8.1). Despite historically unprecedented rates of urban population expansion in the region during this period, shelter lending was cut significantly. In sum, the significant anti-urban turn in development discourse and policy beginning in the 1970s ran through until the end of the twentieth century. Table 8.1 Trends in World Bank shelter lending in sub-Saharan Africa, 1972–2005

Total shelter lending Equivalent per capital Source:

1972–1981

1982–1991

1992–2005

$498 million $5.20

$409 million $2.74

$81 million $0.32

Fox (2014).

One reason for greater recognition of urban poverty relates to improvements in our measurement and understanding of poverty internationally. Over time, how poverty has been conceptualized and measured has evolved. Early conceptions were based on the notion of absolute or subsistence poverty, while later approaches are based on the notion of relative poverty or deprivation. The former dates back to the nineteenth century, referring to a lack of the basic means to survive. Today it is manifest in poverty lines, an income measure enough to purchase sufficient calories to survive, or a basket of essential goods pertinent to a particular context. These sorts of indices can mask differences in the way poverty is experienced in rural and urban contexts. For example, rural dwellers might be dependent on access to fertile land for basic survival, while urban labourers would be more dependent on waged employment. As a result, comparing rural and urban poverty headcount measures may underestimate the extent of urban poverty (Mitlin and Satterthwaite 2013). The notion of ‘relative poverty’ applies when a person’s income falls below that of others in a particular country or context. Originally associated with the analysis of poverty in the United Kingdom (Townsend 1979), it has been most clearly articulated in the context of international development by Amartya Sen, who defined poverty as ‘capability deprivation’. Capability is a relative concept that refers to a

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person having the kind of life they have reason to value, and ‘the ability to appear in public without shame’ (Sen 1999, p. 87). This approach goes beyond simple income measures to include the role of social and political factors as important in determining the experience of poverty. Over time a number of efforts have been made to develop more holistic quantifiable measurements of poverty, going beyond simple income metrics to include indicators of education, health and standard of living. Moreover, the influence of the capability deprivation approach prevailed, with greater attention being paid to social and political factors. This broader approach can be identified in the World Development Report 2000: Poverty is pronounced as deprivation in well-being. But what precisely is deprivation? The voices of poor people bear eloquent testimony to its meaning. To be poor is to be hungry, to lack shelter and clothing, to be sick and not cared for, to be illiterate and not schooled. But for poor people, living in poverty is much more than this. Poor people are particularly vulnerable to adverse events outside their control. They are often treated badly by the institutions of state and society and excluded from voice and power in those institutions. (World Bank 2000, p. 15)

What has become clear through successive approaches to poverty reduction is a growing recognition of context, and this in turn has informed understanding of how to tackle poverty in urban centres. Both the United Nations and the World Bank approaches influenced the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were developed by a small group of specialist scholars and policy makers to address extreme poverty globally. They were subsequently adopted in 2000 by 189 countries, with tangible targets to be achieved by the end of 2015. The number of people living in extreme poverty did halve between 1992 and 2010, but much of the progress was attributable to China and East Asia and several major regions did not meet this target (Fehling et al. 2013). The only specific mention of urban challenges was Goal 7: to improve the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. Ironically, this goal was met, but over the same period, the size of populations living in slums increased substantially. Overall, the MDGs were seen as not up to the realities of addressing urban poverty (Mitlin and Satterthwaite 2013). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) replaced the MDGs in September 2015. They were decided upon through a far more extensive and inclusive process of global consultation, and the aim is to achieve the goals by 2030 through a greater focus on the causes of poverty. They do not simply focus on developing countries but emphasize universal responsibility for a sustained global future. Unlike the MDGs, the SDGs

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included among their ‘Seventeen goals to transform our world’ a specific goal on ‘Sustainable cities and communities’. Goal 11 is to ‘make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’, and it gave long-overdue policy recognition to the need to address the pressures of urbanization and urban poverty. The rationale for Goal 11 is that cities enable people to advance socially and economically, but rapid urbanization has brought enormous challenges. These include increased congestion and pollution and uncontained urban sprawl, growing numbers of slum dwellers, a shortage of adequate housing, inadequate basic services and poor or non-existent infrastructure, all of which make cities more vulnerable to disasters. Better land and housing policies, urban planning and management are needed so that cities can continue to develop while at the same time making the world’s urban spaces more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Progress to date is that 149 countries are now developing national-level urban policies (United Nations 2015). One of the challenges will be to measure progress on the SDGs, and particularly Goal 11. In the past it has been difficult to accurately assess the scale and scope of urban poverty due to both a paucity of basic, comparable data and difficulties in capturing the contextual complexity of urban vulnerability (Mitlin and Satterthwaite 2013). Nevertheless the data have improved greatly over the last 20 years. In addition to improved national statistics there are well-designed and executed household surveys in many countries that help to elucidate understanding of conditions in urban areas. While there are obvious gradations between villages and small towns, towns and small cities, medium-sized cities and megacities, the trend seems to be that ‘poverty is becoming more urban in more urbanized countries’ (World Bank 2013, p. 87). Particularly important for understanding and monitoring urban poverty is the technological revolution in data, complex modelling and innovations in geospatial science, which allow for ‘the integration of spatial and statistical analysis and the nesting of local, national and global indicators’ (Parnell 2015). Such interdisciplinary approaches, which marry insights possible from geographical information systems (GIS) with big data and other forms of spatial analysis, offer new opportunities not only for understanding and planning smart cities but also for identifying and addressing issues of urban poverty and inequality (Singleton et al. 2018). Such data can also help to highlight differences across varying urban centre sizes and types. One such example is the ‘night lights approach’ (satellite imagery from outer space). The use of night lights as a proxy for economic activity assumes that as most consumption and investment activities at night

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require lighting, the intensity of night lights (or its growth over time) can be used as a proxy for the intensity of economic activity or economic growth (Henderson et al. 2012). Although controversial, the potential offered by night lights imagery for understanding poverty and inequality in cities could be compelling. For example, it starkly illustrates differential access to services such as electricity, and accompanying social and economic opportunities. It also holds the potential to provide a more accurate estimation of informal economic activity than is usually captured statistically (Parnell 2016). Urban centres are divided by differential access to income as well as to public services, education, technology and employment. More than two-thirds of the world’s population live in urban centres that are more unequal today than they were 20 years ago (UN-Habitat 2016, p. 74). There are inequalities between cities and within them, and these are very often associated with national and global trends. This reminds us that not all good things go together. Economic growth can lift people out of poverty at a national level at the same time as exacerbating inequality within urban centres. The case of India is particularly illustrative. Until the early 1990s, economic growth in India tended to come with lower poverty measures. Given the modest rate of growth over this period, India was also successful in avoiding rising inequality prior to the 1990s. This period was followed by major policy regime changes in India, which came in the aftermath of the macroeconomic crisis of 1991. This included trade liberalization, reduction in tariff and non-tariff barriers to imports, a flexible exchange rate, and easing of restrictions on the domestic and foreign private sectors. Reforms gave rise to growth and there was great hope that higher growth rates in the wake of economic reforms would bring a faster pace of poverty reduction. And indeed, from the 1990s in India growth emerged as the primary driver of poverty reduction. However, while this has brought benefits to India’s poor at large, the post-reform period has exhibited signs of rising inequality, particularly in urban areas, raising doubts about how much the poor have shared in the gains from higher growth rates (Datt et al. 2016).

URBAN LIVELIHOODS AND INFORMALITY A powerful obstacle to urban poverty reduction and sustainable urban development is the inability to provide employment for growing urban populations. This constitutes one of the most intractable problems facing national and local governments. A comparative study of nine cities across

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Africa, Asia and Latin America found ‘jobs and income earning opportunities to be the most fundamental preoccupations of the urban poor’ (Beall 2001, p. 54). In the 1950s and 1960s, urban employment had been expected to grow with industrialization. But by the 1970s it became clear that urban labour markets were failing to keep pace with urban growth, and the discourse of international development shifted towards meeting basic needs such as through income-generating projects and recognizing and supporting the informal economy. Today most urban jobs are concentrated in the public, manufacturing and service sectors, with the service sector increasing in relative importance as public sector jobs decline and manufacturing employment becomes more insecure. For the majority of people who cannot find work in the formal waged sector, their only choice is to seek their livelihoods in the informal economy. Most informal workers are working in economic activities that are legal but often falling under earnings tax thresholds (Guha-Khasnobis et al. 2006). Yet the informal sector is also equated with the shadow economy, black economy or parallel economy as well (Fox and Goodfellow 2016). The conventional view of the informal economy is that it is relatively easy to enter, operates on a smaller scale than the formal economy, and often with indigenous resources and adapted technology. The work done within it is said to be labour intensive, using skills acquired outside formal education and training systems, and involving minimal capital investment and maximum use of family labour. Much of this is true, but simple categorizations are always problematic. For example, research has shown that sometimes entry into the informal economy can be difficult as there is gatekeeping by those who already have access to customers, skills, sites or markets. Sometimes informal operations are large scale, capital intensive and use imported technology. While many of the poorest urban dwellers are workers in the informal economy, many informal traders and producers themselves can make a reasonable and even a handsome living. What is invariably the case is that the informal economy is unregulated, and characterized by intense competition. Some scholars see the relationship between the formal and informal economies as largely exploitative and likely to perpetuate poverty. Even efforts to support informal businesses are often seen to benefit investors rather than operatives (Meagher 2017). Others, dating back to Hernando de Soto’s (1989) The Other Path, stress the entrepreneurialism of those in the informal economy, seeking to make a living despite the ubiquitous constraints of state interference in private markets. This view is prevalent among many who see cities as a potent force for addressing prosperity,

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driving innovation, consumption and investment, and offering opportunities for both formal and informal employment (UN-Habitat 2016, p. 29). What is clear is that informality deprives governments of a strong fiscal base. The latter is necessary if they are to respond effectively to infrastructure and service deficits. Equally clear, however, is that there are vast numbers of people working under informal conditions, with no security or basic protections (Williams and Lansky 2013). Informal employment is mostly, if not totally, to be found in urban areas, and comprises more than half of all non-agricultural employment in developing countries today (Vanek et al. 2014). A high proportion of workers in the informal economy also tend to be women (see Figure 8.3). They often combine paid activities with reproductive responsibilities such as making cooked food for sale while feeding their families, or looking after the children of others along with their own. The global research and policy-action network for Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) has provided a nuanced definition of informal work by identifying six categories of informal employment: informal employers, informal employees, own account operators, casual wage workers, industrial outworkers/ subcontracted workers, and unpaid but contributing family workers (Chen 2012, p. 9). These descriptors are drawn from WIEGO’s fine-grained Poverty Average Risk Earnings

Segmentaon by Sex

Predominantly Men Employers Informal wage workers: ‘Regular’

Men and Women Own-account operators Informal wage workers: Casual

Predominantly Women

Industrial outworkers/homeworkers Unpaid family workers

High

Source:

Low

Chen (2012).

Figure 8.3 Segmentation by sex within the informal economy

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analysis of engagement with the highly gendered informal economy. Informality is also global in nature, whereby informality is part of globally connected production processes in which private sector profits are made, often with the tacit support of developing-country and emerging-economy governments keen to be competitive in international markets (Meagher et al. 2016). This is recognized by international agencies and private sector companies. If they focused only on developed economies and the megacities of emerging economies today, they would gain exposure to 70 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product. By 2025, however, this combination will generate only one-third of global growth (United Nations 2014). According to the directors of the McKinsey Global Institute, if companies do not wake up to the fact that 3 billion people around the world will become members of the consuming class between 1990 and 2025, and the vast majority of them will reside in cities the names of which do not currently ‘roll off the tips of our tongues’, they will become uncompetitive (Dobbs et al. 2015, pp. 15–25). While this vision of the near future holds bright prospects for international and national investors, it is less clear what the impact might be on local businesses, traders and workers in the formal economy.

HOUSING AND URBAN SERVICES Despite the economic opportunities associated with urbanization, most recognize the challenge of housing and servicing growing urban populations. It is this above all that underpins Goal 11 of the SDGs, but it is not an easy fix. According to recent estimates, 900 million people live in slum conditions today, representing 28 per cent of the urban population in developing countries (UN-Habitat 2016). Actual numbers have increased gradually, except in sub-Saharan Africa, which has seen a steep rise with 72 million new slum dwellers since 2000. This has occurred in tandem with the growth of the region’s urban population overall. As such, sub-Saharan Africa alone accounts for 56 per cent of the total increase in the number of slum dwellers in developing countries between 1990 and 2014. In the early 1950s and 1960s there was a general belief that the state could and should be responsible for the provision of housing and services, and governments attempted to deliver low cost conventional housing to growing urban populations. However, by the 1970s it became increasingly clear that this strategy was failing to provide anything like a sufficient number of units to meet housing needs; nor were these units

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affordable to the majority of the urban poor, particularly when land values rose. What the urban poor tended to do instead was to build their own homes in informal settlements or resort to multiple occupancy in ever more crowded slums. This led to parallel informal land and housing markets, unregulated by the formal system (Wakely 2018). Efforts to reduce costs of shelter were made during the 1960s and 1970s through the promotion of self-help housing. However, there were a number of cost and construction problems with self-help housing, and local politicians did not like such schemes, as they could not offer housing as an incentive or reward for political support. Reducing standards was another method used during the 1970s, for example by providing people with starter or core houses, perhaps a single room that they could later add on to when they could afford it. In practice this rarely happened, because even the core housing was more than many people could afford (Fox and Goodfellow 2016). The next phase of housing policy might be characterized as one of enabling shelter strategies. At first this involved the promotion of ‘sites and services’ schemes by governments and international donors such as the World Bank. Here serviced plots were provided on which people could build or have their own homes built when time and resources allowed. A major problem was land, which often turned out to be marginal or on the periphery of cities, far from jobs, amenities and all but the most basic services. Not surprisingly there was little take-up from poor people, although larger plots were often bought up (although not necessarily occupied) by middle and upper income people for investment purposes. The promotion of sites and services schemes gave way to ‘upgrading’ of informal settlements based on the premise that it was cheaper and easier to provide people with basic services where they were, rather than to move them against their will. This so-called ‘enabling approach’ to shelter provision has not fundamentally changed since the mid-1980s, although there are differences in operational emphasis, such as a focus on upgrading of services, the provision of accessible housing finance, and the involvement of builders from the informal economy in housing schemes promoting skills or small enterprise development, as well as providing options for the growth of rental markets (Gilbert 2008). Nevertheless, successive approaches have failed to keep pace with demand in many low and middle income cities and this has resulted in inflated land and housing costs, making shelter a very costly item for the urban poor. Even slums and informal settlements can be inordinately expensive, with fear of eviction being a constant feature, often at the hands of urban political and economic mafia or elites who undermine

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efforts to improve conditions, whether by government or the private sector. The scale of the slum phenomenon, therefore, is as great as ever and represents the permanent dwellings and neighbourhoods of millions of people. It is only in part the result of rapid demographic change, and is also a consequence of weak policy and urban governments (Fox 2014). The imperative for improving urban services is clear. Urban health risks reduce the health outcomes and productivity of urban dwellers and the loss of an adult breadwinner through ill health is a key factor plunging families into poverty. Inadequate urban services also constitute a social and environmental time bomb for many urban areas, particularly densely populated cities. The known health impacts of poor urban environmental conditions, and the recognition by urban elites that ‘germs do not carry passports’, means there is consensus over the need to provide urban services such as water, sanitation and drainage to poor households and settlements. There is less consensus as to how. The most common approach is the provision of urban basic services at a community level through area-based approaches. This usually includes basic infrastructure alongside health education, community participation and enterprise development components. Despite their undisputed value in many circumstances there are two main problems with area-based approaches (Beall and Todes 2004). First, they fail to deal adequately with the practical difficulties of linking area-based services to city-level services, for example pit latrines stand proud of city-wide sewerage systems. Second, area-based approaches fail to deal with the more fundamental issue of inequalities at a city-wide level. In many instances, piped water supply and sewerage connections only reach a minority of urban dwellers, invariably those concentrated in better-off and high income areas, and further investment is often channelled at those existing services by way of maintenance or extension costs rather than towards increasing connections to trunk infrastructure in poorer areas. It is the issue of devising city-wide and inclusive infrastructure and planning that, above all, inform the New Urban Agenda, discussed in the last section of this chapter.

URBAN SAFETY AND SECURITY Poor infrastructure and environmental threats from inadequate urban services are not the only dangers facing urban dwellers. They are also often subject to high levels of violence, defined as the use of physical force to cause injury, harm, deprivation or death (Fox and Beall 2012). Violence and insecurity constitute a further risk element within the urban

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environment and among individuals and communities. Violence and insecurity can seriously undermine social cohesion, trust, economic productivity and state–society interactions. This is not to suggest that community, cooperation and co-production are missing in cities, nor that collective action and positive forms of conflict are absent. Indeed, cities are often associated with a vibrant associational life and social movements. Yet they can also be redolent with examples of social insecurity. In a comparative study of nine cities globally, it was found that urban gangs, shack-lords, drug lords and pimps intimidated whole neighbourhoods. In Johannesburg, for example, rival taxi operators dominated the streets, sometimes engaging in violent conflict for control of lucrative transport routes. High levels of crime and interpersonal violence in many neighbourhoods meant that people did not venture out of their homes at night. In Colombo, one informant said, ‘today there are three ways to progress in Sri Lanka. One is to sell drugs, another is to run an NGO [non-governmental organization], and another is to be in tow with the underworld’. In Santiago, Chile whole neighbourhoods were stigmatized by their reputation for being sites of crime, violence and drugs. Such conditions erode any sense of public safety and challenge community cohesion or opportunities for positive collective action (Beall 2001). Physical violence constitutes a broad category that embraces, at one end of the spectrum, interpersonal violence such as domestic abuse and isolated crimes, and at the other, urban terrorism and outright war. For many large cities organized crime and gang violence feature somewhere in the middle. So, categorizing urban violence can be difficult (Moser 2017). Moreover, tackling one form of violence, such as armed crime, over another such as domestic violence, often misses the interconnections between them (Moser and McIlwaine 2014). Today, human insecurity and vulnerability to violence are seen as being ‘a primary development challenge of our time’ (World Bank 2011, p. 1). And some see ‘fragile states’, often characterized by violent conflict, imploding into ‘fragile cities’ (Muggah 2014). There is often a relationship between national-level conflicts such as civil wars and the city, and these in turn articulate with international interventions in conflict management (Esser 2013). Efforts by national governments and international actors often overlook the deeper fissures and legacies of violence in their efforts at conflict management and reconstruction (Beall and Goodfellow 2014). For instance, some cities come out of conflict severely spatially divided by violence. Recent examples from the Global North and South range from Beirut to Belfast, Jerusalem to Johannesburg, Medellin to Mostar, and Nagasaki to Nicosia.

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All have been targets of international or national sovereign warfare, or have been caught in the eye of the storm of civil wars or conflicts, or have been arenas of civic conflict turned violent. All the above illustrations present a bleak picture, but one that also helps to explain why the shanty towns of Africa, Asia or Latin America often seem to exhibit apathy and indifference in the face of squalid conditions and ineffective municipal and metropolitan governance, rather than indignation and active citizenship. Nevertheless, alternative and much more positive examples of social organization do exist in towns and cities. One such is the Uniao dos Movimentos de Moradia (Alliance of Housing Movements) or UMM in São Paulo in Brazil, which is a large social movement. It campaigns for low cost housing, basing its approach on the tactics used by the rural landless movement whose members participate in land invasions. In conjunction with constructive campaigning for housing policy reform at municipal, state and federal level, when they were unable to achieve their aims through institutionalized mechanisms of deliberative democracy, they occupied abandoned buildings in the city centre. Hence sometimes illegality forms part of the playing out of ‘transgressive citizenship’, whereby it is used to create a political profile and draw attention to what are regarded as citizenship rights (Earle 2012). Drawing on extensive engagement with and evidence from grassroots organizations and federations immersed in issues of housing and urban services in South Africa and India, for example, Satterthwaite and Mitlin (2014) have created a compelling analytical narrative of their struggles and experiences, detailing the challenges they face as well as the very real achievements they have secured in terms of citizen-led poverty reduction. These movements and federations in Brazil, South Africa and India have all at times engaged in conflictual relations with the state at different levels. It is not conflict that is the problem, but violence, when it prevents or closes down vigorous urban policy contestation and generative conflict, which lies at the heart of robust state–society relations (Beall et al. 2013).

THE NEW GLOBAL URBAN AGENDA Up until quite recently international development responses to urban poverty have been community driven (for example, self-help housing initiatives) or area-based planning initiatives (such as low cost sanitation solutions). In both cases the role of city itself has been ignored or eclipsed. At the heart of the so-called New Urban Agenda is a call to

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rectify this. In the previous two urban conferences, Habitat I in Vancouver in 1976 and Habitat II in Istanbul in 1996, held by the United Nations agency UN-Habitat, the focus was on ‘development in cities’ or urban areas; whereas Habitat III shifted the emphasis to putting cities front and centre in urban development (Parnell 2016, p. 532). This has been the case in relation to urban poverty as well. In the context of debates associated with the SDGs and including an urban goal, scholars and policy makers called for a systematic analysis of how cities themselves interface with poverty (Lemanski and Marx 2015). What this means, in effect, is that we need to go beyond earlier responses that have emphasized individual and community experience over metropolitan interfaces, and to rethink policy approaches at the city and national levels. The focus on people-centred or bottom-up views over the last two decades are by no means wrong, but they need to be accompanied by a recognition of the physical, structural and institutional role of ‘the city’ in shaping the experiences of and the responses to poverty (Pieterse 2008). This means engaging with the materiality of cities, their planning regimes; indeed the local state: Regardless of whether one is born rich or poor, ‘the city’ is the material, operational and ideological scale that mediates contemporary humans’ identity, economy and investment. The territory, scale and governmentality we are speaking of here are not the plot or the street or even the neighbourhood, but that of ‘the city’. (Parnell 2015, p. 22)

The policy solution, in other words, is to focus on the material investments necessary for effective and inclusive urban management and service delivery that embraces the needs of the poor alongside those other urban citizens. Does the New Urban Agenda address this challenge, and is anything lost in the process? The SDGs opened up a dialogue on the need for a global policy focus on the urban context, from small towns to megacities. It was a dialogue that involved a wide range of actors at the local, national and international scales. The SDGs, and specifically Goal 11, put forward a single global urban policy position on inclusive and sustainable cities. As with any United Nations initiative, the SDGs are a national responsibility bolstered by international commitment. As such, the targets are owned by national governments. What has emerged as the New Urban Agenda, therefore, represents an ambitious approach that sees cities at the heart of development, going beyond either sector-based interventions or area-based

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targeting, towards a systemic, spatially based urban planning process that intersects seamlessly with national urban policies. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and success will depend on whether national governments accord cities and urban areas the appropriate governance status and cede to them sufficient investment and financial autonomy to succeed. The worst outcome would be responsibility without resources, leading to unfunded mandates, raised expectations and disappointment and disgruntlement that cities would then be charged with addressing. Urban centres are places of possibility for millions of resourceful people but they also have their dark side: sweatshops and festering waste dumps alongside skyscrapers and heaving markets. The world of artificial intelligence and driverless cars, the leitmotif of the new smart global cities, is light years away from the experience of many urban dwellers in the peri-urban neighbourhoods and informal settlements of cities of the Global South where many of the urban poor reside. The association of cities with economic growth and worlds of opportunity often obscures the persistence of urban poverty and growing inequality in many large cities across the world. This is a phenomenon often referred to as the ‘urban paradox’ (UN-Habitat 2016, p. 33), and one that highlights some of the anomalies of twentieth-century development policy. It is now incumbent on the architects and implementers of the SDGs and the New Urban Agenda to address this paradox, heralding in the new emphasis on the contribution of cities to development, without losing focus on the targeted interventions that ameliorate the conditions for many of their less fortunate inhabitants.

REFERENCES Bates, R. (1981), Toward a Political Economy of Development, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bates, R. (1988), Markets and States in Tropical Africa, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Beall, J. (2001), ‘Valuing social resources or capitalising on them? The limits to pro-poor urban governance in nine cities of the South’, International Planning Studies, 6(4): 357–375. Beall, J. and T. Goodfellow (2014), ‘Conflict and post-war transition in African cities’, in S. Parnell and E. Pieterse (eds), Africa’s Urban Revolution, London: Zed Books, pp. 18–34. Beall, J., T. Goodfellow and D. Rodgers (2013), ‘Cities and conflict in fragile states’, Urban Studies, 50(15): 3065–3083. Beall, J. and A. Todes (2004), ‘Gender and integrated area development projects: lessons from Cato Manor, Durban’, Cities, 21(4): 301–310.

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Social policy and urban development 167 Chen, M. (2012), ‘The informal economy: definitions, theories and policies’, Cambridge, MA: WIEGO Working Paper No. 1. Datt, G., M. Ravallion and R. Murgai (2016), ‘Growth, urbanization and poverty reduction in India’, Policy Research Working Paper No. WPS7568, Washington, DC: World Bank. De Soto, H. (1989), The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, London: I.B. Taurus. Dobbs, R., J. Manyika and J. Woetzel (2015), No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking all the Trends, New York: McKinsey & Company/PublicAffairs. Earle, L. (2012), ‘From insurgent to transgressive citizenship: housing, social movements and the politics of rights in Sao Paulo’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 44(1): 97–126. Esser, D. (2013), ‘The political economy of post-invasion Kabul, Afghanistan: urban restructuring beyond the North–South divide’, Urban Studies, 50(15): 3084–3098. Fay, M. and C. Opal (2000), ‘Urbanization without growth: a not-so-uncommon phenomenon’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 2412, Washington, DC: World Bank. Fehling, M., B.D. Nelson and S. Venkatapuram (2013), ‘Limitations of the Millennium Development Goals: a literature review’, Global Public Health, 8(10): 1109–1122. Fox, S. (2014), ‘The political economy of slums: theory and evidence from sub-Saharan Africa’, World Development, 54: 191–303. Fox, S. and J. Beall (2012), ‘Mitigating conflict and violence in African cities’, Environment and Planning, 30(6): 968–981. Fox, S. and T. Goodfellow (2016), Cities and Development, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Gilbert, A. (2008), ‘Slums, tenants and home-ownership: on blindness to the obvious’, International Development Planning Review, 30(2), https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/32892548_Slums_tenants_and_homeownership_on_blindness_to_the_obvious. Guha-Khasnobis, B., R. Kanbur and E. Ostrom (2006), ‘Beyond formality and informality’, in B. Guha-Khasnobis, R. Kanbur and E. Ostrom (eds), Linking the Formal and Informal Economy, Concepts and Policies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–20. Henderson, J.V., A. Storeygard and D.N. Weil (2012), ‘Measuring economic growth from outer space’, American Economic Review, 102(2): 994–1028. Jones, G. and S. Corbridge (2010), ‘The continuing debate about urban bias: the thesis, its critics, its influence and its implications for poverty-reduction strategies’, Progress in Development Studies, 10(1): 1–18. Lemanski, C. and C. Marx (2015), The City in Urban Poverty, Basingstoke, UK and New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan. Lipton, M. (1977), Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development, London: Maurice Temple Smith. Meagher, K. (2017), ‘Cannibalizing the informal economy: frugal innovation and economic inclusion in Africa’, European Journal of Development Research, 30(1): 17–33. Meagher, K., L. Manna and M. Bolt (2016), ‘Introduction: globalization, African workers and the terms of inclusion’, Journal of Development Studies, 52(4): 471–482. Mitlin, D. (2004), ‘Understanding urban poverty: what the poverty reduction strategy papers tell us’, Paper prepared for the Department for International Development, London: DFID. Mitlin, D. and D. Satterthwaite (2013), Urban Poverty in the Global South: Scale and Nature, London: Routledge. Moser, C. (2017), ‘Gender transformation in a new global urban agenda: challenges for Habitat III and beyond’, Environment and Urbanization, 28(1): 1–16. Moser, C.O. (1996), Confronting Crisis: A Comparative Study of Household Responses to Poverty and Vulnerability in Four Poor Urban Communities, Environmentally Sustainable Development Studies and Monograph Series No. 8, Washington, DC: World Bank.

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168 Handbook of social policy and development Moser, C.O. and K. McIlwaine (2014), ‘New frontiers in twenty-first century urban conflict and violence’, Environment and Urbanization, 26(2): 331–344. Muggah, R. (2014), ‘Deconstructing the fragile city: exploring insecurity, violence and resilience’, Environment and Urbanization, 26(2): 345–358. Parnell, S. (2015), ‘Poverty and “the city”’, in C. Lemanski and C. Marx (eds), The City in Urban Poverty, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 16–38. Parnell, S. (2016), ‘Defining a global urban development agenda’, World Development, 78: 529–540. Pieterse, E. (2008), City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ravallion, M. (2016), The Economics of Poverty: History, Measurement and Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ravallion, M., S. Chen and P. Sangraula (2007), ‘New evidence on the urbanization of global poverty’, Population and Development Review, 33(4): 667–701. Satterthwaite, D. (2010), ‘Urban myths and the mis-use of data that underpin them’, in J. Beall, B. Guha-Khasnobis and R. Kanbur (eds), Urbanization and Development, Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 83–99. Satterthwaite, D. and D. Mitlin (2014), Reducing Urban Poverty in the Global South, London: Routledge. Sen, A. (1999), Development as Freedom, New York: Anchor. Singleton, A., S.E. Spielman and D.C. Folch (2018), Urban Analytics, A 21st Century Introduction to Spatial Analytics, New York: SAGE. Townsend, P. (1979), Poverty in the United Kingdom, London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books. Uchida, H. and A. Nelson (2010), ‘Agglomeration index: towards a new measure of urban concentration’, in J. Beall, B. Guha-Khasnobis and R. Kanbur (eds), Urbanization and Development, Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 41–59. UN-Habitat (2016), The World Cities Report 2016, Urbanization and Development: Emerging Futures, Nairobi: UN-Habitat. United Nations (2014), World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, CD-ROM Edition, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. United Nations (2015), ‘Transforming our world, the 2030 agenda for sustainable development: Finalised text for adoption (1 August)’, accessed 3 August 2015 at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/7891TRANSFORMING%20 OUR%20WORLD.pdf. United Nations (2018), World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision, New York: Population Division of the UN Department of Social and Economic Affairs. Vanek, J., M. Sen, F. Carre, J. Heinz and R. Hussmanns (2014), ‘Statistics on the informal economic: Definitions, regional estimates and challenges’, Cambridge MA: WEIGO Working Paper No. 2. Wakely, P. (2018), Housing in Developing Cities: Experience and Lessons, New York, USA and London, UK: Routledge. Williams, C.C. and M.A. Lansky (2013), ‘Informal employment in developed and developing economies: perspectives and policy responses’, International Labour Review, 152(3/4): 355–380. World Bank (2000), World Development Report 2000, Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (2009), World Development Report 2009, Reshaping Economic Geography, Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (2011), World Development Report 2011, Conflict, Security and Development, Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (2013), Global Monitoring Report 2013: Rural–Urban Dynamics and the Millennium Development Goals, Washington, DC: World Bank.

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9. Rural development Amrita Datta

This chapter discusses ideas and concepts in rural development thinking embedded in the broader theories, paradigms and debates of development. It draws on the parallel, and occasionally overlapping literatures of social policy (SP) and development studies (DS). SP has roots in the Western welfare state literature, whereas DS broadly emerged as a post-colonial discipline with a focus on the Global South. These different starting points, in turn, inform and contribute to varied perspectives of rural development that are discussed in the course of this chapter. The chapter begins with a brief discussion on key concepts, and emphasises the multidisciplinarity and multidimensionality in the study and practice of rural development. Next, it interweaves theoretical and empirical perspectives to present broad themes that have emerged in the evolution of rural development thinking over time. The chapter then presents the case of a landmark rural development intervention – the Green Revolution – and discusses how its origins, impacts and critiques are framed in different literatures. The final section summarises key areas of convergence and divergence in SP and DS in rural development perspectives and practice.

SETTING THE CONTEXT: KEY CONCEPTS, THE ROLE OF AGRICULTURE AND MULTIDIMENSIONALITY OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT ‘Rural’, ‘Development’ and ‘Rural Development’ At the onset it may be useful to briefly engage with the concepts of ‘rural’, ‘development’ and ‘rural development’, all of which are distinct yet closely intertwined with one another, and allude to disparate meanings in academic and policy literatures. The ‘rural’ can be conceptualised in spatial, sectoral and relational terms; ‘development’ here refers to broader processes of social change and transformation; and ‘rural development’ is a relatively new label that had its origins in failures of 169

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development and social policy. Harriss (1982) formulates rural development as both a policy and a process; in the former, rural development is a form of state intervention, while in the context of the latter it refers to processes of change in rural societies with or without the involvement of governments. This distinction is particularly useful; early social policy literature tends to focus on the first theorisation, that of ‘rural development’ as state policy (Hall and Midgley 2004). On the other hand, research in development studies tends to focus more on the processes of rural development, agrarian change in rural societies, and devotes more analytical space to the role of non-state actors (Harriss 1982; Borras 2009). Historically, the ‘rural’ has been a core area of inquiry and scholarship in DS (Harriss 1982; Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2009), but it is not explicitly seen at the forefront of the SP literature (Kennett 2013; Midgley and Livermore 2009). This can be attributed to the origins of the discipline of SP in social work and social welfare administration that have traditionally had an urban focus (Herrick 2009). These roots also explain the primacy of government activity in SP discourses. However, the recent emphasis towards ‘decentring the state’, on account of globalisation (Kennett 2013, p. 3), brings the SP literature closer to the DS literature that has epistemologically leaned towards the study of non-state actors in development. In recent decades, the incorporation of social development and critical social policy perspectives in the SP literature has widened its scope to include global policy issues such as poverty, inequality, social justice, human rights, empowerment and environmental sustainability (Hoff and McNutt 2009; Iatridis 2009; Midgley and Sherraden 2009). This provides an entry point for a more comprehensive engagement with the rural in SP scholarship, as a majority of the aforementioned issues are concentrated in rural areas, where close to half of the world’s population lives. Given the wide range of global social policy problems concerning the rural in its ambit, this also implies that SP moves beyond its largely positivist framework and responds to the calls of its scholars to adopt ‘appropriate normative frameworks’ (Midgley 2013, p. 183). Empirically, there is no single definition of what is considered rural. It is mostly national governments that define ‘rural’ in the context of state programmes and policies. The rural in this framework may constitute one or more dimensions. A commonly used method to define ‘rural’ is the employment of a population limit: if the population of a place is within

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this limit, it is considered rural.1 A second dimension is to have a threshold for the share of agriculture in output and/or employment. Another approach may be relational or residual, that is, the rural is understood in relation to the urban. In many countries, it is the urban that is defined, and areas that are not covered in this definition are understood to be rural. Historically, the ‘rural’ has been embedded in development theory and its practice, and scholarship herein has focused on intersecting social, cultural, political and global themes. The term ‘rural development’, however, gained traction only in the 1970s. This renewed emphasis on rural policies and programmes was predominantly on account of the failure of state-led modernisation projects and industrialisation policies that did not materialise as envisaged in many developing countries in the Global South. Both SP and DS have engaged with this programmatic mode of rural development, albeit from somewhat different perspectives. This is discussed in detail in the next section, where the evolution and trajectory of the policy and practice of rural development is examined in the context of influential ideas in development thinking and social policy. The Role of Agriculture in Development In theories of economic development, structural transformation refers to a shift away from agriculture to industry in terms of output and labour. Historically, agricultural surplus – in terms of both labour and capital – contributed to industrial development, and played an important role in the processes of urbanisation and modernisation in the Western world. In theoretical models of economic development, high agricultural growth has been considered a prerequisite for industrialisation and rapid economic transformation. Consider the following text from Arthur Lewis’s influential work on the dual sector model in economic development that theorises the transfer of labour from the subsistence agricultural sector to the modern industrial sector: industrialization is dependent upon agricultural improvement; it is not profitable to produce a growing volume of manufactures unless agricultural production is growing simultaneously. This is also why industrial and agrarian 1 This population limit is arbitrary. For instance, in India, it is 5000 persons (with some additional qualifications), while in Mexico it is 2500 persons. In other words, caution needs to be exercised in cross-country comparisons of the rural (and urban) due to underlying differences in definitions used.

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172 Handbook of social policy and development revolutions always go together, and why economies in which agriculture is stagnant do not show industrial development. (Lewis 1954, p. 173)

A fundamentally different school of thought within agricultural economics – the small farm paradigm – holds a similar view of the role of agriculture in development as discussed above. Contrary to the dominant discourse of the superiority of large scale farming, this paradigm empirically supported the simple yet powerful idea that small farms too could be efficient (Schultz 1964). Its prominent advocate, Mellor, notes that ‘the faster agriculture grows, the faster its relative size declines’ (Mellor 1966). In other words, movement of output and labour away from agriculture to industry is critical for structural transformation. This apparently paradoxical situation – of an agricultural sector characterised by high growth and productivity, yet shrinking in size – is a stylised fact in agricultural development theory. This is supported, more or less, by the frameworks of SP and DS, as both conceptualise rural development to be a sectoral movement away from agriculture. Take for instance the case of the livelihoods approach discussed in a subsequent section. Notwithstanding SP’s state-oriented focus on the livelihoods approach, and DS’s critique of the same, both SP and DS postulate transitions away from agriculture as well as livelihood diversification as an integral part of rural development. Multiple Disciplines, Multiple Dimensions Ideas and concepts of rural development as both policy and practice draw from different academic disciplines – economics, sociology, political science – as well as the literatures of science and technology studies, development studies and social policy. These have shaped and been shaped by dominant thinking and paradigms of national and local governments, think tanks, social movements and international aid agencies. In agricultural economics, successful rural development is framed as output maximisation through an efficient use of resources. Sociological studies focus on social structures and process of rural change and often employ actor perspectives as an analytical tool. The insertion of political analysis expands the scope of rural development to incorporate perspectives of political actors, institutions and interest groups. In addition, there are specialists and generalists of rural development: agricultural scientists, health and education professionals, policy experts, bureaucrats, and so on. The SP approach relies heavily on the analysis of state actors, and focuses on rural development as a ‘policy’, à la Harriss (1982). The formulation, implementation and evaluation of government policies and

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programmes is the core of this approach. SP’s origins in social welfare and administration lend to its problem-solving approach and subsequently, on account of these historical origins, SP literature tends to have a technocratic paradigm. Thus, due to a somewhat singular focus on the institution of the state, as well as its problem-solving technocratic paradigm, the SP approach leans towards a positivist framework. Inherent in this approach is the assumption that the state can and will undertake rural development. This is often at odds with the DS literature that problematises the concept of rural development and emphasises rural development as a process. Apart from the state, the DS literature covers in its ambit institutions such as the market, family, class and gender. This wider canvas of DS and embedded intersectionality of multiple institutions makes DS perspectives more normative and value-laden. Political and institutional analyses are common to both SP and DS, albeit there is a qualitative difference in how these are done: the former tends to follow a technical and bureaucratic approach, whereas the latter puts more emphasis on non-state actors and social processes. That said, the vast scope of rural development and complex interplay of actors involved calls for it to be studied through the multidisciplinary and multidimensional lenses of both SP and DS, to better address its challenges and solve its diverse and demanding problems.

RURAL DEVELOPMENT: THEORIES AND PRACTICE This section traces the evolution of rural development in SP and DS literatures. It interweaves theoretical and empirical perspectives to present broad themes that emerge in the closely intertwined academic and policy discourses of RD. The idea here is not to provide an exhaustive list of each and every development in the field, but to selectively engage with a large and eclectic body of literature to elucidate key theoretical ideas and debates, how they may converge or diverge, and critically analyse and assess how these shape, and are in turn shaped by, the policies and practices of rural development. Modernisation, Dependency and World Systems Theories In the post-war years, modernisation theory emerged as a powerful narrative of understanding development. Lewis’s dual sector model envisioned development as the movement of surplus labour from subsistence agricultural sector to the modern industrial sector (Lewis 1954). Another prominent modernisation scholar, Walt Whitman Rostow, argued

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that there is a sequence of modernisation; a set of stages of growth from a traditional society characterised by the primary sector, taking off for industrialisation, a subsequent diversification of the industrial base, culminating finally in an age of mass consumption, dominated by an industrial and urban society (Rostow 1959). Dependency and world systems theories emerged in response to modernisation theories. In the context of the Global South, scholars of the dependency school criticised the linearity of modernisation theories and argued that the formulation of adequate development theory and policy is contingent upon the past economic and social history of underdevelopment itself (Frank 1966). Dependency and world systems theories located development, be it rural or urban, in the wider structures of the global capitalist economy, which are shaped by the ‘dependency’ between the ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, between the ‘metropolis’ and ‘satellites’ (Frank 1966; Wallerstein 1979). Both the modernisation and dependency schools have been criticised for their grand theorisations, thereby ignoring issues of context and agency. It has been argued that modernisation and dependency theories provide polar opposite prescriptions for rural development strategies: while the former suggest that the more integrated rural regions are into broader economic and social systems, the more they are likely to develop, the latter imply that the most appropriate strategy for rural areas is to break their relationship with broader economic and social systems and become more autonomous (Green 2013). The modernisation project’s early rural interventions – co-operative and community development programmes that were practiced in several developing countries – failed miserably. They were not designed to address social heterogeneity, and ignored local power structures (Korten 1980). While the DS discourses focused on wider systemic and structural issues, SP scholars emphasised the inability of Western, individualcentric social work frameworks to address the problems of poverty, hunger and illiteracy in the Global South, and viewed community development as an integral part of social services, particularly in the rural areas. At the same time, there was an acknowledgment of the uneasy coexistence of (bottom-up) community-based and (top-down) centralised planning approaches in the SP literature (Midgley 2013). In response to failures of grand, centralised top-down modernisation projects in the Global South, there emerged several other ideas and articulations of rural development. Some of these are discussed in this section.

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Small Farm Paradigm A fundamentally different theorisation of rural development is offered by agricultural economics in what is known as the small farm paradigm. During the development decades of the 1950s and 1960s when modernisation theories dominated development thinking, influential voices in agricultural economics argued that traditional small farms were efficient, and that technology played an important role in smallholder commercial agriculture (Schultz 1964; Johnston and Mellor 1961). This model of agricultural growth based on small farm efficiency questioned the then dominant paradigm that large farms could make more efficient use of resources and modern technologies than small farms. This discourse paved way for smallholder agriculture-led development strategies. The small farm paradigm continues to occupy a dominant space in both SP and DS thinking, as it accommodates both positive and normative approaches. It also appeals to policy makers as it simultaneously addresses both growth and equity goals (Ellis and Biggs 2001). Rural Poverty By the 1970s, it was evident that modernisation projects had bypassed large sections of society, and economic growth did not automatically reach the poor (Lipton 1977; Chenery 1979). In a global context where poverty was concentrated in the rural areas, the World Bank argued for the ‘need for special intervention to raise rural production and incomes … also to the provision of social and other services, such as health and education’ (World Bank 1975). This was also a time when the scope of social policy was rapidly expanding, with new projects in its realm. SP’s entry to rural development was through the vantage point of its engagement with global issues such as poverty, deprivation and environmental sustainability. Robert McNamara’s Nairobi speech at the World Bank in 1973 laid out a global strategy for rural development which included the adoption of an ambitious programme of wide-ranging measures, such as: acceleration in the rate of land and tenancy reform, better access to credit, assured availability of water, expanded extension facilities backed by intensified agricultural research, and greater access to public services, and most critical of all: new forms of rural institutions and organizations that will give as much attention to promoting the inherent potential and productivity of the poor as is generally given to protecting the power of the privileged. (McNamara 1973)

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The framing of rural development here as multidimensional and technocratic, encompassing agricultural inputs and public services, fits an SP perspective. On the other hand, the framing of rural development as the promotion of poor people’s interest in contrast to the power of privileged may be seen as an influence of DS. There also emerged a clear shift from agriculture towards rural development, with a particular focus on the rural poor. This manifested first as integrated rural development programmes – the hallmark of social policy in several countries – and later morphed into the livelihoods approach, as discussed below. The livelihoods approach gained traction in both DS and SP literatures as well as in policy narratives in the 1990s. The focus on poverty alleviation continued, amidst the empirical reality of the deterioration of agriculture in rural societies. A key concept in this approach was livelihood diversification. As defined by Ellis (1998, p. 1), livelihood diversification is ‘the process by which rural families construct a diverse portfolio of activities and social support capabilities in their struggle for survival and in order to improve their standards of living’. Intrinsic in this definition are both economic social institutions and public services, such as health and education – all important pillars of well-being and human development, of rural development. Conceptually, the livelihoods approach incorporated bottom-up, locally driven participatory approaches; a new way of doing rural development that enabled people and communities to share and analyse their knowledge, deliberate upon their priorities, and to plan and take action. All this was envisioned in collaboration with state and non-state actors that are involved in the policy and practice of rural development (Chambers 1983, 1994). ‘Participation’ became a buzzword in academic and policy circles; the new mantra for development. Participatory techniques and the tools of participatory rural appraisal pushed the frontiers of rural development policy and action by legitimising and giving space to the voices of the poor in planning and development processes. There were several criticisms of the practice of participatory approaches to development. One key area of concern was the unbridled power of facilitators, and the paternalist mode that could easily set in. In the field, there were instances of participatory processes becoming ritualistic, manipulative, and even harming people who were supposed to be empowered (Cooke and Kothari 2001). Incorporation of larger debates on environment and development, and their intersections with poverty reduction agendas, led to the expansion of the livelihoods approach to the sustainable livelihood framework. As explained by Chambers and Conway (1991, p. 6):

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Rural development 177 A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (stores, resources, claims and access) and activities required for a means of living; a livelihood is sustainable which can cope with and recover from stress and shocks, maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets, and provide sustainable livelihood opportunities for the next generation; and which contributes net benefits to other livelihoods at the local and global levels and in the short and long-term.

The key contours of this practice-oriented framework are that it be people-centred, responsive and participatory. While poor people themselves must be key actors in identifying and addressing livelihoods, outsiders need processes that enable them to listen to the poor. At the same time, it is expected to be multi-level, encompassing both microeconomic realities and macroeconomic institutions and processes; conducted in partnership with both the public and private sector; be economic, social, institutionally and environmentally sustainable; and external support must be accommodating of the dynamic nature of livelihood strategies, as well as promise long-term commitment (Ashley and Carney 1999). This is indeed a tall order; the sustainable livelihoods approach is a difficult balancing act, as its definition encompasses a range of different criteria which may conflict with one another (Scoones 1998; Carney 2003). Given that people’s well-being is at the heart of the livelihoods approach, it speaks to the new literature in SP that incorporates social development perspectives in its realm (Midgley and Sherraden 2009). However, issues and debates of power and politics have remained on the margins of the livelihoods approach. That it focuses on a fairly instrumental poverty reduction agenda, framed by economics, is one of its key criticisms in the DS literature (Scoones 2009). Theorisations from Below: Bringing Poor People to the Centre of Development Discourses A strand of theorisation in response to earlier grand theorisations and structural approaches emerged in actor-oriented approaches in development sociology. These focused on how ‘ordinary people’ rather than simply abstract ‘social forces’ actively shape the outcomes of development. Special attention was given to questions of lived experience, agency, issues of knowledge and power, and to the need for developing ‘theory from below’ (Long 1984, 2001). Conceptually, this theorisation has some synergies with participatory approaches in development: both bring poor people’s own experiences to the forefront of rural development policy. However, this epistemological shift is critiqued by scholars

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who argue that ‘changing epistemologies, by themselves, are no guarantee of more meaningful participation so that concerted institutional change is also needed’ (Mohan 2007, p. 779). The aforementioned theorisation also manifested in an influential cross-country World Bank publication, titled Voices of the Poor. Based on participatory methods, this qualitative, field-based research presented poor people’s experiences of the stresses of poverty, and emphasised the multidimensionality of poverty, as well as the limits of both state and non-governmental organisation-led initiatives to address poverty. Combining the positivist framework of SP and the value-based, normative DS approach, this work expanded the frontiers of policy research, and reported an unravelling of the social fabric – the only insurance – in poor people’s lives (Narayan et al. 2000). From State-Led to Market-Led Development The unravelling discussed above can also be sensed in the readings of the literature that covered structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s in several countries in Latin America and Africa. Both SP and DS were critical of Washington Consensus policies of debt management and macroeconomic adjustment of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The SP literature largely drew from the Western experiences such as that of Reaganism in the United States, and Thatcherism in the United Kingdom (Midgley 1997; Kennett 2001). The DS literature focused on the impact of neoliberal economic policies, particularly in the Global South, and called for ‘adjustment with a human face’ (Jolly 1991). This period witnessed a paradigm shift: the withdrawal of the state became symbolic of this lost development decade of the 1980s, and market-led development became the new mantra. The World Development Report, 2002, Building Institutions for Markets, was emblematic of this shift in development and social policy thinking. Income from market participation was seen as key to economic growth for nations, and to reducing poverty for individuals (World Bank 2002). The report’s narrative of markets as enablers of enhancing opportunities and empowerment of the poor, in turn, fits into the overall shift in social policy and development. Particularly for the agricultural sector, this period witnessed a decline public investments and an increased participation of private actors.

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Critical Development Studies One strand of literature in DS has questioned standard assumptions and the normative basis of the practice of rural development. This literature has particularly focused on power structures, and emphasised the differentiated nature of change in rural societies. An influential work is the edited volume by Harriss (1982), titled Theories of Peasant Economy and Agrarian Change, that problematises rural development; essays in the volume critically appraise rural development policies and practices. It is argued that interventions of the state – rural development in this case – profoundly affect agrarian societies, and not always in ways which conform with the stated objectives of those interventions (Harriss 1982). These ideas have continued to be part of the larger thinking in the realm of radical and critical development studies that focuses on historical and structural inequities, including those that have been exacerbated by neoliberal globalisation. This literature also covers resistance, backlash and violence in rural societies on account of state and market interventions, new social movements, and land struggles of the rural poor (Sachs 1992; Borras 2009).

GREEN REVOLUTION This section critically examines what may be considered the single most important intervention in the practice of rural development since its inception. Drawing on diverse literatures, it discusses economic, social, political and ecological dimensions of this primarily technological intervention that culminated in the Green Revolution, and traces its origins and impacts. Here, the positivist literature, with an SP focus, covers the technical and administrative aspects, while DS has been concerned with issues of equity and access. Over time, the divergence in the two fields seems to have narrowed, particularly in terms of the environmental and sustainability concerns of the Green Revolution. Origins In the 1960s, food production was a burning political and development issue in the developing world. Many post-colonial nation states had experienced hunger and famine first-hand in the not so distant past, and policy makers and planners grappled with how best to attain the intertwined goals of food security, peace and prosperity. There prevailed

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a dominant view that the world would run out of food, and debates around food security were tainted with a Malthusian tint. Against this backdrop, there emerged a technological breakthrough: the development of modern varieties of high-yielding crops that produced more than traditional varieties under assured irrigation, chemical fertilisers and pesticides. This agro-technological innovation was facilitated by an institutional architecture of international and national public organisations such as the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico (where Norman Borlaug first developed the semi-dwarf varieties of seeds for the Green Revolution in the mid-1960s), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Together, these global and national public institutions, along with private institutions and actors, engaged in research, extension and technological diffusion, created an environment conducive for the adoption of this technology by generating investments, knowledge and products that were locally adapted (Pingali 2012; Conway 2012). Impact The large-scale adoption of the technological package of modern varieties of seeds and complementary chemical inputs (fertilisers and pesticides) and controlled irrigation practices, first in Mexico, then in India, the Philippines and other Asian countries, replaced traditional farming practices of millions of farmers. By the 1990s, 75 per cent of Asian rice and more than half of the wheat in Latin America and Asia was of these high yielding varieties (Rosett et al. 2000). The adoption of this state-led agricultural strategy led to a phenomenal increase in agricultural output. In the developing world, output of cereal crops tripled in the five decades since the 1960s. This increase in agricultural output has been primarily on account of the increase in crop yields, and not so much due to the expansion of areas under cultivation (Pingali 2012). Contrary to popular perception, the gains from the modern varieties were larger in the 1980s and 1990s, and not in the 1960s when the Green Revolution initially kicked in. This suggests that the Green Revolution was not a one-time jump in production, but contributed to long-term trend rates in overall growth and productivity (Evenson and Gollin 2003).

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Geopolitics In the agricultural development literature, the Green Revolution has been framed as a technological fix to the problem of inadequate food production in the developing world. There is also a geopolitical discourse of the Green Revolution. In the post-World War II world, as newly independent developing nations emerged from the shadow of colonial rule, they were confounded with two confronting geopolitical blocs that had fundamentally different ideas on how to engineer agricultural development and social change. The Soviet bloc believed in land to the tiller, collectivisation and agrarian reforms; whereas the American bloc emphasised on the practice of industrial agriculture facilitated by both the market and the state. Through a bipolar analytical lens, it may seem that the former propagated a model of agricultural development ‘from below’, while the latter institutionalised a top-down approach. However, both converged in their methods of the adoption of large-scale industrial farming: the Soviet model relied on socialist principles of collectivisation, whereas the American model was one of private capitalist agriculture. The Green Revolution, nevertheless, is associated with United States foreign policy, with the Rockefeller Foundation supporting the Mexican Agricultural Program that literally sowed the seeds for the Green Revolution (Schmalzer 2016). Upon its early success, William Gaud, the then administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), remarked: ‘These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution’ (Gaud 1968). Gaud’s speech symbolised the ideological construct of a Green Revolution, in contrast to the socialist Red Revolution. This was a case in point of how geopolitics in international development played out in the Cold War era. In the years following the Green Revolution, Malthusian imprints remained embedded in the global discourse on food production and security. In his Nobel Prize Acceptance speech, Borlaug warned that ‘the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only’ (Borlaug 1970). This exemplifies the fear that emanated from Malthusian prophecies and it valorises technological advancement as a saviour of the human race. Scholars in the field of political ecology have challenged this narrative of technological determinism, questioned its empirical validity, and advocated alternative socio-ecological systems that build on local knowledge and resources (Shiva 1991).

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Critiques Mainstream and radical critiques of the Green Revolution have been related to issues of equity and sustainability. At first, the Green Revolution technology was adopted in regions that were already agriculturally advanced. As these advanced regions experienced increased agricultural output and productivity, inequalities between regions widened. At the same time, the adoption of this technological package within the same region was differentiated. Farmers with large tracts of land, access to capital and resources were more likely to adopt and reap the fruits of this technology. The marginalisation and exclusion of small peasant landowners embedded in the revolution contributed to within-region inequality (Pingali 2012; Griffin 1979). The adoption of the Green Revolution has had environmental consequences. There is now mounting evidence that intensive use of agrochemical inputs has contributed to soil degradation, salinisation of irrigated areas, aquifer depletion, increased vulnerability to pests, and loss of biodiversity (Pingali 2012; FAO 2017). These developments have negatively impacted upon agriculture’s natural resource base; ‘the process of increasing output affect [sic] the processes that sustain the condition for agricultural production’ (Shiva 1991, p. 71). This agro-technological intervention contributed to a phenomenal increase in food production, but it was naïve to assume that it would automatically eliminate hunger, for the distribution of food is contingent not only upon its production, but also upon entitlements, access and social relations (Dreze and Sen 1991). Aggregate statistics of food production obfuscate issues of food security as these are presented in terms of ‘what exists rather than in terms of who can command what’ (Sen 1983, p. 8). In sum, the Green Revolution was different things to different actors. For the post-colonial nation state, it was a path to national food security. The large farmer is likely to have viewed it as an opportunity to participate in capital-intensive agriculture, and perceived himself as an agent of modernisation. The smallholder may have felt anguish at being bypassed by the same modern capitalist agriculture that brought material success to his neighbouring farm. The local agricultural labour may have been displaced on account of mechanisation that was part and parcel of the Green Revolution technology. For migrant labour, the Green Revolution is likely to have appeared as a chance to enhance workers’ income by earning higher wages in the peak season. There is also evidence that this sweeping intervention marginalised women: while female labourers and peasants suffered a fate similar to their male counterparts, female

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farmers faced barriers in accessing resources and opportunities offered by this new technology, and were unable to participate fully in the success of the Green Revolution.

SOCIAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT: SOME AREAS OF CONVERGENCE AND DIVERGENCE John Harriss’s analytical framing of rural development as a policy and a process has been a useful starting point to better understand distinct perspectives of SP and DS. The SP framework highlights the role of state actors and government activity, and subsequently tends to approach rural development through a technocratic lens, and focuses on rural development as a policy. Much of the DS literature, on the other hand, tends to concentrate on micro, meso and macro issues related to agrarian change and rural structures; these issues fit in the larger framework of rural development as a process. There is reasonable consensus between SP and DS approaches on the role of agriculture in rural development à la Mellor (1966). The same is not found for specific interventions such as the Green Revolution. While SP accounts frame the Green Revolution as a problem to be solved, some strands in the DS literature ask whether the Green Revolution was necessary at all, and advocate alternative sustainable models of agricultural development. There is a general agreement in both SP and DS on the negative environmental consequences of the Green Revolution. Studies in SP are in the areas of technical and environmental assessments, while ecological issues intersecting with feminist and political spheres dominate the DS literature (Shiva 1991; Jackson and Pearson 1998). Both DS and SP have been critical of structural adjustment policies of the Washington Consensus in the 1980s and 1990s, and there has been some convergence between the two as both have advocated more state intervention in this context. They also converge in their adoption of the participatory rural appraisal (Chambers 1994) and sustainable livelihoods framework (Ellis 2000). However, SP is structurally more accommodative of these practice-oriented agendas, as they tend to be policy initiatives of the state and its actors.2 DS, partly on account of its epistemological framework, tends to adopt a critical perspective, for 2 In the case of participatory rural appraisal, non-state actors may have devised the intervention, but it has been endorsed and adopted by the state actors.

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instance, towards both participatory rural appraisal and the sustainable livelihood framework, despite having played a role in their evolution. Notwithstanding the unevenness of rural change, rural development continues to hold a prominent space in the global development policy architecture of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This framework of SDGs is popular in both SP and DS literatures. Some scholars in DS criticise this framework for being reductionist in its conceptualisation of development, and its one-size-fits-all approach. That said, the first two SDGs of eradication of poverty and hunger are closely intertwined with agriculture and rural development, as globally poverty and hunger are overwhelmingly concentrated in rural areas. Historically, SP has focused on policy analysis and DS had a tradition of action-oriented research and praxis. A synthesis of these perspectives of DS and SP, and in turn, an integration of policy and action, can contribute to better outcomes in the eradication of poverty and hunger. Lastly, rural development has an odd relationship with rural–urban migration. In the dominant literature, development is conceptualised as a movement of output and labour away from agriculture to industry and services. In-built in this theorisation is the axiomatic movement of population from rural to urban areas. This rural–urban migration, integral to development theory, finds little space in the rural development literature apart from some mention in the livelihood approach. SP and DS tend to adopt a value-laden and paternalistic stand that rural people must remain in rural areas (Bakewell 2008). This is puzzling, as the experience of both developed and developing countries lends support to the hypothesis that migration tends to increase with development, and not the other way round. Given that close to half of the world’s population still lives in rural areas, in a context of rapid and dynamic rural change and increasing urban connections and aspirations, there is a need for new theorisation and research in SP and DS on linkages between processes of rural–urban migration and policies and practices of rural development.

REFERENCES Akram-Lodhi, Haroon and Cristóbal Kay (eds) (2009), Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Agrarian Transformation and Development, London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge. Ashley, C. and D. Carney (1999), ‘Sustainable livelihoods: lessons from early experience’, London: Department for International Development. Bakewell, O. (2008), ‘Keeping them in their place: the ambivalent relationship between development and migration in Africa’, Third World Quarterly, 29 (7), 1341–1358.

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Rural development 185 Borlaug, Norman E. (1970), ‘The Green Revolution: peace and humanity’, accessed 25 January 2018 at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1970/ borlauglecture.htm. Borras Jr, Saturnino M. (2009), ‘Agrarian change and peasant studies: changes, continuities and challenges – an introduction’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 36 (1), 5–31. Carney, D. (2003), ‘Sustainable livelihoods approaches: progress and possibilities for change’, London: Department for International Development. Chambers, Robert (1983), Putting the Last First, London: Longman. Chambers, Robert (1994), ‘The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal’, World Development, 22 (7), 953–969. Chambers, R. and G. Conway (1991), ‘Sustainable rural livelihoods: practical concepts for the 21st century’, IDS Discussion Paper 296, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Chenery, Hollis (1979), ‘Introduction’, in Hollis Chenery, Montek S. Ahluwalia, C.L.G. Bell, John H. Duloy and Richard Jolly (eds), Redistribution with Growth, London, UK and New York, USA: Oxford University Press, pp. xiii–xx. Conway, Gordon (2012), One Billion Hungry, Can We Feed the World, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cooke, Bill and Uma Kothari (2001), Participation, the New Tyranny?, London: Zed Books. Dreze, Jean and Amartya Sen (1991), Hunger and Public Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, F. (1998), ‘Household strategies and rural livelihood diversification’, Journal of Development Studies, 35 (1), 1–38. Ellis, F. (2000), Rural Livelihood Diversity in Developing Countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, F. and S. Biggs (2001), ‘Evolving themes in rural development: 1950s–2000s’, Development Policy Review, 19 (4), 437–448. Evenson, R.E. and D. Gollin (2003), ‘Assessing the impact of the Green Revolution, 1960 to 2000’, Science, 300 (5620), 758–762. FAO (2017), ‘The future of food and agriculture – trends and challenges’, Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization, United Nations. Frank, A.G. (1966), ‘The development of underdevelopment’, Monthly Review, 18 (4), 17–31. Gaud, William S. (1968), ‘The Green Revolution: accomplishments and apprehensions’, accessed 20 January 2018 at http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech-info/topics/borlaug/ borlaug-green.html. Green, Gary P. (ed.) (2013), Handbook of Rural Development, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Griffin, Keith (1979), The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution, London: Macmillan. Hall, Anthony L. and James Midgley (2004), Social Policy for Development, London, UK and New Delhi, India: SAGE. Harriss, John (ed.) (1982), Rural Development: Theories of Peasant Economy and Agrarian Change, London: Hutchinson. Herrick, J.M. (2009), ‘Social policy and the progressive era’, in James Midgley and Michelle Livermore (eds), The Handbook of Social Policy, London, UK and New Delhi, India: SAGE, pp. 114–132. Hoff, H.D. and G. McNutt (2009), ‘Social policy and the physical enviromnent’, in James Midgley and Michelle Livermore (eds), The Handbook of Social Policy, London, UK and New Delhi, India: SAGE, pp. 295–312.

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186 Handbook of social policy and development Iatridis, D.S. (2009), ‘Critical social policy’, in James Midgley and Michelle Livermore (eds), The Handbook of Social Policy, London, UK and New Delhi, India: SAGE, pp. 215–235. Jackson, Cecile and Ruth Pearson (eds) (1998), Feminist Visions in Development: Gender Analysis and Policy, London: Routledge. Johnston, B.F. and J.W. Mellor (1961), ‘The role of agriculture in economic development’, American Economic Review, 51 (4), 566–593. Jolly, R. (1991), ‘Adjustment with a human face: a UNICEF record and perspective on the 1980s’, World Development, 19 (12), 1807–1821. Kennett, Patricia (2001), Comparative Social Policy: Theory and Research, Buckingham, UK and Philadelphia, PA, USA: Open University Press Kennett, Patricia (ed.) (2013), A Handbook of Comparative Social Policy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Korten, D.C. (1980), ‘Community organization and rural development: a learning process approach’, Public Administration Review, 40 (5), 480–511. Lewis, W.A. (1954), ‘Economic development with unlimited supplies of labour’, Manchester School, 22 (2), 139–191. Lipton, Michael (1977), Why Poor People Stay Poor: A Study of Urban Bias in World Development, London: Temple Smith. Long, N. (1984), ‘A perspective on the sociology of development’, Sociologia Ruralis, 24 (3/4), 168–184. Long, N. (2001), Rural Development Sociology, Actor Perspectives, London: Routledge. McNamara, Robert S. (1973), ‘Address to the board of governors’, accessed 15 January 2018 at http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/930801468315304694/pdf/420310W P0Box0321445B01PUBLIC1.pdf. Mellor, John Williams (1966), The Economics of Agricultural Development, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Midgley, J. (1997), Social Welfare in Comparative Context, London, UK and New Delhi, India: SAGE. Midgley, J. (2013), ‘Social development and social welfare: implications for comparative social policy’, in Patricia Kennett (ed.) A Handbook of Comparative Social Policy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 182–204. Midgley, J. and M. Livermore (eds) (2009), The Handbook of Social Policy, London, UK and New Delhi, India: SAGE. Midgley, J. and M. Sherraden (2009), ‘The social development perspective in social policy’, in J. Midgley and M. Livermore (eds), The Handbook of Social Policy, London, UK and New Delhi, India: SAGE, pp. 297–294. Mohan, G. (2007), ‘Participatory development: from epistemological reversals to active citizenship’, Geography Compass, 1 (4), 779–796. Narayan, D., R. Patel, K. Schafft, A. Rademacher and S. Koch-Schulte (2000), Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us?, New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank. Pingali, P.L. (2012), ‘Green Revolution: impacts, limits, and the path ahead’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109 (31), 12302–12308. Rosset, P., J. Collins and F. Moore Lappé (2000), ‘Lessons from the Green Revolution’, Tikkun Magazine, 15 (2), 52–56. Rostow, W.W. (1959), ‘The stages of economic growth’, Economic History Review, 12 (1), 1–16. Sachs, Wolfgang (ed.) (1992), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books. Schultz, Theodore William (1964), Transforming Traditional Agriculture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Rural development 187 Schmalzer, Sigrid (2016), Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Scoones, I. (1998), ‘Sustainable rural livelihoods: a framework for analysis’, IDS Working Paper, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Scoones, I. (2009), ‘Livelihoods perspectives and rural development’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 36 (1), 171–196. Sen, Amartya (1983), Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shiva, Vandana (1991), The Violence of the Green Revolution, Third World Ecology, Agriculture and Politics, London: Zed Books. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1979), The Capitalist World Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. World Bank (1975), ‘Rural development: sector policy paper’, Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (2002), World Development Report, 2002, Building Institutions for Markets, New York: Oxford University Press.

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10. The environment and development: fight against poverty and/or protection of the environment – a conflict of interests? Karl Falkenberg

SETTING THE SCENE For much of the last century, collective wisdom seems to have accepted that nations first grow at the expense of nature and the environment, before eventually, when sufficient wealth has been produced, shifting from fighting poverty to cleaning up and protecting the environment. In this, economic growth theory followed the historic industrialization processes of the so-called ‘Western world’. When in the second half of last century ecological concerns started to be voiced more forcefully in Europe, the United States (US) and Japan, the rest of the world considered this a luxury concern of wealthy societies. When individual incomes of the vast majority of a nations population appear to be safe, the focus turns from earning more to spending in a healthy, attractive environment. This seemed to be the general perception of the emergence of ecological movements in the political spectrum of the developed world. Developing nations, on the other hand, had to focus on providing economic growth to combat poverty among their population. This would be achieved through unrestrained exploitation of their natural resources as a basis for the industrialization of their economies. At the international level, the developing nations therefore insisted that fighting poverty had priority over the environment and that environmental protection would only be considered if compensated through financial transfers from the North to the South. This vision largely ignored the interests of many indigenous communities, whose existence depended on living in harmony with nature, drawing on nature’s renewable resources for their own livelihoods. These resources typically include clean drinking water, maritime (fishing) or terrestrial (hunting) food resources, as well as traditional knowledge of medicinal uses of a large variety of plants and so on. It looked, indeed, as if the developing countries saw no selfinterest in protecting their natural environment in the pursuit of economic growth, and that there was no awareness of the negative effects of 188

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environmental degradation on their growth and poverty eradication policies. The academic underpinning for this attitude may well have been the empiric work of Kuznets, often understood to imply that development processes historically have gone through a phase of unequal income distribution before turning more equal, and a period of environmental pollution before eventually turning cleaner, as shown in Figure 10.1. The curve however does not explain why it is in the shape observed, because it omits to link the development to the establishment of regulation that imposes cleaner production methods and leads to a more even income distribution. It also omits to address the issue of repairability of the environmental degradation incurred. While the ozone layer appears to have been largely restored through the international limitation on the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the restoration capability of other environmental damage is more questionable, for example with regard to climate change and biodiversity.

Source: By Govinddelhi. The diagram is made using Microsoft Word., CC BY 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47019360.

Figure 10.1 Hypothetical environmental Kuznets curve: a translation of the Kuznets curve to the use of natural resources

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INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE The first global efforts to address the issues of poverty and development led to the Brandt and Brundtland Commissions and their respective reports (Brandt 1980; Brandt Commission 1983; Brundtland Commission 1987). The Brandt Commission was established in 1977, based on a suggestion by Robert McNamara, then President of the World Bank. It was chaired by Willy Brandt, the former German Chancellor, and consisted of a representative number of independent politicians, economists and industrialists from both developed and developing countries. Brandt sought to have wide representation of ideas, professional experience and gender, with a majority of members from the developing world, but none from communist countries. The Brandt Commission produced two reports, North–South (Brandt 1980) and Common Crisis (Brandt Commission 1983), recognizing the interdependence of economic developments between the North and the South and focusing on issues of food and agriculture, demographic growth, energy, trade, international finance, monetary system and international aid implications. The Brundtland Commission, chaired by the former Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, was appointed by the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar in 1983, with a mandate to explore ways of addressing the heavy deterioration of the social and environmental conditions on the planet. The Brundtland Report was published in 1987, named Our Common Future (Brundtland Commission 1987), and laid the groundwork for the notion of sustainable development. All three reports recognized the very unequal development between nations, with rich industrialized nations on the one hand and poor developing countries on the other. They sought to highlight the interdependence of the development of nations, called for special and differential treatment for the developing world and substantial financial transfers from the North to the South to address the risks of an increasing rift between a few rich and a majority of poor countries on the planet. Both of the Commissions were influenced in their thinking by the prolonged economic crisis of the 1970s triggered by OPEC’s oil embargo of 1973 and the coordinated output reduction of 1979, as well as the 1972 report by the Club of Rome on The Limits to Growth, highlighting for the first time the fact that our planet is a finite system with physical limitations to natural resources including essential materials for the existing Western economies’ production and consumption models (Meadows et al. 1972).

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Eventually all of this led to the first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, also known as the first World Summit. The Conference addressed a wide range of issues such as: + systematic scrutiny of production processes (lead in petrol, poisonous waste, radioactive chemicals and so on); + renewable sources of energy to replace fossil fuels that contribute to climate change; + public transportation systems to reduce air pollution and congestion problems in cities; + accessibility to clean drinking water and sanitation. The Conference also adopted a number of decisions: + An agreement on the rights of indigenous peoples, including a commitment not to carry out activities on their lands that could cause environmental degradation. + The Convention on Biological Diversity to protect the world’s ecosystems and species. + The Convention to Combat Desertification. + The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. + The Forest Principles, aiming at protecting the world’s tropical forests. + Agenda 21, the UN’s action plan for sustainable development, non-binding recommendations addressed to other multilateral organizations and individual governments, to be implemented at local, national and global levels. It is evident from all these international activities that there appears to be a growing awareness of the link between poverty, economic development and a healthy natural environment. There equally seems to be an understanding that the planet is a finite system and that its bearing capacity has limits. But there are, equally clearly, significant differences in how to deal with these issues. On the one hand, there are developing countries, facing serious poverty challenges. Many of these countries are well endowed with natural resources and their development strategy relies largely on the fullest exploitation of these resources to overcome poverty. They claim the right to follow the old economic development path of the developed Western countries. Their answer to the limited overall resources is to claim a reduction in the developed world’s access to allow for their own growth. On the other hand, there are developed

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nations trying to argue a development model that learns from the mistakes of the past and allows today’s developing countries to leapfrog technology, to shift directly towards a more sustainable development model. Finally, there is also a group of countries that basically remains in denial of any significant role of human activity in the deterioration of the planet’s ecosystems, and therefore sees no need for action in this respect. These differences can be easily identified in the different international Conventions. The Climate Change Convention is a good example. The Kyoto Protocol, which sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally to levels that would limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (2°C), contained binding targets only for developed economies, referred to as Annex 1 countries. Developing countries recognized the problem and their limited contribution to the overall emissions, but claimed the right to increase their emissions to supply more energy to their populations in an effort to fight poverty. The result of this approach is ever-increasing global emissions, with emerging economies rapidly catching up or even overtaking developed countries (China), more climate change-related disasters and adaptation costs, and therefore more poverty. While the consequences are easily seen at global level, increased emissions and their consequences do not necessarily show within each individual national territory, or at least not to a comparable degree. In fact, today the majority of the damage shows in developing countries. Hurricanes with terrific rainfall or flood waves on the one hand, and further dramatic desertification through unbearable heatwaves and absence of any rainfall on the other. Where the US has the means to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, Puerto Rico will suffer for years to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Maria. The recently concluded Paris Agreement (United Nations 2016) contains a more promising approach in that all countries accept to make a contribution towards reducing overall emissions. The downside, however, is the fact that all such contributions are voluntary in nature and add up to well below what is required to stay within the target of not exceeding 2°C overall warming. The US withdrawal from the Paris agreement is an additional concern, despite the fact that many US states, cities and enterprises are actively making contributions towards effective climate change mitigation. Another striking example of conflict between environment protection and poverty reduction can be seen in the area of biodiversity. Whether mangrove coastlines or coral reefs, their destruction hits the poorer part of the population of the neighbouring countries worst. It takes away natural coastline protection and exacerbates risks to their homes, while at the same time it reduces their fishing capacity, because both mangroves

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and coral reefs are essential breeding grounds for marine species. On land, forests play a comparably important role. Tropical forests are a major sink for carbon dioxide (CO2) and are therefore a significant mitigating factor against climate change. They also host a large number of the world’s indigenous peoples. At the same time they are a valuable resource in themselves, domestically and internationally. And they compete with more internationally traded crops, such as palm oil and soya, for soil occupation. These alternative crops lead to substantial clearing of the tropical forests, and the destruction of indigenous peoples’ livelihoods, for the benefit of large monoculture production for a handful of individuals or companies for maximum benefit with minimal job creation. Economically, however, both the export of logs and the alternative crops increase the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country concerned and the wealth of the individuals involved. For a villager in Cameroon, for example, to cut a single large teak tree and to deliver it against existing laws to the export port in Douala could bring around €2000, equivalent to many months of alternative income. Hence the difficulty of implementing strict forest policies. The same logic applies to rhino or elephant protection. On the one hand, the animals attract tourism and bring income to natural parks and their populations; on the other hand, poaching brings high revenues for illegal activity through ivory sales on international markets. The international response to these challenges has been fairly comprehensive in describing and analysing the issues, and trying to define pathways and growth models to alleviate poverty without prolonged destruction of the planet’s natural assets. The response has, however, been weak in seeking to implement multilateral recommendations. There are probably two main reasons for this worrisome failure. The first is inherent in the nature of environment, which basically is a collective good. There may be some more limited regional or local environmental issues, such as availability of drinking water, but most environmental issues tend to be relevant beyond national borders. If some countries fish less, the fish stocks will replenish. But this improvement is going to be available to all nations: those that have exercised restraint in the same way as those that have not. So, there is a free-rider problem in defining multilateral solutions to these kinds of issues. Even for the most obviously global phenomenon, climate change, free-riding is a real limiting factor in implementing the necessary change. Change tends to generate short term costs, before the longer term benefits accrue. New technology will have to be developed and installed, while existing equipment may have to be shut down. In the absence of enforceable efforts by all, individual countries will be wary of

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outpricing their industries or agriculture in the global markets with the effect of losing jobs and creating more poverty. If all (major) economies were to share in the transformation cost without differentiation, substantially less pollution would be achievable, compared to a scenario where countries design their own efforts in the absence of reliable contributions by others. When the European Union (EU) decided on its own to set up its Emission Trading System (ETS), aimed at establishing a price for a tonne of CO2 emissions at a level around €40, industries exposed to international competition were granted substantial exceptions, which effectively led the CO2 price to collapse to around €5. This obviously substantially reduced the price incentive for change. And yet it raised the question of social justice, because in a situation where major industries are largely exempted from the cost of change, these costs have to be shouldered by consumers, with a relatively higher impact on the revenue of the poorer parts of society. The second reason for failure to implement multilateral recommendations has to do with economics and measurement. Economic success of nations is predominantly measured in terms of GDP. But this indicator does not include the contribution of natural capital to our common wealth. Pollination by insects is not included, because there is no market price for this service. If bees disappear and a few beehives are put on a lorry to be driven around fruit farms, there is a market price for this service and the GDP indicator will show that the nation is getting richer. For individual enterprises equally, the accounting systems do not include so-called externalities: the pollution of water, the air, the soil or negative effects on biodiversity are not reflected in individual enterprises’ accounts. They are costs to the general public, that is, state budgets. In industrialized countries, this pollution puts a disproportionate burden on the poorer segment of society. The major health hazards in Europe today are due, first, to poor air quality, and second, to noise exposure. In both cases, the wealthy segment tends to live in the less polluted areas, with the poorer segment living along major roads, railway corridors, flight corridors and industrial areas. For the poor in developing countries the situation tends to be even worse. Where no water distribution systems exist, survival depends on nature’s capability to provide clean drinking water. Where no national energy grid delivers the necessary energy to cook and heat, the poor turn to nature and burn wood, thereby further undermining their very livelihood. When forests are cut down to provide space for monoculture crops, not even this (bad) solution is available any longer for the poor. There are interesting efforts to measure nature’s contribution to our incomes. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Kumar 2010) is one of the first to have estimated the relative

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contribution of nature to the respective incomes in developed and developing countries. It shows that nature can make up to 75 per cent of the income of the poorer parts of society in developing countries. The message is clear: environmental policy is not a luxury of rich countries, but rather a necessity for the poor. And yet, at a multilateral level finding common responses to the definition of a sustainable development path has been elusive so far.

NATIONAL EXPERIENCES Historically, all of the industrialized nations of today have followed unsustainable development models, drawing heavily on the planet’s natural resources, polluting the environment and producing significantly uneven income distributions. Academia has developed quantified assessments in the form of footprinting to make the case for the environmental implications. One can relatively easily measure countries’ shares of global greenhouse gas emissions dumped into the atmosphere as a consequence of their domestic production methods. In today’s world, however, production based on global value chains makes it a lot more complex to calculate the effective emissions by country. An alternative method consists in calculating footprints not on the basis of production, but of domestic consumption. The differences are striking: under production footprinting, China is the world’s largest polluter. Under consumption, the US and the EU overtake China, because the pollution caused by Chinese exports is redistributed to the importing countries. This is obviously absurd, because it tends to show that countries with large export surpluses, like China and Germany, are less responsible for their pollution. Calculating the emissions on a per capita basis is yet another method to try to define a ‘fair share’ of the world’s resources, based on the assumption that every human being has the same ‘right’ to the planet’s resources. The EU, for example, is the only industrialized player that has reduced its CO2 emissions compared to the base year of the Kyoto Protocol (1990) and is on course to achieving its reduction target for 2020, that is, a reduction of 20 per cent. On the other hand, with a global population share of 7 per cent, the EU is still responsible for roughly 10 per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions, that is, above its ‘fair share’. More recently, triggered by the financial crisis of 2007, closer attention has also been given to the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth worldwide and within nations. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) had already published a substantial study showing the limits to growth of uneven wealth distribution and

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pointing towards redistributive policies as a means to kickstarting economic growth (OECD 2015). The challenge remains to redirect such growth to remain within the physical limits of the planet. It argues for forms of resource and energy use delinked from growth. More focus on energy efficiency and energy saving, as well as circular economy concepts, reusing and recycling materials, are ways in which this may be achievable. Interestingly, such growth is expected to rely more on labour, offering more jobs and contributing to addressing the root causes of poverty. The risk inherent in the digital robotized economy is indeed the further marginalization of labour. In Western societies a basic ‘free’ income, delinked from participation in the production and distribution processes, is being discussed. What may seem to be an interesting approach to increased social injustice, offering the marginalized share of population a basic income, may well lead to seriously dividing our societies into a two-class system: those that participate in the production processes and those that do not. The more radical economic approaches for the industrialized world look at realignment of the footprints through reduced growth in the industrialized world, or even de-growth (negative growth). What this would mean for industrialized countries’ employment perspectives and the necessary reallocation of wealth inside these systems is hard to predict. Recent electoral trends against established parties seems to predict substantial political instability if growing parts of societies have the perception of being left behind in the overall development of their respective nations. Interestingly, the developing countries may be negatively affected by such approaches as well. The reduced worldwide demand for natural resources, largely triggered by the lack of growth in the major (industrialized) markets since the financial crisis of 2007, has been referred to as a lost decade in development, hampering growth rates in developing countries in their fight against poverty. An often quoted success story in development is South Korea. First imitated for its export-led industrialization, it now also stands for social and environmental progress. An essentially agrarian economy, severely punished by civil war and the separation of the country, the transformation achieved has indeed been tremendous. Starting from a largely protected domestic market and developing production capacities aimed at export markets, based largely on the availability of disciplined low cost labour and oligarchic industrial empires (chaebols), the population fought hard for democratic and labour union rights while the country managed a transition from simple textile products to the most sophisticated industrial sectors. The country today stands out for relatively inclusive growth and substantial investments in green technology to overcome the global

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economic slowdown after the Lehman financial crisis. Many countries have tried to follow a similar development path, with few succeeding effectively. Korea is interesting because it is not simply a city state, or a port state like Singapore or Hong Kong: it actually has a population of 50 million, that is, a country with a domestic hinterland. Still, its size allowed for a dramatic impact of international trade on the economy, with a ratio of trade to GDP of up to 40 per cent. It is difficult to imagine the amount of trade necessary for economies the size of Brazil, India or China to reach comparable ratios of foreign trade to GDP. For these countries, the domestic market will have to produce much more of the transformation drive. China, therefore, is another interesting case in point. It also started from extremely low development after the war and the communist revolution. The early Mao years were still defined by major famines in a largely agrarian society with severely limited use of technology. China’s rapid development, fuelled largely by Deng Xiao Ping’s reforms of the economy, the move towards private initiative and market economy principles, has dramatically highlighted the sustainability limitations of unfettered economic growth without the necessary flanking policies on the social and ecological aspects. It has been successful in lifting an estimated 500 million people out of poverty, but leaving some 700 million Chinese behind. Those Chinese who have benefited from personal income growth today realize the downside of this development in the form of air pollution preventing them from leaving their modern city flats for fear of serious health risks. They have experienced the problems of polluted food, leading on occasion to the death of newborn babies, events that raise very serious concerns among a population living under a one child policy. They see on a daily basis dead fish, or indeed dead pigs, drifting down their rivers, together with tons of plastic waste. Ninety per cent of the oceans’ plastic pollution is carried by ten river systems, eight of which are in Asia, four of which are Chinese (Yellow River, Yangtze, Pearl River and the Amur) (Schmidt et al. 2017). Equally dramatic failure of the rapid, export driven growth in the eastern coastal parts of China has been witnessed on the social front, with millions of people moving to the eastern coastal cities to form a low cost workforce fuelling the growth, increasing numbers of homeless and beggars, and continued rural exodus in the central and eastern regions. The government has taken steps to redress the situation on the environmental side, but also in lowering the economic growth targets (from 10 per cent to 6 per cent annually), and by seeking to incentivize domestic growth with particular attention to central and western areas. The costs for correcting the mistakes of the past are going to be tremendous. The World Bank (2007) has already estimated the cost of remedying the

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environmental damage in China for soil, water and air pollution at some $2 trillion. During climate change negotiations in 2009, Indian negotiators have pointed out that India is spending 3 per cent of its GDP on climaterelated repair activity. The environmental pollution and social inequality cost of the present development models continue to rise on a daily basis, and they hit the weakest part of developing countries the worst.

THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS It was against this background that Brazil hosted the Rio+20 Conference, in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, as a follow-up to the 1992 Earth Summit. The Conference produced a political outcome document entitled ‘The future we want’ (United Nations 2012). The document reiterates in its paragraph 2 that eradication of poverty is the greatest global challenge facing the world. Most importantly, however, it then goes on to recognize for the first time that this can only be achieved by mainstreaming sustainable development at all levels, integrating economic, social and environmental aspects. The novelty is that in order to combat poverty, economic, social and environmental aspects have to be looked at in all their dimensions and by all participants. The text goes on to highlight the common determination to address the themes of the Conference, namely a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, and to examine the institutional framework for sustainable development. This effectively became the starting point for the negotiation in the UN system of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), merging developmental goals, the former Millennium Development Goals and new environmental goals. So, it had taken 20 years until, for the first time, nations recognized at the UN Rio+20 Conference that fighting poverty was not possible at the expense of the environment, and that for the sake of all nations this apparent contradiction between economic growth and preserving a healthy environment had to be reconciled. The full recognition of the need for sustainable policies emerged when the UN adopted the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Here all nations commit to implement policies for peace, prosperity, people, planet and partnership, convinced that only holistic strategies taking economic, social and ecological goals into consideration will deliver lasting benefits for people and secure our collective survival on Planet Earth. The European Union and its member states have been driving forces behind the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, together

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with countries such as Colombia and Mexico, a large number of African states and, eventually, China. There are a number of different factors and individual experiences that have allowed such a large coalition in favour of sustainable policies to emerge and to push for their universal application. A large number of resource-rich developing countries have come to understand that weak governance has turned their resource blessing into development failure. Growing income inequalities, environmental degradation and the destruction of traditional livelihoods have often been the consequence of policies relying largely on export-oriented exploitation of raw materials, whether oil, minerals, timber or foodstuffs. This is not a necessity per se, but the absence of good governance and sound framing policies as well as their effective implementation through stable domestic governments have seriously aggravated the outcomes in many exporting countries. Reliance on natural resources has typically contributed to creating small local elites, some services activities in rapidly growing cities, and a forgotten hinterland, where traditional livelihoods have come under increasing pressure from the resource-focused development model. Brazil has managed in this way to lift 50 million people out of poverty during the Cardoso and Lula presidencies, at the expense of unwieldy cities, and dramatic security issues directly related to substantial social inequalities and lack of decent work for large parts of the population. Most of Africa suffers from similar structural governance levels, exacerbated by substantial informal sectors that do not participate in the creation of state revenue to cope with traditional public sector activities such as infrastructure, education or health. At the other extreme, the rapid export-driven industrialization pursued in other emerging countries, linked to rapid demographic growth, has equally produced unacceptable environmental damage, and marginalization of substantive parts of their societies. Even China, having succeeded in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, is facing intolerable environmental and social problems that have led the leadership to reconsider its mainly GDP-based growth strategies. Much of this is neither new nor surprising. Robert Kennedy famously said in 1968 that the problem with GDP was that it ‘measures everything … except that which makes life worthwhile’. Industrialization has created significant numbers of jobs, often at outrageously low cost. South Korea is an example of how over time, with labour unions, this model can produce more democratic societies and a broad middle class. It appears to be one of the few more successful transition examples, transforming an economy to benefit a substantial majority of the people. It remains questionable, however, whether its export-driven strategy

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could be replicated by other, larger economies. The relation of the export sector to the overall economy would mean that, for example, Brazil would have to achieve a four times larger export performance, not to speak of China or India (both at almost 30 times the population size of Korea). It is difficult to imagine where such amounts of manufactures would be absorbed, without significant development of their own domestic markets. Marrying export-driven and domestic growth models is not easy, as the export drive is traditionally based on low wages, while the domestic growth depends on domestic demand, hence on higher wages. At OECD level, social inequalities can be considered as a major limiting factor on economic growth. A recent OECD study, ‘Why less inequality benefits all’ (OECD 2015), shows that the long term rise in inequality of disposable incomes in most OECD countries has indeed put a significant break on long term growth. It further shows that efforts to reduce inequality through redistribution do not lead to slower growth. These findings for OECD countries are even more relevant in developing countries, where the population growth provides for even stronger economic opportunities, provided the marginalized poor part of these societies can be lifted out of pure subsistence economics. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) global initiative has, interestingly, demonstrated that the share of ecosystems and biodiversity in the income of the poor in developing countries is significantly higher than the corresponding share of income of the wealthy (Kumar 2010). Here are some of the findings. Where no water sanitation or purification exists, the dependence on nature to produce drinking water is absolute. Globally, an estimated 2 billion people today still have no regular access to clean drinking water. Mangroves provide effective coastline protection and offer important breeding space for many marine species. Seventy per cent of the world’s fish stocks are in poor condition due to overfishing; this is estimated to reduce potential harvests by more than $50 billion annually. Bees and other pollinators are decimated worldwide by a combination of monocultures and pesticides, invasive species and climate change. They are essential for 75 per cent of the world food crops, estimated at more than $500 billion. Finally, our reliance on fossil fuels for energy is dramatically accelerating climate change, with grave consequences on the livelihoods of those affected by the water shortages for their own survival or the survival of their livestock. Others will suffer from increasing floods and rising sea levels. Substantial numbers of today’s refugees, estimated at 60 million globally, are already connected to climate change and its effects on their regional ecosystems.

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The challenge for the coming decades is not only to cater to the growing demand from a rapidly growing world population, expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, but also to achieve this in a socially fair and environmentally sound manner. The SDGs are providing a vision for living well and sharing fairly what we produce within the limits of our planet. The vision requires more resource efficiency, more reliance on renewable resources, within their respective regeneration capabilities; as well as sound domestic and strengthened multilateral governance, more rule of law-based democratic systems and, above all, peace as a precondition for prosperity for all. It also explicitly requires decent work opportunities (SDG8). New challenges will arise out of digitalization and robotization. Historically, when countries have moved out of the original agrarian societies, jobs have been created mainly in manufacturing, before shifting towards services. Both of these activities are now coming under rapidly growing pressure from the combined effects of computerization and robotization. These effects are clearly perceived in developed economies, but will rapidly move into the developing part of the world, which is producing substantial demographic growth. The coming decades therefore risk continuing to be defined by substantial additional migration from poor to rich parts of the planet. The only hope against this development will neither come from Trump’s ‘big wall’ across North America, nor from Fortress Europe. The pressure will have to be handled at source, providing populations with decent living conditions in their home countries. This is where the SDGs derive all their importance. No poverty (SDG1), zero hunger (SDG2), good health and well-being (SDG3), quality education (SDG4), gender equality (SDG5), clean water and sanitation (SDG6), affordable and clean energy (SDG7), decent work and economic growth (SDG8), industry, innovation and infrastructure (SDG9), reduced inequalities (SDG10), sustainable cities and communities (SDG11), responsible consumption and production (SDG12), climate action (SDG13), life below water (SDG14), life on land (SDG15), peace, justice and strong institutions (SDG16) – all of these goals require essentially proper domestic policies, in both developed and developing countries. To be achievable within the timetable foreseen – that is, by 2030 – they will also require very substantial investments, which the developing countries alone will not be capable of mustering within the timelines envisaged. Hence the need for partnership in the implementation of the goals (SDG17). All goals will have to be addressed together: transfer of funds from the North to the South, without proper domestic policies in the South, will exacerbate rather than mitigate the problems the planet is facing.

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IMPLEMENTING THE SDGs The UN Declaration on the SDGs recognizes the responsibility of each country in the implementation of the SDGs. There is not one ‘silver pathway’, as geographical, demographic, geological, industrial, agrarian, educational (and so on) realities differ. But a selective reading and implementation of the 17 SDGs is unlikely to adequately deal with the declared intention of ‘leaving no one behind’. Countries will need to define their respective sustainable development paths, in the knowledge of the limits of this planet. The EU has started to lay out an approach in its Environmental Action Plan for the period 2014 to 2020, calling it ‘Living well, within the limits of our planet’ (EC 2014). Implementing the SDGs requires managing the necessary change. The present policies of developed countries are equally unsustainable, as are the economic, social and environmental realities in the developing countries. The trend towards growing inequalities among nations, and the similar trend within nations, are clear signals. The overexploitation of the planet’s natural resources is becoming more broadly recognized: we are eating up our future as human beings by cutting deeper and deeper into the natural capital of the planet and its regeneration capabilities. And continued warring, disregard for basic human rights, continued racial, sexual and religious discrimination, the absence of rule of law and respect for democratic processes, are threatening all efforts towards sustainable living conditions for all. Instead, we witness larger numbers of refugees and stronger migration pressures than ever before. The UN, or whatever other form of multilateral governance, will have to address these issues and provide the basis for sustainable development. Education will have to play an important role. But education must go hand in hand with creating employment opportunities for the millions of bettereducated people, otherwise risking real development disasters through upheavals, revolutions and their inherent destruction of wealth. The way we consume and produce will have to change substantially. Our present linear model draws too heavily on the planet’s resources. It produces too much waste, which we can no longer afford to dump in landfills. This change demands both new thinking in the design of products and new technology to effectively recycle high quality secondary materials for circular uses. A shift from selling goods to leasing may provide incentives for durability and repairability. Separate waste collection schemes will offer good waste streams for high quality recyclates, using less energy than the production of primary materials. To be successful, we need to understand better what toxic risks the different

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materials in our production processes have, both for human health and for the environment. We need to develop this knowledge up front, to avoid problems like the dramatic mercury pollution in Minamata, Japan, or the ongoing pollution in low-tech gold mining in Brazil and other developing countries. In the energy sector, a shift is necessary towards better use of the energy we produce. Energy savings and energy efficiency will be key, together with a shift away from fossil fuel-based energy production towards renewable energy sources. Developing countries do have choices, too. India has basically chosen to subsidize kerosene for their rural poor’s cooking needs, despite concerns over climate change. Bangladesh has successfully tested the subsidization of solar panels, for both cooking and lighting. China has become the world’s leading investor in solar and wind energy, but persists in building additional coal-based energy plants. Developing countries have the advantage to build their needed additional energy networks on renewable energy technology, while the developed world will have to face the cost of writing off the existent fossil fuel-based production lines and investing in new renewable ones. This will require different energy distribution networks, with substantial focus on developing efficient storage capacity within these networks. Our agrifood sector is another major source of concern. While having successfully reduced hunger despite a rapidly growing world population, the development of specialized monoculture production is threatening the biodiversity of the planet. Massive fertilizer and pesticide use, as well as the routine use of antibiotics, pose additional risks. The temptation by the food industry to rely too heavily on sugar, salt and saturated fats is becoming a major health problem, leading to obesity and a constant increase in cardio-vascular diseases. Both developed and developing countries are also producing too much food waste. Estimates show that the amount of waste in both system appears to be at a rough 30 per cent of the food produced; the waste tends to occur in developing countries in the segment from the producer to the distributor, while in the developed countries the waste occurs in the distribution and consumption segment. The world needs massive investments into the developing countries to provide employment opportunities for their growing population. Longerterm investments, however, will only occur in countries that offer sufficient stability, rule of law and generally good governance. These few examples highlight the necessity for holistic approaches in looking for sustainable solutions. All of the SDGs have to be assessed in designing policies. This means a considerable change for our highly segmented specialized education systems, as well as both private and public management. We are building constantly more complex societies,

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which we manage with more and more special skills. What we seem to lack is general knowledge, that would more effectively reveal the cross-cutting risks of high tech solutions. Development theory appears to have come to accept the informal sector’s contribution to employment and revenue in developing countries. But this informality leads to permanently weak public administration, through lack of public revenue, and therefore to a serious break on the creation of a more stable society. Over-regulation can equally stymie the development of a vibrant private sector economy. Defining the right balances between these different options must remain a responsibility for individual countries. For the implementation of the SDGs to work globally, the minimum requirement must be to review individual country performances regularly and transparently. The UN High-Level Forum may become the right place, but only if the reviews are credible, with participation of science, private business and civil society. At some point there may also be the necessity to find additional leverage beside a mere ‘red-face test’, to avoid individual countries free-riding on the sustainability-oriented efforts of other countries. Implementing SDGs definitely requires more multilateral governance than what can be presently seen. Coordinated policies, rather than simple one-size-fits-all solutions, will be necessary to face the growing challenges of global policy making, with regard to socially inclusive and environmentally sound developments.

REFERENCES Brandt, Willy (1980), North–South: A Program for Survival, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brandt Commission (1983), Common Crisis North–South: Cooperation for World Recovery, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brundtland Commission (1987), Our Common Future; The Report of the Brundtland Commission, London: Oxford University Press. European Commission (EC) (2014), ‘Living well, within the limits of our planet’, Brussels: Directorate-General for the Environment. Kumar, Pushpam (ed.) (2010), The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB): Ecological and Economic Foundations, London, UK and Washington, DC: Earthscan. Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens (1972), The Limits to Growth: A Report of the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York: Universe Books. OECD (2015), ‘In it together: why less inequality benefits all’, http://www.oecd.org/els/ soc/OECD2015-In-It-Together. Schmidt, C., T. Krauth and S. Wagner (2017), ‘Export of plastic debris by rivers into the sea’, Environmental Science and Technology, 51 (21), 12246–12252. United Nations (2012), ‘The future we want: declaration of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development’, Rio de Janeiro.

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Fight against poverty and/or protection of the environment 205 United Nations (2016), ‘Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’, New York: United Nations. World Bank (2007), ‘Cost of pollution in China: economic estimates of physical damage’, Beijing: World Bank.

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11. Security and development Dina Kiwan

This chapter explores understandings of ‘security’ and ‘development’ and traces how these have developed and how they are related to one another. It first elucidates understandings of security and contextualizes these shifts over time. A key idea in the literature proposes that contemporary understandings of security have reoriented the focus from the state to the individual, introducing the concept of ‘human security’ (Doneys 2011). Human security has been conceptualized as ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ by the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) seminal 1994 Human Development Report (UNDP 1994). As such, there is concern with the material and physical security of individuals, and the communities in which they live, which has been attributed to a shift from war-based paradigms of security to law-based paradigms of security reflecting changes in ‘security thinking’ after the end of the Cold War (Kaldor 2011). Human security is people-centred and multidisciplinary in approach, in contrast to traditional conceptions of national or state security. Human security is considered to be a prerequisite for development, and is conceptualized as addressing two domains of threat: ongoing challenges such as hunger and disease, and more acute challenges such as conflict and natural disaster. It has been argued that we are witnessing a new bringing together of security and development; yet this idea has been contested, with some arguing that changing discourses rather reflect changes in the relationship between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world and, conversely, we are in fact seeing a separation of these conceptions (McCormack 2011). Relatedly, others have invoked Foucault’s conception of ‘biopower’ where ‘human security’ is a global technology to create ‘self-reliant and docile subjectivities’ in the Third World, which can then continue to survive in serious conditions of underdevelopment without causing a security risk to the developed world (Duffield 2010, p. 243). The chapter then situates security discourses in relation to evolving discourses on development. It explores intellectual influences, including Sen’s thicker conceptions of personhood in comparison to earlier more individualist conceptions of human development, and also Nussbaum’s 206

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conception of human development where ‘affiliation is seen as a universal good’ and not just instrumental in promoting personal choice options (Gasper 2011). Gasper (2011) proposes a social quality approach as an alternative to more individualistic human development approaches and societally oriented human security approaches. This section of the chapter also explores developments in policy thinking, looking at the developments in the UNDP’s Human Development Reports from the mid-1990s onwards and how human security is conceptualized in these reports (Gomez et al. 2016). The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals on peace and security are also outlined. Next, the chapter explores how ‘vulnerability’ relates to security and development, followed by the examination of a case study of Syrian refugee women in Lebanon. The Syrian refugee crisis has been described as the largest refugee crisis in recent history (UNHCR 2016), with 78 per cent of refugees being women and children, with an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon. This case study is used to explore the inter-relationships between gender, migration and security. The discourse of ‘vulnerability’ is dominant in constructing what it means to be a refugee, and in particular a refugee woman. In addition, the related notion of psychological vulnerability is explored, with migration implicated in this. The final section concludes by proposing some methodological ideas based on a reflection of the literature and insights from the case study.

DISCOURSES OF SECURITY Whilst ‘human security’ can be analysed and contested as a concept, it can be recognized more holistically as a discourse. ‘Discourse’ refers to ways of constituting knowledge through ideas, attitudes, social practices and power relations, and can be seen to produce meaning (Foucault 1972). A number of scholars have traced the development of discourses of security, and also examined and situated these often contested discourses in relation to discourses of development (Duffield 2010; Gasper 2011), shifting international relations (Isotalo 2009; Kaldor 2011; McCormack 2011), migration (Doneys 2011; Long and Hanafi 2010) and, critically within the field of governmentality studies, influenced by Foucault (Duffield 2010; McCormack 2011). A number of scholars claim a shift in ‘security thinking’ that they identify with the changes in international relations at the end of the Cold War in 1989. This is typically characterized as a shift in discourse from a state-centred to a person-centred security paradigm, notably with a

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concern for the most vulnerable. UN documentation makes reference to ‘survival, livelihoods and dignity’ (Gomez et al. 2016). In addition, the notion of subjective threat emanates from the person-centred focus. Whilst still recognizing a central role for the state, a person-centred approach to security acknowledges a range of actors, including people themselves, alluding to notions of agency and empowerment. It also lays claim to being context-specific and holistic, as well as having a prevention-oriented approach (Gomez et al. 2016). Kaldor (2011) conceptualizes human security in terms of three dimensions: the first is the emphasis on security of individuals and their communities where they live. The second dimension entails ‘freedom from want’ and ‘freedom from fear’, encompassing both physical and material security. The third dimension is the shift from war-based security to law-based security. Gasper (2011) traces the development of human security, noting that it has had prominence in Asia (Japan and Thailand in particular), as well as within UN agencies and development non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Mahbub ul-Haq, a Pakistani economist who founded the UNDP’s Human Development Report Office in 1989, is credited with initiating the discourse of human security in the Human Development Report in 1994, complementing conceptions of human development. The framework of human security underpins the UN’s approach to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with its people-centred approach to achieving targets relating to peace, well-being and development in particular. The 17 SDGs of the 2030 Agenda came into force on 1 January 2016. The SDGs build on the earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The SDGs call on all countries to develop national frameworks to tackle all forms of poverty with interrelated strategies in a wide range of domains including education, health, hunger, gender equality, social protection, water, climate change and environmental protection. ‘Human security’ is conceived of as an ‘effective tool for prevention’, bridging efforts between humanitarian assistance and longer term development (UN News 2017). The 17 SDGs each have specific targets but can be conceived as interrelated and informed by the human security approach. There are also pertinent cross-cutting themes such as women and gender identity, and education and sustainable development. Focusing on Goal 16, ‘Peace, justice and strong institutions’, this is defined as aiming to ‘Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels’ (UN 2015). Targets include reducing violent crime, sex trafficking, forced labour and child abuse, as well as targeting the promotion of universal legal identity

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and registration, the rights to a name and a nationality, civil rights and access to fair justice systems (UN 2015). Whilst in policy human security has developed in relation to human development, it has expanded beyond this in both academic and policyrelated work (Gasper 2011). Gomez et al. (2016) have explored the operationalization of human security in the UN Human Development (HD) Reports, highlighting the seven domains of human security listed in the 1994 HD Report: economic, food, health, environmental, political, personal and community securities. Whilst this compartmentalization of domains of human security can be helpful in identifying different types of threat, it has been argued that it can also obscure interconnections between different domains. They also note that the different types of human security have not been consistently taken up in either academic or policy discourses over the last two decades. Whilst the term ‘food security’ is more frequently used, for example, the term ‘personal security’ is less frequently observed and is conceptually indistinct, it is argued, from some of the other forms of human security. Gasper and Gomez (2015) instead propose a more holistic, interconnected approach. Indeed, there has been a range of critiques of human security. It has been argued by some that the concept is vague and problematic to operationalize. Others have argued that the methodological problem with human security is that it is both a means and a goal. It has also been critiqued as a way for stronger states to intervene in the affairs of weaker states, with in fact the reverse effect of making the lives of people in the developing world less secure and exacerbating inequalities (Duffield 2010; McCormack 2011). The concept of ‘human security’ has enabled feminist interjections into security discourses that have largely been absent from security work (Gasper and Gomez 2015). Feminist approaches emphasize interconnectivity and take a holistic approach to understanding people’s lives; where, for example, women’s physical security cannot be addressed separately from economic security. This requires a more sophisticated consideration of power and gender relations within society’s systems and institutions. A gendered approach to human security necessitates recognition of the importance of perceptions and emotions. This relates, for example, to perceptions of threat, and also a consideration of widening the nature of assessment of threat from a range of more subjective sources of information.

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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMAN SECURITY AND DEVELOPMENT In both the academic and the policy literatures, a common claim is how security and development are inextricably linked (Gasper 2011; Stern and Ajendal 2010; Stewart 2004). Yet this inter-relationship, and their discourses, are contested both conceptually and methodologically. Whilst these terms may be used to describe processes and contexts, they are also used to construct realities through prescribing processes and deciding on preferred outcomes (Stern and Ajendal 2010). Stern and Ajendal identify six main discourses of what is sometimes referred to as the security–development nexus: (1) development/security as modern and goal-oriented; (2) ‘humanizing’ development/security; (3) development/security as impossible; (4) post-development/security; (5) development/security as a technology of power/governmentality; and (6) development/security as globalized (ibid., p. 9). The first discourse takes a linear historical narrative approach to development and security, as evident in state building discourses in post-colonial states. The second discourse of ‘humanizing’ development and security is a counter-narrative in that it focuses on the individual, arising from Marxist critiques of international power structures, as evident in world system theory (Wallerstein 1974). With respect to security, the identification of such threats as gender-based violence and climate change illustrate the broadening of the conceptualization of security. The third discourse is evident in critiques claiming that development has failed the developing world and that security measures often increase fear and insecurity; whereas post-development approaches further develop these critiques drawing on postmodern and post-colonial theory. Influenced by Foucauldian critiques of governmentality, we can also witness discourses that frame development and security as best understood in terms of biopolitical power (Duffield 2010). Finally, global development narratives challenge the methodological nationalism of the state (Isotalo 2009), highlighting the transnational governance discourses of human rights and sustainable development (Stern and Ajendal 2010). In comparing human security and human development approaches, Gasper (2011) describes human development as focusing on increasing the range of individual choices – what he calls the ‘good society in global context’ – whereas human security has a focus on risk and disaster and has a central concern for environmental sustainability. Human security also, through its attention to psychological security, has an activist

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potential, albeit within a capitalist framework. With regard to conceptualization of ‘being’ in society, human development, influenced by Sen, considers human well-being and has a richer conception of personhood emphasizing the idea of public reasoning, moving beyond constructions of personhood as atomized individuals relating to one another and aiming to control their environment. It has been argued that Sen’s conception is a form of liberal individualism that is not embedded in societal relations, and affiliation is instrumentalized, in contrast to Nussbaum’s notion of affiliation as a universal good (Gasper 2011). Human development thinking has not typically focused on issues of cohesion and social inclusion. In addition, it has been issue-focused (for example, poverty), without a concomitant focus on structures and institutions implicated in these issues. As a result, it does not distinguish between different causal pathways, which require different conceptualizations and processes towards solutions. This contrasts with human security approaches that take account of institutions and processes (Gasper 2011). Human security is set within the values context of human rights, whereas human development has traditionally been framed in terms of values of human flourishing (Gasper 2011), although more recently the concept of the ‘right’ to development has emerged. The tensions between discourses of security and discourses of development is further elaborated by Duffield (2010), who describes this as an ‘impasse’ within global liberalism, rather than the more optimistic framings of the mutual benefits of development supposedly promoting security and vice versa. He develops an argument that whilst the relationship between development and security has long been associated with liberalism, now its contemporary formulation is distinguished by two aspects: the global clamping down on free movement, and the shift from state-centred to person-centred security. Drawing on Foucault, Duffield (2010) conceptualizes development biopolitically and within a liberal paradigm that conceives of sustainability in terms of individual and community self-reliance. Humanitarian intervention is also conceived in these terms, where the aim is to promote adaptive self-reliance. Whilst those in the developed world are ‘insured’, those in the developing world are expected to, or are supported to, develop self-reliance (Duffield 2010). There is an assumption that the local community and other networks will provide people’s welfare needs. Duffield describes the international NGO movement as the ‘executors’ of this development approach, with humanitarian assistance as the ‘insurance of last resort for the world’s non-insured and erstwhile self-reliant peoples’ (ibid., p. 66). Using this logic, development is not aiming to extend the same levels of social protection to people in the Global South, but rather the opposite,

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through focusing on notions of self-reliance. So rather than a continuum between the West and the Global South, there is a discontinuity in approach. As such, the ‘liberal way of development functions to reproduce and maintain the generic biopolitical divide between development and underdevelopment’ (Duffield 2010, p. 66). Consequently, the security–development nexus is in fact exacerbating the divide between the West and the Global South (Duffield 2010; Isotalo 2009; McCormack 2011). McCormack (2011) advances an alternative argument that human security actually represents a time in international relations of a separation of human security and human development. Post-World War II, foreign aid to the developing world had a security role, aiming to promote a Western political and economic order. So it can be argued that during the Cold War, security and development were in fact actually very much interrelated. Since the Cold War, statistics have shown that more aid goes to emergencies than to development (McCormack 2011). McCormack also notes the rise in aid associated with the War on Terror (ibid., p. 251). Tracing the historical development of the concept of human security from the 1990s, whilst seeming to suggest a progressive agenda and one that is people-centred, McCormack (2011) argues that the security discourse is a means of regulation, rather than being emancipatory. Similarly, Duffield (2010, p. 243) argues that sustainable development (although championed by the left) and human security are global technologies of security to create ‘self-reliant and docile subjectivities’ in the Third World, which can then continue to survive in serious conditions of underdevelopment without causing a security risk to the developed world. Development and migration are necessarily linked, given the economic inequalities between the developing and the developed world. Whilst there is a literature that examines the inter-relationships between development and migration, there has been less attention to the interrelationships between ‘security-related disparities’ fuelling migration (Isotalo 2009, p. 60). Similarly Stewart (2004) makes the point that whilst development used to be framed in economic terms, there has been a shift, with a recognition of the limitations of this framework. The UN’s Human Development Reports can be understood in this context, where development is also understood in terms of security, where human security entails not just material needs but includes absence of severe economic and political threats: ‘job security, income security, health security, environmental security, security from crime’ (Stewart 2004, p. 262).

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Isotalo (2009) also highlights the tensions between securitization and development, and how movement or migration itself has been both securitized and developmentalized. Whilst migration (controlled) is perceived to be a development resource, refugees are perceived to be a security threat. Tracing discourses on refugees, there has been a historical shift, with refugees having not always been constructed as primarily an international humanitarian problem; they were actually constructed as a ‘military problem’ at the end of World War II (Maalki 1995, p. 499). The standardization and globalization of international legal and humanitarian systems emerged, and international refugee law managing large movements of displaced people became more systematically established, with the refugee camp becoming a ‘vital device of power’ (Maalki 1995, p. 498). It is notable how the study of refugees has come to be coupled with the development literature, with Maalki (1995) arguing that this has led to a ‘depoliticization’ of refugee movements. The following section examines understandings of vulnerability in relation to (forced) migration, its gendered nature, and how this is situated in relation to discourses of human security and development.

VULNERABILITY There is a literature that connects human security, migration and gender, through the link between vulnerability and insecurity (Doneys 2011). Two main approaches are, firstly, the Norwegian or Canadian approach that highlights the link between personal safety and conflict, and its gendered nature; and secondly, a Japanese approach which is broader, incorporating notions of ‘freedom from want’ and ‘freedom from fear’ in its conception of security (Doneys 2011). There is an implicit functionalist model of society that constructs society as stable and sedentary, whereby displacement and movement are an anomaly; this therefore ‘naturalizes the need to control the movement of people’ through such ‘technologies of power’ as sealing the borders, the ‘refugee camp’, the ‘transit camp’ and reinforces the nation state order of sovereignty and citizens’ rights (Maalki 1995, p. 512). In addition, identity is essentialized and is understood in terms of something that is lost through this movement and only restored on returning, and that necessarily results in suboptimal psychological functioning; this individualizing through psychologization reinforces the depoliticizing and dehistoricizing tendencies of this functionalist approach (Maalki 1995). This framework also informs policy discourses on social integration, where programmes emphasize psychological and interpersonal dimensions of adaptation to

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new cultural settings. Although it is important to recognize the hardships that refugees face, and that they are victims of political circumstances such as war, it is argued that this kind of approach is ahistorical and depoliticizes the experience of refugees (Kiwan 2016). The gendered nature of human security has been relatively neglected, although more recently contributions from feminist theory include the critique of the public–private sphere divide (Okin 1989), bringing attention to the ‘legal void’ of the domestic sphere, as well as the gendered division of labour with women often doing more vulnerable work in the informal economy (Doneys 2011, p. 55). The gendered nature to the construction of ‘vulnerability’ is also evident in discourses of women refugees. In addition to the notion of psychological vulnerability of women, exacerbated through migration, this vulnerability is compounded through bodily sexual vulnerability, evident in discourses of ‘survival sex’, prostitution, early marriage, and domestic and gender-based violence. Vulnerability is also framed as a condition resulting from economic marginalization, evident in the initiatives of international organizations and NGOs working on women’s economic empowerment. Yet what is less emphasized in humanitarian organizations’ discourses of vulnerability is the vulnerability due to a lack of legal recognition per se, what Agamben (1998) refers to as living in a ‘state of exception’, and what Douzinas (2000) refers to as the ‘gap between man and citizen’. Douzinas (2000) argues that it is through being recognized politically as part of a political community that we become human, that we can embody our humanness, and thus claim our human rights. For Douzinas, a refugee’s lack of human rights is not lack of rights per se, but rather the vulnerable condition that comes from the lack of being a recognized member of a political community with its legal protections. This lack of recognition is in effect dehumanizing: ‘the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion of humanity altogether’ (Arendt 1976, p. 279, cited in Douzinas 2000, p. 144). Fadlalla illustrates how humanitarian discourses often use images of women and mothers to broadcast a ‘narrative about rescue and compassion’ (Fadlalla 2009, p. 79), rather than a more politicized discourse around entitlement and claiming rights. This approach can clearly be understood in a context where international organizations such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) have a mission of fundraising (Kiwan 2016). This depoliticization of the refugee reduces the human being to their ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998), exacerbated by the ‘state of exception’ by living outside of the law and political community. This emphasis on

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vulnerability also directs attention to focus on such issues as genderbased violence and the sexual vulnerability of woman refugees; by compartmentalizing a group’s needs into various categories, this can potentially obscure a holistic and coherent understanding of the experience of people’s lives (Kiwan 2016). This approach of categorizing vulnerability has been criticized as essentializing identities, leading to ineffective interventions that ignore overlapping vulnerabilities and also that vulnerability is not a permanent state but varies over time (Global Protection Cluster and HelpAge International 2014). The control of gender and sexuality can be conceived of as a site of power for the state over its citizens; what is sometimes referred to as ‘technologies of citizenship’. For immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers, the notion of ‘technologies of anti-citizenship’ supports a discourse of these ‘others’ as irrational, unethical subjects (Lan 2008). Techniques to exclude these others include criminalization or restriction in movement. Laws relating to resettlement are rationalized in terms of vulnerability, with criteria developed to determine the most vulnerable, and the most vulnerable prioritized for resettlement. Humanitarian discourses identify women, children, older people, those with disabilities, the chronically ill and oppressed minorities (political, religious, ethnic, racial, sexual) as being at increased risk during crises and less able to manage their impacts (Global Protection Cluster and HelpAge International 2014). UNHCR initially identifies ‘vulnerable’ refugees according to set criteria, and these most vulnerable are prioritized for resettlement. These cases are then put forward to potential resettlement countries to decide whether or not to accept them, and they facilitate their transport to the country and support their integration. Yet, according to Amnesty International (2015), only 79,180 resettlement places have been offered globally by wealthier countries. Examining resettlement policies with respect to ‘vulnerable’ sexual minorities, a similar discourse is revealed where refugees (and asylum seekers) are prioritized on the basis of sexual orientation, framed in terms of a discourse of upholding universal human rights. Yet Sabsay (2012a) calls attention to the West’s practice of ‘othering’, despite its call for inclusivity; evidence in policies where migrants are ‘assumed to be homophobic and have to prove their liberal credentials’. Whilst not denying the vulnerability of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and/or intersex (LGBTI) refugees, the discourse of Western foreign policy of supporting LGBT persons from around the world has been critiqued as a neoorientalist discourse of liberating women and sexual minorities from uncivilized societies (Sabsay 2012a, 2012b). This is evident in United States (US) discourses and decisions on deciding on the allocation of

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foreign aid, and the US-led War on Terror (Puar 2007). As argued by Ticktin (2008) in the European context, debates on immigration, Islam and national security are structured around sexuality, where immigrant men of North African origin men are excluded from the nation through criminalization as uncivilized ‘violators of women’s human rights’ (ibid., p. 865), as a post-colonial extension of colonial discourses on sexuality and civility, with the need to rescue Muslim women. How does vulnerability relate to agency? How do populations at heightened risk of violence, injury or death make claims? There is a literature challenging conceptions of citizenship and participation in purely legal terms. For example, Isin (2009) calls for a re-articulation of discourses of citizenship that prioritize relationships and acts, rather than legal status. His work has illustrated how those without legal status nevertheless act, thereby constituting their political subjectivities. We may also draw from Saba Mahmood’s (2005) work on different modes of agency, whereby agency need not be conceived in terms of acts of political transgression or economic empowerment. Through exploring agency in contexts within a religious framing in a study of Egyptian Muslim women’s conceptions of agency, Mahmood (2005) explores how conceptions of agency are religiously moderated by notions of fate and God’s will. The Syrian refugee crisis has had an influence on discourses and policies of humanitarianism, security and development (Gabiam 2016). In Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, many Syrian refugees are living in cities rather than in camps. This not only affects the vulnerability of the urban poor, but also has been linked with a policy shift towards a more rights-based approach with an emphasis on development as part of the humanitarian response. This was pre-dated by the Palestinian refugee crisis where, similarly, development in Palestinian refugee camps has also been emphasized (Hanafi et al. 2014). This discourse typically emphasizes self-reliance and resilience (Gabiam 2016), as noted by Duffield (2010). The following section explores a case study of Syrian refugee women in Lebanon, examined within the framework of the interlinking discourses of security, development, refugees and vulnerability.

CASE STUDY In the contemporary Arab world, security has been typically framed as a state-centred security, rather than as a person-centred security, given the context of authoritarian regimes, conflict, refugee flows and scarce

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resources. The concept of human security in the Middle East was a focus in the 2009 Arab Human Development Report, with an explicit call for policy makers, researchers and other stakeholders to move away from a state-centred conception of security to a person-centred conception of security. They argue that the neglect of person-centred framings of security is directly related to the region’s challenges of personal vulnerability, economic challenges of unemployment and exclusion. A direct link is made between human security and human development: that human security is a requirement of human development, and vice versa (UNDP 2009). Human security is situated within the context of human rights as creating the conditions ‘favourable to human security’ (UNDP 2009, p. 2). It has been argued that using a discourse of human security has enabled states to intervene in the affairs of weaker states, and essentially entails a form of control of the developing world by the developed world (McCormack 2011). In response, Wheeler (2011) argues that the local embracing of human security by policy makers, academics and other stakeholders from within the region itself is a means to bring about change organically from within, that does not make it complicit with foreign intervention. The Arab Human Development Reports have also been critiqued from a gendered and post-colonial perspective (Kiwan 2016). For example, Abu-Lughod (2009) has argued that, in particular, women’s human rights have been an object of focus of the West and in development discourses. Whilst recognizing the importance of empirical evidence, she is concerned about the political impact of empirical data that is then taken as evidence of the ‘pathology of Arab gender culture’ (Abu-Lughod 2009, p. 85), with a methodological lack of systematic comparative and historical perspectives. As previously noted, human security is a discourse used (and contested) in relation to refugees. In Lebanon, with its long history of hosting Palestinian refugees over several decades, as well as the more recent influx of an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees (UNHCR 2016), the human security for refugees and citizens is a significant challenge. Lebanon reflects the wider regional trend for a state-centred as opposed to a person-centred approach to security. Although typically described as a weak state subject to regional and interventional intervention, there is also a discourse recognizing its resilience. Hazbun (2016) argues that societal actors understand insecurity differently from state elites, understanding security and governance as more fluid and hybrid, drawing on the notion of ‘assemblages’ from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Long and Hanafi (2010, p. 674) describe the situation for Palestinian refugees in 2010 as ‘suffering from a lack of human security, that is, they have

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neither “freedom from fear” (violence) nor “freedom from want” (economic insecurity)’. They argue that Palestinian human security is ‘inextricably linked to Lebanese sovereignty and national security’ (ibid., p. 673). Whilst the discourse of human security has been adopted by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the Lebanese security forces, Palestinians’ subjective experiences continue to reflect social, economic and political exclusion on a daily basis (Long and Hanafi 2010). As non-citizens, Palestinians are unable to claim their human rights, and are excluded in practice from the discourse of human security (Long and Hanafi 2010). The issue of gender-based violence, and in particular the framing of domestic violence, illustrates how NGOs and international organizations utilize discourses of (in)security linking the psychological stress of forced migration to men’s frustration, anger and ensuing violence. Gender-based violence (GBV) programmes typically focus on teaching women how to deal with and report violence, whilst men are encouraged to attend anger management sessions (El Helou 2014). The discourse of rationalizing gender-based violence in terms of anger, rather than attributing it to structural gendered inequalities in power, thus perpetuates gendered notions of aggressive masculinity and accepting femininity. An example of an initiative going beyond such approaches and looking at broader structural gendered inequalities can be seen in an initiative organized by a local NGO, the Resource Centre for Gender Equality (ABAAD), in partnership with Oxfam and the Forum for Development, Culture and Dialogue of a regional roundtable with religious leaders to end gender-based violence. ABAAD was founded in 2011 in Lebanon with ‘the aim of promoting sustainable social and economic development in the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region through equality, protection and empowerment of marginalized groups, especially women’ (ABAAD 2015). Religious leaders from across the region met during 2012 to discuss their understandings of the underlying causes of GBV, its different forms, and identified that ‘societal systems’ utilizing patriarchal and religious discourses constitute an important factor; religious leaders worked to identify ways in which their roles could prevent, support and legislate against GBV, and in developing partnerships with civil society. In contrast, from the perspectives of women themselves, what emerges is that women are ‘transgressing’ their usual roles, in a context where more than 20 per cent of Syrian refugee women are the head of the household. This role thrusts women more prominently into the public space. For example, one mother reported, ‘I would dress and act like a man so that my children could sleep in peace and feel safe’ (Kozlowska 2014). Another Syrian refugee, a mother of a boy and girl, living in

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Akkar Lebanon, reports having to decide between sending her son or her daughter to school, as she could not afford to send both. Deciding on her daughter, she reasoned, ‘A girl needs her education. A boy can find work in places a girl can’t’ (Kozlowska 2014). The Foucauldian analysis of security discourses as forms of governmentality and biopower are evident in the themes of criminalization and restriction of movement of refugees in Lebanon. For those children born to Syrian refugees in Lebanon, the process by which births can be registered is extremely difficult, resulting in most of these children living in a legal limbo. It is estimated that as many as 30 000 Syrian children have been born in Lebanon who are not registered; this constitutes 70 per cent of the total number of Syrian children born in Lebanon who are therefore stateless and without documentation (AP 2014). This is a consequence of the practical difficulties in registering newborns, including having little money to travel to the different locations required for registration and for registration fees, little time off work, parents not having legal documentation themselves (citizenship or marriage certificates), as well as the multiple steps within the process required from the state authorities. In addition, if a child is born without the presence of an authorized midwife or doctor, it is not possible to authentically verify the birth. Furthermore, if the parents married within Lebanon without the marriage being registered, this also makes the registering of the birth impossible (AP 2014). This renders these children invisible, unrecognized. Fassin and D’Halluin (2005, p. 606) described the role of such medical certification as the ‘tenuous thread on which hangs the entire existence of the asylum seeker’. So too does the lack of documentation make impossible basic things in life, such as going to school, getting a job and getting married. The state is implicated in regulating and legitimating marriage and birth – embodiments of the human condition – and hence refugees’ lives are predicated on this form of (or lack of) legal recognition. Women are also vulnerable, since if they suffer harassment or violence, reporting it to the Lebanese authorities engenders fear of either further harassment of fear relating to the legitimacy of their legal status. The state is clearly implicated in its exercising of technologies of anti-citizenship, rendering the refugee as outside of society.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS This chapter has traced the contemporary intellectual histories of the discourses of ‘security’ and development’, examining how these discourses relate to one another situated in the transnational political

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context. A number of scholars claim a shift in ‘security thinking’ contextualized in relation to the change in international relations with the end of the Cold War in 1989. A key feature is posited to be the shift in discourse from a state-centred to a person-centred security paradigm. There has been a range of critiques of ‘human security’, including the argument that the concept is vague and problematic to operationalize, and also that there is the methodological problem that it is both a means and a goal. Foucauldian critiques argue that the discourse provides legitimation for stronger states to intervene in the affairs of weaker states, often making the lives of people in the developing world less secure and exacerbating inequalities (Duffield 2010; McCormack 2011). The chapter also critically examines the contested nature of the inter-relationships between security and development and how discourses of security and development have shifted the policy approaches of international organizations such as the UN and international development NGOs. There is also a literature exploring discourses of security and development in relation to migration, and the gendered forms these take. Taking into account these theoretical literatures, the chapter, drawing also on the conception of ‘vulnerability’, situates these discourses through the case study of Syrian refugee women in Lebanon. The case study contributes towards a contextualized and gendered understanding of human security, development and migration, as this has been relatively understudied in the literature. Organizational discourses illustrated the gendered nature to the construction of ‘vulnerability’, as well as a presumed psychological and sexual vulnerability of women, exacerbated through migration, evident in the examples given of approaches to domestic and gender-based violence. Vulnerability is also constructed as arising from economic marginalization, evident in the initiatives of international organizations and NGOs working on women’s economic empowerment. Yet what is less emphasized in humanitarian organizations’ discourses of vulnerability is the vulnerability due to a lack of legal recognition per se. This is evident from the case study’s examples of the vulnerability compounded by the state with regard to registering births and reporting crimes. It is recommended that contributions in the field in extending understandings of discourses of human security and development will benefit from contextualized and multi-perspectival and multiple levels of analysis. This resonates with the methodological recommendations of Isotalo (2009), who notes that migration scholars have left analyses of strategic relations of security and migration to security analysts, rather than looking at the individual level. This is not an argument for methodological nationalism or methodological individualism, but instead for

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bringing different units of analysis into the frame in one analytical perspective.

REFERENCES ABAAD (2015), ‘ABAAD dialogues with religious leaders to end gender based violence (GBV) in the Middle East’, accessed 24 February 2015 at: http://www.abaadmena.org/ index.php?p=our_work_sub&s=policy_development&w=36. Abu-Lughod, L. (2009), ‘Dialects of women’s empowerment: the international circuitry of the Arab Human Development Report 2005’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 41, 83–103. Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Amnesty International (2015), Hardship, Hope and Resettlement: Refugees from Syria Tell Their Stories, London: Amnesty International. Associated Press (AP) (2014), ‘Nearly 30 000 Syrian children born in Lebanon as refugees at risk of statelessness’, accessed 24 February 2015 at: http://www.foxnews.com/world/ 2014/12/19/nearly-30000-syrian-children-born-in-lebanon-s-refugees-at-risk-statelessness/. Doneys, P. (2011), ‘En-gendering insecurities: the case of the migration policy regime in Thailand’, International Journal of Social Quality, 1(2), 50–65. Douzinas, C. (2000), The End of Human Rights, Oxford, UK and Portland, OR, USA: Hart Publishing. Duffield, M. (2010), ‘The liberal way of development and the development–security impasse: exploring the global life-chance divide’, Security Dialogue, 41(1), 53–76. El Helou, M. (2014), ‘Refugee camps in Lebanon: Syrian women’s bodies as a site of structural violence’, Legal Agenda, accessed 25 February 2015 at: http://www. english.legal-agenda.com.article.php?id=673&lang=en. Fadlalla, A.H. (2009), ‘Contested borders of (in)humanity: Sudanese refugees and the mediation of suffering and subaltern visibilities’, Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 38(1), 79–120. Fassin, D. and E. D’Halluin (2005), ‘The truth from the body: medical certificates as ultimate evidence for asylum seekers’, American Anthropologist, New Series, 107(4), 597–608. Foucault, M. (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon Books. Gabiam, N. (2016), ‘Humanitarianism, development, and security in the 21st century: lessons from the Syrian refugee crisis’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 48, 382–386. Gasper, D. (2011), ‘The human and the social: a comparison of the discourses of human development, human security and social quality’, International Journal of Social Quality, 1(1), 91–108. Gasper, D. and O.A. Gomez (2015), ‘Human security thinking in practice: “personal security”, “citizen security” and comprehensive mappings’, Contemporary Politics, 21(1), 100–116. Global Protection Cluster and HelpAge International (2014), ‘Mapping of vulnerabilities: unmasking the Syrian population’, accessed 2 May 2018 at: https://www.alnap.org/helplibrary/mapping-of-vulnerabilities-unmasking-the-syrian-population. Gomez, O.A., D. Gasper and Y. Mine (2016), ‘Moving development and security narratives a step further: human security in the Human Development Reports’, Journal of Development Studies, 52(1), 113–129.

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222 Handbook of social policy and development Hanafi, S., L. Hilal and L. Takkenberg (eds) (2014), UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees: From Relief and Works to Human Development, New York: Routledge. Hazbun, W. (2016), ‘Assembling security in a “weak state”: the contentious politics of plural governance in Lebanon since 2005’, Third World Quarterly, 37(6), 1053–1070. Isin, E. (2009), ‘Citizenship in flux: the figure of the activist citizen’, Subjectivity, 29(1), 367–388. Isotalo, R. (2009), ‘Politicizing the transnational: on implications for migrants, refugees, and scholarship’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 53(3), 60–84. Kaldor, M. (2011), ‘Human security’, Society and Economy, 33(3), 441–448. Kiwan, D. (2016), ‘Syrian and Syrian Palestinian women in Lebanon: “actors of citizenship”?’, in M. Shalaby and V. Moghadam (eds), Empowering Women after the Arab Spring, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kozlowska, H. (2014), ‘Report: women Syrian refugees “have no choice but to be strong”’, accessed 24 February 2015 at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/08/reportwomen-syrian-refugees-have-no-choice-but-to-be-strong/. Lan, P.-C. (2008), ‘Migrant women’s bodies as boundary markers: reproductive crisis and sexual control in the ethnic frontiers of Taiwan’, Signs, 33(4), 838–861. Long, T. and S. Hanafi (2010), ‘Human (in)security: Palestinian perceptions of security in and around the refugee camps in Lebanon’, Conflict, Security and Development, 10(5), 673–692. Maalki, L. (1995), ‘Refugees and exile: from “refugee studies” to the national order of things’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 495–523. McCormack, T. (2011), ‘Human security and the separation of security and development’, Conflict, Security and Development, 11(2), 235–260. Mahmood, S. (2005), Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton, NJ, USA and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press. Okin, S. (1989), Justice, Gender and the Family, New York: Basic Books. Puar, J. (2007), Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sabsay, L. (2012a), ‘Orientalism and the modernization of sexuality’, OpenDemocracy, accessed 26 February 2015 at: file:///Users/dinakiwan/Documents/sexuality%20and% 20citizenship/sabsay-Orientalism%20and%20the%20modernisation%20of%20sexuality %20%7C%20openDemocracy.webarchive. Sabsay, L. (2012b), ‘The emergence of the other sexual citizen: orientalism and the modernization of sexuality’, Citizenship Studies, 16(5/6), 605–623. Stern, M. and J. Ajendal (2010), ‘Mapping the security–development nexus: conflict, complexity, cacophony, convergence?’, Security Dialogue, 41(1), 5–29. Stewart, F. (2004), ‘Development and security’, Conflict, Security and Development, 4(3), 261–288. Ticktin, M. (2008), ‘Sexual violence as the language of border control: where French feminist and anti-immigrant rhetoric meet’, Signs, 33(4), 883–889. UN (2015), Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, New York: United Nations. UNDP (1994), Human Development Report, New York: UNDP. UNDP (2009), Arab Human Development Report 2009, New York: UNDP. UNHCR (2016), ‘Syria conflict at 5 years’, accessed 13 December 2017 at: http:// www.unhcr.org/afr/news/press/2016/3/56e6e3249/syria-conflict-5-years-biggest-refugeedisplacement-crisis-time-demands.html. UN News (2017), ‘Human security approach “central” to achieving sustainable development – UN officials’, accessed 2 May 2018 at: https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/07/ 561142-human-security-approach-central-achieving-sustainable-development-un-officials.

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Security and development 223 Wallerstein, I. (1974), The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press. Wheeler, D. (2011), ‘Freedom from want, and freedom from fear: a human security approach to a new Middle East?’, Journal of Human Security, 7(1), 37–52.

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12. World-regional social governance, policy and development Nicola Yeates

REGIONALIZING SOCIAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT The key institutions, actors, processes and outcomes of social policy and development are traditionally conceptualized and theorized in relation to countries and intra-national processes of development and change. An established body of literature considers how social policy and social development strategies, actors, institutions and outcomes in transnational contexts, emphasizing how these are projected ‘outwardly’ and how policy formation transcends the realm of any individual country (Yeates 2014). This chapter considers one aspect of that, namely ongoing processes of regionalization and strategies to pursue regional cooperation and integration at the sub-global, transnational, level and how they relate to social policy and development. For some time now, scholars, policy makers and activists have been alert to the topic of world-regional social governance, policy and development. This interest reflects the importance of strategies of state and non-state actors to ‘lock in’ internationalizing flows of trade and investment on a regional basis among groups of ‘most favoured nations’ and to forge institutions to strengthen economic, political and sociocultural relations between groups of nations in contemporary national and global policy-making. Such regionalizing processes and the social actors mobilized around them are deeply embroiled in shaping the conditions for social development and the direction of national social policy. The archetypal example of an overtly world-regional approach to social policy and development is the European Union, around which a specialist field of academic study has grown. However, regionalizing processes, regionalist projects and regional forces of different kinds are not confined to the advanced industrialized countries. Indeed, they are evident across diverse development contexts worldwide. There are context-specific reasons for this overall impetus, but collective action on a regional scale is widely seen as a compelling means of tackling the cross-border nature 224

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of social, political, environmental and economic challenges arising from the greater cross-border connectivity and interdependence associated with globalization. Regional-level collective action can be easier to negotiate and conclude than at the global level; it can enable a more effective and coherent set of responses to pressing social policy issues than governments acting unilaterally or bilaterally; and it can sustain the interest of prospective partners outside the region (Yeates et al. 2010; Yeates 2017a). This chapter explains and illustrates these propositions with reference to prevailing research approaches and perspectives as well as to policy discourses and practices drawn from instantiated cases from around the world. The focus lies firmly on transnational regions, otherwise known as world-regions, to distinguish them from subnational regions within a country which are not considered here. The chapter argues that worldregional cooperation and integration are vital components of contemporary global and national governance and policy landscapes. They are embroiled in the (re)making of welfare capitalism and its governance, nationally and globally, across diverse development contexts. The chapter starts from the observation that the relationship between regionalizing processes, social policy and social development has tended to remain implicit rather than be fully explicated. Regional governance and policy are often neglected in literatures on social policy, social development and global governance, while social policy and social development are overlooked by the burgeoning literature on comparative regionalism. Nevertheless, this chapter identifies key points of intersection between regionalism, social policy and social development, along with studies which are addressing these intersections. These pivot around the contested role of regionalism in shaping the conditions and prospects for socially-equitable social policies and inclusive social development. Three questions arise in particular. First, whether regionalism undermines or strengthens national welfare states and welfare systems. Second, whether regionalism undermines or strengthens global efforts in support of coherent and comprehensive social policies. Third, whether regional governance and social policy can be strengthened in the interests of inclusive social development and socially-equitable social policies.

APPROACHES AND DEBATES Lexicons of Regions, Regionalism and Regionalization World-regionalism studies is a multidisciplinary field of academic study and research, spanning the disciplines of political science, geography,

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sociology and economics. This field is expansive and replete with different definitions, conceptualizations and theorizations (Börzel and Risse 2016; Söderbaum 2016a, 2016b). The notions of ‘region’, ‘region building’, ‘regionalism’ and ‘regionalization’, which are essential when relating this topic to the social policy–development nexus, are briefly reviewed below. A ‘region’ is a socio-politically constructed entity that ‘makes references to territorial location and to geographical or normative contiguity’ (Borzel and Risse 2016, p. 7). It includes three or more countries but can also be continental (as in Europe, Caribbean, South Asia) or transcontinental (Eurasia, transatlantic area, Asia-Pacific) in scale. Countries in a region are usually geographically proximate to one another, but there are exceptions. For example, Iran is an associate member of a South American regional grouping, ALBA. The location of a country within a geographical continent (for example, Europe, Asia) is not a definitive guide to the designation of what is a region. For example, the AsiaPacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) spans Asian, South American and Oceanic countries; while the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region encompasses all countries located in Europe, Africa and Asia that share the Mediterranean coastline (ibid.). ‘Region-building’ refers to the process whereby social actors (state and non-state) create regional institutions and organizations, whether by building new ones or strengthening existing ones (Van Langenhove 2011). ‘Regionalism’ refers primarily to a ‘top-down’ statist process, whereby the state is the lead actor engaging in strategies to build and sustain formal regional institutions and organizations (Börzel and Risse 2016, p. 7). At least three states are needed to distinguish regionalism from bilateralism (which involves state strategies of two countries). Regional organizations lie at the heart of regional development governance. Country membership of such organizations spans nearly all countries in all continents of the world. Just as countries are members of multiple international organizations – the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO) – so many countries also belong to more than one regional organization. For example, the Philippines is simultaneously a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the East Asia Forum (EAF), and a partner of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). The UN system has its own distinct regional structure, in the form of UN Regional Commissions and regional offices of UN social agencies; for example, World Health Organization (WHO) regional health organizations such as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), or the International Labour Organization (ILO) regional offices. Alongside these sit regional

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development banks with mandates to finance overall development in the continent in which they are embedded. Country membership of each of these different kinds of regional organizations differs. For example, country membership of the (UN) West African Health Organization is not coterminous with that of either the UN Economic Commission for Africa, or the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Regional organizations are significant actors, as knowledge brokers, advocacy actors, training hubs and industrial coordinators within their respective regions (Van Langenhove 2011). Diverse drivers and logics of regionalist strategies give rise to and shape the institutional characteristics of the region and the strategies of any particular regional organization. Aspirations that international commercial and trade integration would render inter-state warfare illogical have been major drivers. Geopolitical considerations have also been important. ASEAN, for example, originated in the late 1960s as a Western-sponsored political alliance to counteract the ‘communist threat’ in the region perceived to emanate from China. Otherwise, different models of political cooperation and market-building are evident, even within the same region-building project over time. For example, MERCOSUR originated as a customs union and evolved as a commercial initiative aiming at the free movement of factors of production. The history of the EU similarly speaks to this dynamic, but it has gone further in creating a single market and common currency with substantial involvement in many other domains of social and public policy. It has also become a global political actor in its own right, with rights of representation and participation as a regional bloc in global institutions. UNASUR has ambitions to develop akin to the EU, including developing a presence on the global stage as a political actor. Major motivating forces driving regional organizations are increased international trade, and being able to take advantage of economies of scale afforded by integrated markets for production and trade. Accordingly, regional trade agreements are traditional cornerstones of regional cooperation and integration. In both ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries, regional trade agreements (RTAs) cover goods and services and they have become increasingly significant within the global economy, with over half of all international trade being conducted inside them. They have been instrumental in forging circumstances whereby neighbouring countries within regional groupings are often the most important trading partners. Just as regionalist strategies are proliferating, so they are also undergoing consolidation. ‘Mega-regions’, involving regional groupings of 20-plus countries, are emerging, as are trans-regional groupings involving

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cooperation between existing regional blocs (for example, EU– MERCOSUR; MERCOSUR–Southern African Customs Union; SAARC– ASEAN). Alongside this, we need to keep in mind existing ‘clubs’ to which members of regional groups are also party. The BRICS and CIVETS groups are notable in this regard. BRICS is a group of large, middle-income countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) which have sought alliances with each other, while CIVETS is an assigned group of emerging market economies (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa). Of note is that South Africa is a member of both BRICS and CIVETS, as well as a member of SADC and the AU. It sees no incompatibility in these multiple memberships of regional and trans-regional groupings. ‘Regionalization’ refers to a more diffuse, bottom-up set of social processes, involving ‘processes of increasing economic, political, social or cultural interactions among geographically or culturally contiguous states and societies’ (Börzel and Risse 2016, p. 8). Emphasized are a variety of non-state actors organized in formal and informal networks, and the transnational relations between social actors such as business, labour, social movements and non-governmental organizations. In these processes, such actors may be important drivers of region-building projects; sometimes they may exceed states in their significance in promoting regional identity and solidarity. The outcomes of such regionalizing processes may include formal institution- and organizationbuilding, but this is not always the case. For example, sub-Saharan Africa exhibits comparatively strong regionalism without pronounced economic regionalization, while strong economic regionalization in East Asia has not yet led to strong regionalism in the form of robust supranational regional organizations (Börzel and Risse 2016, p. 8). Around the world, then, there are different sorts of regionalization processes and regionalist strategies, combining in complex ways to produce different regional orders and regional modes of governance (Börzel and Risse 2016, p. 9). At this juncture it is worth emphasizing the wide range of social actors coexisting within any given region at any given point in time. Although not all of them are immersed in regionbuilding, many of them are, by virtue of the intense links, alliances and coalitions they form with others in proximate countries in the region (as well as with countries in other regions of the world). Also, not all of these policy actors are necessarily of, or from, the region. For example, international donors are highly engaged in the provision of development aid directed at countries within a lower-income region, or at regional organizations themselves. Similarly, philanthropic actors can have a major presence in political economies of social policy and development

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in any given region. For example, the Gates Foundation is a major provider of health-related development aid across Africa and Asia. The value of its donations may exceed the official development assistance (ODA). From the perspective of an individual country, then, this regional perspective brings into sharp relief the realities of ‘complex multilateralism’. Regional orders are the outcome of markedly different histories. Whereas regional integration is often pinpointed to the post-World War II period, and in particular to the origins of the European Union, regional integration as an ambition and as a political practice in fact dates back much further in history. It is linked to histories of colonialism and liberation movements (Yeates 2014; Söderbaum 2016a). The former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) instantiates an early example of world-regional social policy. Its model of communist social policy and development contrasts sharply with contemporary models of regional social policy which mainly revolve around variants of social liberalism and conservatism. Regional orders are, then, the result of different political contexts and modes of organization. A central feature of these are welfare arrangements and systems. This point is overlooked by comparative regionalism literatures, which rarely focus on social policy or social development issues. The tendency to focus on ‘developed’ regions, notably the European Union, to the neglect of middle- and lower-income countries has further marginalized the critical role that social policy and development discourses and debates are actually playing in region-building processes there. These and other points are elaborated during the course of the chapter. Regional Development Regional actors and projects of region-building are not always considered as factors shaping the conditions of social development. Scholarly literatures on regional development governance prioritize issues of economic development and a narrow range of public policy measures (notably, trade, investment and state security) (see, e.g., Bruszt and Palestini 2016). The prevailing narrative in those literatures locates historical waves in which the link between regionalism and economic development has been constructed. Typically, three main waves are identified. The first wave was in 1940–1970, when statist developmental models prevailed, underpinned by the idea that under conditions of trade imbalances with ‘core’ countries, regionalist state strategies in the South could support the process of economic transformation from agrarian and primary economies to industrialized and high-tech ones. In the second

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wave, from 1980, during the period termed ‘open regionalism’, regionalism was associated with progressing market integration through freetrade agreements, customs unions and common markets. Region-building was about regional market-making where the allocation of economic assets and economic outcomes were left to the investment and trading decisions of private actors. In the third wave, since 1990, the regional development paradigm is said to have shifted towards forms of regional governance that could reconcile potential conflicts between the requirements of regional market-making and economic development. International competitiveness in this era is seen as the outcome of capacitybuilding initiatives to upgrade institutions and provide regional public goods such as transport and telecommunication connectivity, energy integration, capacity building and human resource development (Bruszt and Palestini 2016). The identification of historical waves of regionalism is a useful heuristic device, but in practice the lines are less clearly drawn. Thus, throughout the most recent period we continue to see open regionalism alive and thriving, while regional public goods provision is unevenly taken up by region-building projects around the world. For all their differences in approach, regional development initiatives have tended to assume that social development would flow on from economic transformation. Comparative regionalism studies, as a field of academic study and research, has not explicated this point, let alone problematized it. As such, there remains a great deal of scope for context-specific social policy–development research that is purposively directed at surfacing the social and political conditions underpinning regionalizing economic transformations and the consequences of regional development governance for social welfare. Crucially, any assessment of a social policy or social development ‘turn’ in regionalism needs to verify whether and how official discourses and mandates are being carried through into practice; that is, whether tangible, robust and effective initiatives that are capable of, or are actually, raising social standards, providing public goods and improving social provision are actually being implemented. For the purposes of this chapter, and this Handbook more generally, the following observations are pertinent. Regional trade policy (and its variants) is underpinned by particular conceptions of society and social development, even though scholarly literatures on comparative regionalism do not explicate them. Regional economic integration initiatives, particularly those revolving around commercial trade and investment, articulate certain cultural values underpinning social relationships (individualism, accumulative acquisition, competitiveness) and social models of production and exchange (as in factors of production that are sold on

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the market at market-determined prices, instead of being allocated according to principles of need, redistribution or reciprocity). The societal model underpinning regionalist economic development strategies, in particular open regionalism, is often criticized for its farreaching impacts upon national social systems of welfare production and distribution, livelihoods and the provision of many kinds of public goods. A key question here is: do regional agreements strengthen or undermine state capacity as an agent of social development? Advocates of such agreements argue that they bolster national welfare systems and social innovation by virtue of the economic growth and transformative effects on services organization and delivery which they enable, and that there are clear ‘social development dividends’ in the form of jobs, tax revenue, increased productivity and greater efficiency. Critics argue that without embedding strong social regulation, such agreements exert a competitive downward pressure on social standards, and contribute to the ‘hollowing out’ of the state, and the erosion of state autonomy and its redistributive powers (Holden 2014). Most research in regional studies has focused on the European Union, and there has been far less attention to the impacts of its external development, trade and social policies on non-EU countries or to the social policy consequences of regional trade agreements adopted by regional groupings in different development contexts. Regional trade agreements incorporate sectors of direct relevance to social policy. Health services are an exemplar in this regard. For example, SADC governments have identified medicines development, production and supply as part of their regional trade-based integration plan, while ASEAN governments have identified healthcare as a priority sector for region-wide integration based on liberalizing trade in services (Arunanondchai and Fink 2006; Penfold 2015). Advocates argue that increased intra-regional health services trade (such as in telemedicine, health worker training, medicine production) presents opportunities for greater efficiency, cost savings and access to better-quality care. However, there are real risks from including health services in regional trade agreements. Regional trade agreements intervene in the domestic politics of policy making, influencing trade-offs involved in healthcare policymaking (Arunanondchai and Fink 2006). Also, such agreements provide little if any incentive to governments to properly fund health services in the interests of social equity, and they risk reducing governments’ policy space to respond effectively and comprehensively to public health issues (Holden 2014). The concern is that social development imperatives become subordinated to commercial trade and investment ones. Such concerns about regional agreements that incorporate education as a

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tradeable service have also been raised (see Education International, www.ei-ie.org; Robertson 2017). Regional Social Policy An established body of social policy literature considers the extent to which world-regional development and public policy actors and initiatives are manifestly engaged with questions of social regulation, redistribution, reproduction, representation and rights (Yeates and Deacon 2006; Deacon et al. 2010; Yeates 2007, 2014, 2017b; Yeates and Riggirozzi 2015; Bianculli and Hoffman 2016). World-regional social policy is broadly defined as cross-border public interventions on a (cross-border) regional scale that directly affect social welfare, social institutions and social relations. Key questions inspiring this literature include the following. How extensively are questions of social policy taken up in region-building projects? How are representation and participation of social policy actors structured in regional policy making and governance? What kinds of institutional responses to them result? How broad and deep is regional social policy in practice: is regional action confined to a narrow range of social sectors or is it more wide-ranging? What kinds of policy approaches and instruments are used to achieve identified goals? What is the significance of world-regional social policy for global social governance and policy, as well as for national social policy making? Because of the discipline’s dominant focus on highly institutionalized forms of social provision, the lion’s share of attention tends to be dedicated to regional organizations’ social policy discourses, mandates, policy instruments and social programmes of provision. Region-building strategies at lower levels of formalization, and regionalization processes as they relate to and influence social policy making, have received much less attention. World-regional cooperation and integration is a fertile terrain upon which scholarship in social policy and development studies meet. Arguments in favour of more coherent regionalist forms of cooperation and integration have been advanced in response to the perceived threats to public social provision at the national level resulting from global competition, the stalling of (failure to produce) global agreements in which social policy and social standards are embedded and which have ‘teeth that bite’. Such arguments emanate from those in the Global South and those in the Global North concerned with socially-just models of social policy and development. The point, it is argued, is not so much to reform and strengthen extant ‘global’ institutions that are controlled by and operate in the interests of the North, but to create countervailing and

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pluralistic sources of power properly serving the interests of the Global South and to generate greater policy space for governments and civil society in diverse development contexts to make their own policy choices. The implication of this is that the focus should be on building several regionally-based social policies of redistribution, regulation and rights as part of a more general strategy of global and national social governance in the interests of social equity (Yeates and Deacon 2010). Although the aim of increasing intra-regional trade, finance and investment occupies the preponderant share of regional policy making and initiatives, region-building is increasingly embracing other public (social) policy goals. Region-building has gone beyond its traditional purview of trade and economic integration, while questions to do with social development are increasingly present on research and regional policy agendas. Scholars, policy makers and activists are confronting key social policy questions, such as: how to forge an appropriately-balanced relationship between trade and social (labour, welfare, health) standards in region-building projects? How can regions maintain levels of taxation and progressive tax structures in the face of international competition to attract and maintain inward capital investment? And how to balance national risk and resource pooling systems and mechanisms with worldregional ones. There are in principle several advantages to a comprehensive worldregional social policy. First, regional groupings can offer their member access to broader social policy options attuned to their specific contexts. Because they consist of fewer countries with more similar cultural, legal and political characteristics, they offer greater ease and pace of agreeing on common social policies, including greater possibilities for advancing their own regionally-defined social standards. More developed countries can force social standards upwards in the poorer members, while smaller countries can have a strong blocking effect on the liberalizing ambitions of larger ones (or vice versa). Second, regional groupings can offer members enhanced access to, and influence over, global policy. Countries acting through regional associations can have a louder voice in global arenas than when they act alone. Regionally-coordinated responses can overcome the limitations of small scale initiatives, and are more likely to sustain the interest of prospective partners outside the region. Third, regional strategies can protect, promote and reshape a regional division of labour, trade and production in support of social policy objectives. Common regional trade and tax rules can help to support and build fiscal capacity in the region that can be used to support collectivelydefined regional social policy priorities. Fourth, regional social policy can enable economies of scale and the pooling of risks and resources among

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member countries. Regional action plans, regulatory frameworks and partnerships can potentially address intra-regional imbalances in education, health and welfare provision through, for example, facilities sharing arrangements. The limitations of small-scale social insurance schemes can be addressed by pooling and spreading risks regionally, akin to a regional social protection fund. Regional coordination offers the possibility of more effective preparedness for and response to disasters and other calls on aid. Fifth, regional groupings can provide donors and partners with a single point of contact for discussions relating to member countries. Regional groupings can provide a channel through which to disburse development aid according to regionally-defined social policy and development priorities. For example, the disbursement of donor aid among West African states under the EU’s Aid for Trade programme is coordinated by the West African regional grouping, ECOWAS (Yeates and Deacon 2006, 2010; Yeates 2014, 2017a, 2017b). These in-principle arguments have been advocated by various international agencies amongst others over the years, and increasingly frequently since 2016 when the Sustainable Development Goals incorporated regionalization, regional institutions and regional actors as key means of implementing the goals. However, such arguments raise the question about why countries should be compatible and able to take collective action just because they are geographical neighbours to each another. In this regard, the war-averting origins and ambitions of regional integration in Western Europe are clear enough. But we find that regional relationships that may make sense in principle may in practice be strongly inflected, even weakened, by unresolved historical issues. The border conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has not prevented these countries from joining SAARC, for example, but it is an impediment to more concerted forms of regional cooperation and integration in the domain of social policy. In East Asia, Japan’s imperialist history and the spectre of it dominating ASEAN are factors inhibiting closer collaboration among ASEAN member states. This also helps to explain their adherence to the ‘ASEAN way’: the principle of national sovereignty and non-interference in all matters of public policy. That said, recent years have witnessed ASEAN pressing ahead with initiatives to regionalize its economies by encouraging greater goods and services trade among its member states. Although ASEAN regional policy making tends to be glacial in pace it has nevertheless adopted a regional social charter and is increasingly active in matters of social and cultural affairs. At another level, it is not necessary for countries to have the same welfare types, compatible legal systems or similar economic systems in order to join a regional grouping; although it is clear that the greater

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degree to which they do will have a bearing on how far relatively loose forms of regional cooperation can move towards deeper forms of regional institutional integration. Thus, pronounced differences in welfare types or stark inequalities in wealth, income and development between member countries will not prevent regional groupings from being formed, but these will condition the social politics of region-building, including the development of regional social policy. Moreover, it is debatable how far those extant differences and inequalities can be smoothed through regional agreements and membership of regional ‘clubs’, at least on the terms that have prevailed to date.

EXAMPLES OF REGIONAL SOCIAL POLICY IN PRACTICE Social policy considerations are framing debates and agendas as to what the purpose of regional integration should be and what kinds of governance arrangements and policies are needed to support region building. Regional organizations’ mandates and competences have extended to reflect this wider agenda. Regional action on health and disease control has become a significant area for international cooperation, as public health threats from communicable diseases, pollution and antibiotic resistance, for example, cannot be addressed by countries working alone in an increasingly interconnected world. With regional labour mobility being incorporated into regional economic integration projects, regional mechanisms to uphold labour rights and allow social protection portability are also the subject of regional policy making. Regional initiatives are also increasingly embracing diverse other areas such as professional qualifications, workforce training, food security and child trafficking, amongst others (Deacon et al. 2010; Yeates 2014). Regional action in the higher education sector is also an important sector, especially for more developed economies worldwide, through which to resolve bigger challenges of global competitiveness (Robertson et al. 2016). Regional road maps for social development more generally are also emerging (Yeates 2017b). The latter reflect the growing interest of UN Regional Commissions in the possibilities of a more concerted regional approach for stimulating social development. A variety of instruments are used to develop and realize regional social policy mandates and objectives (Table 12.1). The table shows the variety of differences between regional organizations as to when and how regional social policy mandates and programmes have developed, together with what has been developed and how it is institutionalized.

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Table 12.1 Regional social policy instruments and examples from five continents 1. Instrument

2. Functions to …

3. Examples

Regional forum

Share information for mutual education, analysis and debate; promote shared analyses and create epistemic communities and networks that can inform policy debate and provide a platform for collaboration

Capacity building on communicable diseases: CARICOM Regional compact (e.g., peer review mechanisms for country development plans): PIF Regional health think tank: UNASUR

Social standard setting

Define international social standards and common frameworks for social policy (e.g., human rights charters, labour, social protection and health conventions)

Social Charter: SAARC, EU, SADC Constitutional treaty enshrining common normative framework: UNASUR Development Goals regional road map: ASEAN Regional framework on people trafficking: ASEAN

Resource mobilization and allocation

Provide resources supporting policy development and provision (e.g., stimulus finance, technical assistance, policy advice and expertise)

Regional social humanitarian fund: CAN Anti-poverty projects, social and solidarity economy trading schemes: ALBA Food security schemes: ASEAN, SAARC Regional think tank facilitating institutional reform, professionalization and capacity-building in health services: UNASUR

Regulation

Regulate in the interests of health and social protection; regulatory instruments and reform affecting entitlements and access to social provision

Regional court of justice adjudicating on labour rights: ECOWAS, EU Removal of work visa requirements for migrant workers from other member states: CARICOM, ECOWAS, EU, SAARC, SADC Mutual recognition agreements (of professional and educational qualifications and educational institutions): ASEAN, CAN, EU, MERCOSUR Social security portability entitlements: EU, GCC, MERCOSUR, CARICOM, SADC

Source:

Yeates (2017a).

Policy approaches vary between regional organizations. For example, Amaya et al.’s (2015) review compared ASEAN, UNASUR, SADC and the EU in terms of how each of these regional organizations frame health as a policy issue, and how this framing in turn shapes their prioritization of policies. ASEAN’s struggle with re-emerging diseases has engendered an approach to health framed as a matter of regional (and domestic) security. The EU approaches health as a cross-cutting, intersectoral policy

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issue. SADC frames regional health cooperation as a driver for development. UNASUR’s distinctiveness lies in its rootedness in addressing the social determinants of health as an ethical imperative (ibid.) Another approach has been to ask whether there are distinct regional social policy regimes. Drawing on the international study by Deacon et al. (2010), Van Der Vleuten (2016) suggests there are four such regimes. Her classification is based on social regulation (labour rights, occupational health and safety, gender equality and other forms of nondiscrimination), social protection policies aimed at social inclusion and poverty reduction and social redistribution (regional assistance programmes). However, she excludes a range of policy sectors, including the very significant ones of health and education in which regional policy has been highly active. The regional regime types she identifies are as follows. First, an individual rights regime which engages in social standard-setting but not in social protection or redistribution, where the rights enshrined are based on individual entitlements (for example, CoE, OAS). Second, a market integration regime, whose focus lies with the elimination of unfair competition arising from, for example, gender inequality, rather than with fundamental social rights (CAN, EU). Third, a developmental regime, which is state-led, and puts the promotion of social equality before market integration goals. Weak on regional social regulation, preferring non-binding declarations and dialogue, regional developmental regimes enshrine principles of social redistribution and solidarity (ALBA, SADC, ECOWAS). Fourth, are conservative regimes whose social policies preserve and enshrine existing societal inequalities, with weak commitments to principles of social rights, equality and international social (labour) standards (ASEAN, SAARC, GCC). Only individual rights and market integration regimes have enforcement mechanisms, through court systems or complaints systems. Any regime type analysis necessarily masks differences and exaggerates similarities. We can take issue with the categorization of regimes, the characterization of regime types, and the location of cases within particular categories. The original findings of Deacon et al.’s (2010) study certainly suggests that there is scope for such adjustments. Classifications of regional welfare regimes will undoubtedly continue to be the subject of ongoing research. There are several overall points worth highlighting. First, the diverse origins, forms and logics of regional organizations, and the region-building project of which they are a part, are reflected in their varied social policy mandates and objectives. The depth and scope of regional social policy varies considerably between regions. Many are confined to specific social sectors or issues, while (fewer) others have a broader mandate. Some

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are limited to regional cooperation (in the form of information exchange, policy learning and dialogue) rather than pursuing deeper integrationist ambitions. Second, the extent and nature of institutionalization varies considerably. Regional social policy includes exhortative as well as legislative approaches to standard setting, alongside practices of policy cooperation and coordination pursued and achieved to differing degrees of formalization. No other regional formation comes close to the EU in terms of the extent of institutionalized regional social policy. Other regional groups have instituted cooperation in social sectors and mechanisms for lesson-learning on a cross-border basis; thereafter, they have instituted to varying degrees different elements of regional redistribution, regulation, provision and rights. Many associations have regional social funds of some kind, but most do not have forms of social regulation and social rights backed by the force of law. (A notable exception is ECOWAS, which has a regional labour court.) There is a reluctance by regional groupings of governments to enter into legally-binding agreements backed by robust monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. Indeed, regional social policies have tended to progress faster as exhortative declarations of aims and principles rather than as binding regulatory or redistributive mechanisms. This preference for non-binding forms of international cooperation, it should be said, is part of a more general trend in global policy making, and it is not specific to regionalist forms of collective action and policy making. Although exhortative policy may not have ‘teeth’, it can be a precursor to the development of more substantial social policies. Indeed, it is this sustained, incrementalist, long term project involving the participation of labour, development and civil society groups alongside governments and business interests that, in the Western European context, gave rise to the transformation of a customs union with limited labour mobility rights, into an economic and political union with (by contemporary world standards) a relatively substantial regional social policy with regional mechanisms of social provision, redistribution, regulations and legally enforceable rights of citizenship (Yeates 2014). However, we cannot assume this trajectory in other parts of the world. As regional organizations do not command control over resource generation or have independent revenue-raising powers they are dependent on member states or international donors for funding, and this can limit their capacities to pursue regional policies and programmes of redistribution, regulation and rights. Third, the dynamics of regional social policy development differ considerably, temporally and geographically. In all groupings we find labour, development and civil society groups, business interest groups,

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political parties and governments, but in many developing-country contexts, regional social policy actors also include those that are external to the region: for example, international donors acting unilaterally (such as UKAID, USAID, the Gates Foundation) or through multilateral forums (such as the OECD, EU, World Bank); regional development banks also play a critical role in the development of social policy reforms in Southern regions. One concern is that international donors’ preferred social policy models take precedence in shaping the policy approach and directions of social policies, and that regional priorities coming from within the region are unable to be fully developed. This concern was a major impetus behind the origins and development of UNASUR, which sought to eschew extra-regional influence from international donors on the development of its social policy mandate and programmes of social action. This is similarly the case for ALBA. In any case, it is important to be alert to different combinations of regional social policy actors, and political and institutional dynamics in different contexts, which will vary according to the issues at hand. Indeed, the opportunity structures available for social policy actors to exert influence over the course and direction of regional social policy vary considerably. Most regionalist projects are state-led integration processes, and afford only limited participation (if at all) by civil society in policy making. The struggle to establish a formal right of representation and participation in regional governance and policy making is one shared by many social movements and civil society groups (Berrón et al. 2013; Olivet and Brennan 2010). That said, in practice, the non-state groups pursue their social policy models and goals in relation to region-building projects in the domestic arena as well as in the regional one, influencing state decisions in numerous areas. This raises the question of how institutional regimes of regional governance structure representation and participation in social policy making. What kinds of governance arrangements are conducive to, or closed to, democratic representation and participation? And how does this impact upon the scope and depth of regional social policy in different contexts? Fourth, region-building strategies do not steamroll over national differences. They contribute to diversity within a region and at the level of global policy making. This diversity can compound complexity in policy making, but it can also generate welcome policy debate. Policy models promulgated through regional fora and by regional organizations can provide an alternative to those espoused by powerful global policy actors such as the World Bank. Teichman (2007), for example, notes that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) enjoys closer and more cooperative relationships with Latin American governments than the World

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Bank. The IDB’s borrower members and majority shareholders are Latin American governments, and they enjoy a shared ‘cultural understanding’ with the IDB – unlike the World Bank. In the context of conditional cash transfers policy, the closeness of the IDB to governments in the region meant that the IDB did not push civil society participation on reluctant governments through its loan facilities, in contrast to the World Bank which became more intensively engaged with civil society organizations in pressing for their participation (ibid.). Thus, the presence of regional entities stimulates discussion within the region and beyond about what kind of development is desirable, the basis on which it is built, and how it can be realized through context-specific responses. Powerful regions are also capable of providing direct ‘competition’ to ‘external’ global agencies and alternative sources of development financing. Fifth, the extent to which regional social governance is substantially challenging the prevailing trade and economic development paradigm is far from clear. This is despite the fact that region-building projects have demonstrated themselves capable of going beyond social liberal and conservative models to press more socially transformative, developmental social policy agendas. In this sense, regionalism may be a bulwark against the excesses of free trade agendas; albeit, it seems, only in some cases and under certain conditions.

PROSPECTS AND AVENUES FOR REGIONAL SOCIAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT Regional organizations are actively involved in social policy making, from framing the definition of issues through to the implementation of programmes of social action, and monitoring and evaluation of their effects and outcomes. While what can be achieved in theory and in principle may fall short of what happens in practice, there is nonetheless a significant international impetus driving the development of regional social governance and policy. The topic and issues discussed in this chapter are highly significant for the global and national politics of social policy and development. In particular, there is an international impetus behind a reformed system of global governance built on stronger regions, underpinned by greater levels of regional cooperation and integration. For example, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) incorporate regional cooperation and integration as key means by which socially-developmental policy objectives can potentially be achieved (Yeates 2017b). This may present more of a challenge for UN organizations than for the World Bank. This

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is because the latter has for some time been alert and open to regional (economic) development and the ways in which regional groupings of countries can harness their collective power in support of that (Yeates 2014). For UN organizations this regional turn in the international development agenda may require a significant shift in its approach to social policy and development. There are some signs that its Regional Economic Commissions and other UN social agencies are starting to consider the benefits of stronger regional governance. However, whether this will take the UN beyond its own extant regional structures and propel it to engage more with regional groupings of states and regional development banks remains to be seen. In any case, the incorporation of regions as implementing partners in the SDGs is a highly significant shift in the global social policy and development agenda which will play out in dynamic and variable ways over the coming years. In principle, it raises the prospects of further ‘thickening’ of regional social governance and policy. In this context, a key question is whether the purposes, methods and means for generating significant inclusive development dividends can be achieved through region-building projects as they have been conducted to date. Evidence from regional social policy studies and other areas suggest that radical shifts are needed in the ways that social development agendas are made visible within broader development agendas, globally, regionally and nationally. Given the difficulties besetting global policy making, and the obvious advantages of collective action beyond unilateral or bilateral responses, it is likely that regional governance will continue to be a favoured mode of global governance. In this, ‘soft law’ will likely play a leading part, not least to anticipate objections to highly formalized kinds of institutional integration and to circumvent accusations of regional organizations encroaching into the sovereignty of nations. Soft law is more acceptable to many governments because it does not legally bind them to a set of norms or fixed rules, and allows them greater flexibility. The problem is that social progress through soft law is subject to the pitfalls of international agreements based on voluntaristic compliance. Soft law is also less likely to be able to challenge trade and investment agreements, which tend to be enshrined in ‘hard law’. It is this inequality between soft (social) law and hard (commerce) law that lies at the heart of the challenge for advocates of comprehensive welfare systems founded on the principle of universalism, social equity and social rights. A further issue relates to trends for countries to simultaneously be members of different regional organizations. Regional groupings have different institutional logics. As we have seen, some are no more than arrangements to set rules around trade and tariffs for participating

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countries; while others have gone beyond this level of cooperation, embarking on a more substantial integrationist agenda involving social, environmental and human rights issues and a degree of pooling of sovereignty rights. How these different and sometimes overlapping regional institutional regimes play out within any given country poses a number of challenges. For example, how does support for and commitment to a more substantial regional social agenda in relation to one grouping sit alongside a commitment to a ‘thin’ trading regime in another? Does multiple membership of regional groupings and support for different modes of region building increase the prospects for negotiating better domestic social policy and development outcomes? A further question concerns whether regionalist, mega-regionalist and trans-regionalist groupings premised on open regionalism will enhance or diminish prospects for a coherent regional or national social policy aligned with inclusive development. The potentially adverse effects on national economic and social development were a major concern arising from the mega-regionalist free trade project involving 34 countries, US-led Free Trade Association of the Americas (FTAA). The FTAA was ill-fated, but such issues recur as new trans-regional trade agreements are agreed (for example, TPP, signed in March 2018 by 11 governments). To what extent can social policy regimes, founded on the principle of protection and social cohesion, and pursuing strategies to lock in the benefits of intra-regional trade and resourcing, be sustained by such mega-trade agreements founded on open regionalism? This chapter has drawn attention to the complex multi-institutional, multi-level framework within which social policies in any one country and part of the world develop, opening up welfare state and system research in new directions. Social policy agendas including regional approaches to social policy are embedded in regional political economies of welfare and wider regionalization processes, yet these regionalization and region-building processes have not yet received as much attention as they merit. There is considerable scope for research that illuminates how the social relations of welfare, and the governance of territories and populations, are being remade over larger integrative scales, and with what effects and outcomes. This can in turn generate new scholarly inquiry capable of incorporating substantive issues associated with the consolidation of regional organizations into literatures on national welfare restructuring and social policy change. Examining the interactions between regional and national-level social policy governance as well as between regional and global social policy governance may provide crucial avenues through which we can gain a better understanding of the contemporary condition of social policies, the state of welfare, and the

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possibilities for inclusive social development in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The author was Principal Investigator of an ESRC-DfID grant on world-regional social governance and policy (Grant Ref. ES/L005336/1) from which this Handbook chapter arises (see http://www.open.ac.uk/ socialsciences/prari/). The chapter does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the ESRC.

REFERENCES Amaya, A., S. Kingah and P. de Lombaerde (2015), ‘What’s in a word? The framing of health at the regional level: ASEAN, EU, SADC and UNASUR’, Global Social Policy, 15(3), 229–260. Arunanondchai, J. and C. Fink (2006), ‘Trade in health services in the ASEAN region’, Health Promotion International, 21(1), 59–66. Bianculli, Andrea C. and Andrea R. Hoffman (eds) (2016), Regional Organisations and Social Policy in Europe and Latin America, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Berrón, Gonzalo, Jenina Joy Chavez, Cecilia Olivet and Graciela Rodríguez (eds) (2013), Rethinking Regionalisms in Times of Crises: A Collection of Activists’ Perspectives from Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Bangkok, Thailand: Transnational Institute, Instituto Equit and Focus on the Global South, as part of the initiative People’s Agenda for Alternative Regionalisms (PAAR). Available at: https://www.tni.org/en/publication/rethinking-regionalisms-intimes-of-crises. Börzel, Tanja A. and Thomas Risse (eds) (2016), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bruszt, Laszlo and Stefano Palestini (2016), ‘Regional development governance’, in Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 374–404. Deacon, Bob, Maria Macovei, Luk Van Langenhove and Nicola Yeates (eds) (2010), World-Regional Social Policy and Global Governance: New Research and Policy Agendas in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, Abingdon: Routledge. Holden, Chris (2014), ‘International trade and welfare’, in Nicola Yeates (ed.), Understanding Global Social Policy, 2nd edition, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 105–128. Olivet, Cecilia and Brid Brennan (2010), ‘Regional social policy: reclaiming regional integration: social movements and civil society organisations as key protagonists’, in Bob Deacon, Maria Macovei, Luk Van Langenhove and Nicola Yeates (eds), WorldRegional Social Policy and Global Governance: New Research and Policy Agendas in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 63–81. Penfold, Erica (2015), ‘Regionalism in the southern African development community: integration for better health?’, PRARI Working Paper 15-11, Milton Keynes: Open University. Robertson, Susan L. (2017), ‘Making education markets through global trade agreements’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 15(3), 296–308.

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244 Handbook of social policy and development Robertson, Susan L., Kris Olds, Roger Dale and Que Anh Dang (eds) (2016), Global Regionalisms and Higher Education: Projects, Processes, Politics, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Söderbaum, Fredrik (2016a), Rethinking Regionalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Söderbaum, Fredrik (2016b), ‘Old, new, and comparative regionalism: the history and scholarly development of the field’, in Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 16–37. Teichman, J. (2007), ‘Multilateral lending institutions and transnational policy networks in Mexico and Chile’, Global Governance, 13, 557–573. Van Der Vleuten, Anna (2016), ‘Regional social and gender governance’, in Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 405–429. Van Langenhove, Luk (2011), Building Regions: The Regionalization of the World Order, Farnham: Ashgate. Yeates, N. (ed.) (2007), Special Issue on the Social Policy Dimensions of WorldRegionalism, Global Social Policy, 7(3), 251–385. Yeates, N. (2014), ‘The socialisation of regionalism and the regionalisation of social policy: contexts, imperatives and challenges’, in Alexandra Kaasch and Paul Stubbs (eds), Transformations in Global and Regional Social Policies, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 17–43. Yeates, N. (2017a), ‘Southern regionalisms, global agendas: innovating inclusive access to health, medicines and social protection in a context of social inequity’, PRARI Policy Brief No. 8, Milton Keynes: Open University. Freely available at: http://www.open.ac. uk/socialsciences/prari/files/policy_brief_8_en.pdf. Yeates, N. (2017b), ‘Beyond the Nation State: how can regional social policy contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals?’, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development Issue Brief no. 5. November, 4pp. Geneva: UNRISD. Available at: http://www.unrisd.org/ib5. Yeates, N. and B. Deacon (2006), ‘Globalism, regionalism and social policy: framing the debate’, United Nations University Centre for Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS) Occasional Papers 0-2006/6. Bruges: UNU-CRIS. Available at: http://oro. open.ac.uk/13183/1/20060418154630.O-2006-6.pdf. Yeates, Nicola and Bob Deacon (2010), ‘Globalisation, regionalism and social policy’, in Bob Deacon, Maria Macovei, Luk Van Langenhove and Nicola Yeates (eds), WorldRegional Social Policy and Global Governance, London: Routledge, pp. 27–39. Yeates, Nicola, Maria Macovei and Luk Van Langenhove (2010), ‘The evolving context of regional social policy’, in Bob Deacon, Maria Macovei, Luk Van Langenhove and Nicola Yeates (eds), World-Regional Social Policy and Global Governance, London: Routledge, pp. 191–212. Yeates, N. and P. Riggirozzi (eds) (2015), Special Issue on Regional Health Governance, Policy and Diplomacy, Global Social Policy, 15(3), 212–354.

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APPENDIX 12.1 ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS ASEAN – Association of Southeast Asian Nations ALBA – Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas AU – African Union CAN – Andean Community CARICOM – Caribbean Community COE – Council of Europe EAF – East Asia Forum ECOWAS – Economic Community of West African States EU – European Union GCC – Gulf Cooperation Council MERCOSUR – Southern Cone Common Market OAS – Organization of American States PAHO – Pan American Health Organization PIF – Pacific Islands Forum SAARC – South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation SADC – Southern African Development Community UNASUR – Union of South American Nations

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13. The informal economy and informal employment Francie Lund

SETTING THE CONTEXT A considerable obstacle to greater understanding between the fields of social policy on the one hand, and development studies on the other, is that by and large neither domain has an explicit articulation of the informal economy and those who work within it. The informal economy does not feature in any significant way in the concepts or discourses of social policies such as health, education, social security, social services, or – to use a more recent term – social protection. Tendler (2004, p. 124) describes how development planners have seen the informal sector as a welfare measure; others have described it as a ‘safety net’, which is a term reserved for measures to assist those who do not work. Mkandawire (2004, p. 16) notes that the informal labour market has itself been described by some economists as a ‘market distortion’. The discipline of economics has been dominant in the global institutions that shape development. Until recently there has been an absence in neoclassical economics of any attention to the informal economy or to informal labour markets. Labour economics and the related field of labour studies are mostly taken up with formal labour markets, their regulation, and formal workers’ organisations. Of all the people who do paid work in the Global South, the majority are in the informal economy. Chen and Beard (2018), using data from 50 countries, estimate that informal employment comprises over threequarters of urban employment in Africa, over half in Asia and the Pacific, and just under half in Latin America and the Caribbean. If agricultural workers were added to the analysis, the numbers in informal employment would rise. The majority of informal workers are self-employed. They have made work, for themselves and for others. The lack of attention to the informal economy is partly because of the lack of recognition of the size of the informal economy in the Global South. Despite the great improvements in the last two decades in collecting data about informal work in household and labour force 246

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surveys, informal workers remain undercounted because they may be less visible, and less accessible to data collectors. There are sectoral differences in the extent of their visibility. Street vendors, for example, are easily seen on the public roadways and markets where they work. Less in evidence are the home-based workers, or industrial outworkers, who do their garment stitching, jewellery making, shoe repairing in their own homes. Domestic workers do their work in the private homes of their employers, in subordinate relations of power to their employers, and they are not easily or accurately captured in surveys. Waste pickers and recyclers collect from other people’s private homes, and many do their sorting at waste dumps, far from the public eye. The informal economy can be seen as a missing link between poverty and development. Many in the informal economy live and work in appalling conditions, and the intention here is not to valorise or romanticise the informal labour market. The intention is to recognise informal paid work as real work. The chapter starts with setting out broad contours of the informal economy, with attention to internationally accepted definitions around and in the informal economy. It presents an approach to the concept of ‘status in employment’ in the informal economy. There is a sharp distinction, in terms of access to development programmes and to social services, between for example those who are self-employed and those who are employed by someone else in the informal economy; such distinctions determine an understanding of the poverty risks faced by different categories of workers, as well as the gendered distribution of work-related risks. While there is a need for strict definitions in the classification of employment status, there are also linkages between formal and informal sectors, with many different places on the continuum between formal and informal work. Three current issues and debates are selected which speak to both social policy and development. First, it is argued that there is a need for both domains to focus more on the role played by the local level of government and governance, and the provision of infrastructure, and this is especially pertinent with the rapid growth of urbanisation (see Beall, Chapter 8 in this volume). Second, a hidden dynamic in both development studies and in much of social policy is unpaid care work: the role of women in the reproduction of households, in household management and in bringing up and caring for both children and frail or ill members of the household. This has deeply gendered implications for women’s ability to participate in paid employment outside of the household; however, informal work offers some women some flexibility in being able to manage households and informal work at the same time. Third, a

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growing movement of informal workers networks, organised mainly on sectoral or occupational lines (street vendors, waste recyclers, homebased workers, for example), are demanding and increasingly securing representation and a voice in policy platforms, at local and national government level, and in global organisations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), and in setting the New Urban Agenda through Habitat forums. The chapter concludes with the identification of some lines of enquiry that might serve to knit together more clearly joint concerns of development studies and of social policy.

UNDERSTANDING THE INFORMAL ECONOMY The informal sector was identified in the early 1970s in Africa. Anthropologist Keith Hart coined the term to describe the many activities in the informal labour market in Ghana (Hart 1973). At about the same time, the ILO, reporting on a visit to Kenya in East Africa, drew attention to the importance of the informal sector (International Labour Office 1972). Until recently, the terms ‘informal sector’ and ‘informal economy’ were not well defined, and were commonly used as synonyms. Other commonly used terms have been the ‘black economy’, the ‘grey economy’, and the ‘unorganised sector’, all with negative connotations. Clearer Definitions and Better Data The International Conference of Labour Statisticians is the permanent international institution that considers standard setting and guidelines for labour force statistics. At its 17th Annual Conference in 2003 it reached agreement on the following basic conceptual division: ‘the informal sector refers to the production and employment that takes place in small or unregistered enterprises, informal employment refers to employment without legal and social protection … and the informal economy refers to all units, activities and workers so defined and the output from them’ (International Labour Office 2003). The significant conceptual shift was that the ‘informal sector’ is now accepted as an enterprise-focused or firm-focused term, while ‘informal employment’ refers to those in informal jobs, whether self-employed or in waged work, and whether in the informal or the formal sector. In many countries in the South, this conceptual refinement enabled a clearer acknowledgement of the fact that the majority of workers, whether agricultural or urban, have always been in informal employment in the informal sector. Furthermore, the majority of them are self-employed.

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Dramatic improvements to statistics about the numbers working in the informal economy have taken place in the last two decades. The International Labour Organization has led an international team of experts in estimating the numbers in informal employment, and continues to strive for the best possible comparability across countries. Since the turn of the century, three editions of a series all called Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Profile have been produced. The 2002 edition used indirect and residual methods across 25 countries as there was little available national labour force data that included informal workers. The second edition in 2013 was able to report on national survey data on non-agricultural employment in 47 countries, as a result of the significant increase over the decade in the number of household and labour force surveys collecting consistent informal worker data; neither the first nor second edition could include agricultural employment because of paucity of data. The 2018 third edition presents data on agricultural and non-agricultural employment of the working population age 15 and over in more than 100 countries (ILO 2018). It is objectively difficult to obtain reliable data on incomes earned by informal workers. Research in a number of countries shows that the vast majority of informal workers earn well below the income tax threshold. Mitlin and Satterthwaite (2013, pp. 151–152) describe some of the difficulties involved in estimating earnings, including the fact that many surveys capture only the income of heads of household; surveys are designed by researchers who are themselves not aware of the extent of informal work; they thus do not know what to prompt for. Also, household survey respondents may have unreliable and volatile patterns of earning, and may not be able to report accurately on the small and unreliable incomes earned by different people in a household. Formal–Informal Boundaries and Linkages Drawing a clear boundary between formal and informal labour markets can be difficult. It is relatively easy to differentiate at the extreme ends of the continuum of formal and informal work. At one end is, say, a civil servant or factory worker in a permanent job with a written contract and a range of benefits additional to the wage or salary. These could include paid leave, payment for overtime work, compensation for sickness or injury, a savings or pensions fund, membership of a health insurance scheme, perhaps access to a housing subsidy, among other components of the ‘social wage’. These provide a measure of security for the health and well-being of the worker and their family. Towards the informal end of the continuum is a self-employed street vendor with an uncertain,

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unreliable and low income, no paid holiday, no work-related social provision, and no coverage for access to health services (unless in a country with affordable health services to citizens), or to savings for retirement. Between these extremes is a fluid and changing middle of the continuum. Related to this, there are many and complex linkages between the formal and informal economies. Understanding the dynamics of these linkages challenges the stereotype of the informal economy as always marginal, residual and disconnected. Common examples of linkages are the urban home-based seamstresses in hundreds of cities who get their equipment such as machines and threads from formal shops. In Oaxaca, a skilled Mexican maker of tin artefacts – some for the church, some such as Frida Kahlo flaming hearts for the public – sources his tin sheets from the United States. In South Africa, a woman in her home in a Durban township stitches shoe soles to shoe uppers; she gets her orders and goods from the formal shoe factory upon which she is entirely dependent for her income, though she is not registered as that factory’s employee. Status in Employment: Income, Risks and Gender There is diversity within the informal economy, in terms of categories of employment, incomes earned, and risks faced at and through work. There are people in the self-employed category, such as professionals, whose incomes are relatively high. On the whole, though, those working informally are poor. Furthermore, some people work in more than one occupation at the same time, though at different times of day, in which one could be in a formal setting and one in informal employment. Figure 13.1 shows the categories of informal employment (the technical term is ‘classification of status in employment’) in stylised form, showing poverty risk (income earned), the extent of work-related risks faced, and the segmentation by sex (the distribution of women and men across different categories). At the apex are the employers, self-employed people who employ others. Next are the regular informal wage workers who may be employed by formal or informal employers. They are followed by own-account operators, who are self-employed but do not employ others – they work on their own. They constitute by far the majority of those who work in non-agricultural employment in the informal economy. Industrial outworkers, also called home-based workers and sometimes homeworkers, work from their own homes, very often doing piece rate work (being paid a set amount for, say, a specific number of shirt sleeves sewn, or blouses buttoned). Many are, in fact, dependent on only one or two firms for their work, and the ILO is in the

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The informal economy and informal employment 251 Poverty Average Risk Earnings

Segmentaon by Sex

Predominantly Men Employers Informal wage workers: ‘Regular’

Men and Women Own-account operators Informal wage workers: Casual

Predominantly Women

Industrial outworkers/homeworkers Unpaid family workers

High

Source:

Low

Chen (2012).

Figure 13.1 The pyramid of status in employment: income, risks and gender process of creating an additional category for them, that of ‘dependent contractor’. At the bottom of the pyramid is the category of unpaid family members contributing to the family enterprise; by far the majority of these are women. A simple example from the construction industry will illustrate some of the different categories of status in employment. An informal construction worker wants to build a small bridge over a stream to get closer access to a road that goes to the local market. He is not registered as an enterprise. He employs three men to do the building work and uses his own truck for transporting building materials. These men are thus informal waged workers working for an informal employer. The informal employer’s wife makes the bricks which will be used to stabilise the bridge; doing this work, she is an unpaid contributing family member. She also, however, makes additional bricks which she sells separately from and outside her husband’s informal enterprise, making her simultaneously an unpaid contributing worker to the family enterprise, and self-employed. Returning to the pyramid, workers at the top are more likely to be men, and to earn more than women, and earn more than those in categories lower down the pyramid. They may also face lower work-related risks than women. By contrast, more women are likely to be found in the

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bottom three categories, and they are more likely to be lower paid or wholly unpaid. Women may be more likely to face higher work-related risks than men are; this may vary according to specific occupation and specific place of work. There is a seeming paradox here, which is difficult to reconcile both in scholarship and in practice. On the one hand, it is vital to ‘put people in boxes’: to classify, according to the international classification of statistics on the informal economy, the now-standard definitions of status in employment. On the other hand, the complexity and diversity within the informal economy needs to be recognised, as well as its fluidity and dynamism, to enable better integration of the concepts of, and linkages between, the formal and informal economies.

THE INFORMAL ECONOMY IN SOCIAL POLICY AND IN DEVELOPMENT STUDIES In general, informal workers appear very little in either development studies or social policy. In social policy, this may be because much social policy emerged in the Northern context, and in response to the development of Northern welfare states (but see Midgley 1995, and Midgley, Chapter 1 in this volume, for an account of the longer history of different domains of social policy in pre- and post-independence contexts in the South). Development studies also actively emerged in the postindependence context (Midgley, Chapter 1 in this volume), which preceded or just overlapped with the recognition of the informal economy as an important economic force that was not merely residual and marginal to the mainstream economy. In general, development studies concerns itself with the economics and growth side of how societies develop, and social policy more on the consumption and welfare side. Some recent titles point to an emerging convergence, however: Pensions in Development (Charlton and McKinnon 2001, bolded in the original), Social Protection as Development Policy (Cook and Kabeer 2010), Re-Thinking Care in a Development Context (Razavi 2012) and ‘Transformative Social Protection’ (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler 2004). These new approaches all seek to reconcile economic and social policy, with an emphasis on social policy as social and economic investment. Some focus on cash transfers, which have gained a great deal of attention in the mobilisation within international agencies around global social floors (see Deacon 2013 for a lively insider’s account of ‘social policy in the making’, as reflected in his title).

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The main debates in social policy are about the proportional contributions and responsibilities of the state, market, family and communities in the provision of services such as health, education and welfare. Individual scholars may base their work on the basic needs approach, or the livelihoods approach. The current move towards a rights-based approach, towards social benefits as simply entitlements, can be in tension with a productivist approach which, while agreeing with rights as the basis for entitlements, places more emphasis on the investments in social spending as having clear medium term impacts on people’s ability to participate productively in social and economic life, as well as to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty (Alfers et al. 2017). Esping-Andersen’s immense contribution to the development of welfare regime analysis, beginning with The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Esping-Andersen 1990), marked the revival of interest in the assumptions underlying the development of different models of welfare capitalism. His work was mostly relevant to regimes in the Global North, and indeed to urban contexts. There have been subsequent attempts to extend the analysis to regions in the Global South (for example Gough et al. 2004). Esping-Andersen’s initial analysis was blind to gender issues in welfare provision, which means that he did not see women’s unpaid care work in the fields of health and welfare as a vital part of social provision. McKinnon notes that one of the challenges facing the administration and delivery of social security is that there are ‘distinct policy areas across the life course (for example, child care, labour market interventions and unemployment, and long term care’ (McKinnon 2016, p. 16). He also draws attention to one of the obstacles in the way of interactions between different domains within social policy: the very fragmented literatures in the policy fields of health, education, and social security and social assistance (McKinnon, personal communication, 2018). It must also be noted that, within the broad field of health, there are different literatures and practices between, say, occupational health and safety, and public health. In addition, social policies in the fields of health, education, social assistance and social welfare do not have a worker focus. Those concerned with health may well take into account the worker’s need to work; those concerned with education might be concerned about aligning their curricula with likely future employment possibilities of students; those working in the field of disability in welfare services may be attempting to connect people with physical disabilities with opportunities for paid work. However, the point of departure of social policy, in general, frames the context on the grounds of individuals and households as citizens, rather than on the grounds of their working status. The anchoring assumption of the advanced welfare states is and was that there

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would be full or nearly full employment, and that direct taxes on working individuals would be the revenue source for public spending on welfare provision. Development studies emerged with a largely rural and agricultural focus, within a largely post-colonial context, or in the transition of countries in the Global South to independence. Development studies has at different times focused on the peasantry, subsistence farmers and agricultural workers who are mostly poor, but has not so far taken on the growing informality of work in the modern state. The rapid growth of cities has recently significantly shifted the attention of development studies towards urban analysis (Beall and Fox 2009; Mitlin and Satterthwaite 2013; Satterthwaite and Mitlin 2014).

CURRENT ISSUES Three domains have been chosen which, while they are important to both social policy and to development, are not dwelt on with any weight by either: the provision of infrastructure, which has direct effects on the health, productivity and general welfare outcomes of informal workers; how women’s unpaid care work in the household constrains their opportunities to participate in the labour market; and the role of informal workers and their organisations as significant interested parties in policy development and implementation. Infrastructural Provision The place of work is an important determinant of health; see Mitlin and Satterthwaite (2013, pp. 91–150) for a rich analysis and summary of literature about the relationship between health status, health service provision, informal work and informal settlements. If participation in the labour market is to provide improved security and well-being, workers need to be enabled to accumulate assets and grow their often very small enterprises. A fundamental issue is whether informal workers have the right to a secure space in which to operate economically, whether as industrial outworkers in their own homes, shoe sellers in public spaces, or rural workers growing food for the market. The secure place then needs basic infrastructure. In common to both rural and urban workers these may be shelter, sanitation, clean water, garbage removal, a place for storage of goods, ventilation, among others.

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None of the above is directly in the domain of social policy, with the important exception of public health in its focus on the ‘social determinants of health’. In the social policy domain, the decisions about health, education and social protection are made at national level (in federal systems, there may be variation in policies at state or provincial level). Local authorities may have a health division, but that is likely to deal only with urban public health problems. Yet in most countries it is the local level of government that may critically influence the provision of the infrastructure that impacts on the daily working conditions of informal workers. Mitlin and Satterthwaite (2013, p. 47) show how poor urban households may have to spend a lot on non-food essentials, such as paid water, paid toilet facilities and health care. They hold that ‘More effective local governance can reduce these costs or provide better living conditions, so reducing poverty without increasing incomes.’ An important institutional issue is that of whether all three of the national or federal, provincial and local levels of government are integrated vertically (is the national mandate being implemented at local level?) as well as horizontally (in local government, is there alignment of policies between divisions and departments?). On the vertical axis, a national-level labour policy may mandate that attention be given to the specific work-related needs of informal workers for health provision, for example by allowing workers to register for health facilities close to their place of work, as well as close to their homes. This may not be accepted by the health departments of all municipalities, who think primarily in terms of the needs of citizens as residents. On the horizontal axis, and staying in the field of health, within particular local authorities there may be little integration between departments. For example, it may be that the local departments of urban planning, and of housing, and of health, have different priorities and rationales for where space should be allocated to street traders who cook for and sell to daily commuters. Seen from the point of view of informal workers themselves, workers (mainly women) in Ahmedabad, Bangkok and Durban reported very similar barriers to inclusion to health services, despite the fact that India, Thailand and South Africa have widely different health services. In other words, the barriers were not uniformly about lack of resources, as much as they were about institutional issues that could be changed with little cost. A major issue was that, though health services were near places of work in the city, workers could not use those services as they had to be registered at the nearest facility to their own homes. Then, hours of opening of health facilities made it difficult to attend, as workers had to leave home earlier than facilities opened, and got home after they closed.

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Registration procedures were cumbersome, and time spent on transport and in long queues or the wrong queues meant time spent not earning. While in all three cities the workers could get low cost access to health services, the time in queues, and frequently the rude attitudes of nursing and other staff, led even very poor workers to choose to go to more expensive private health sector facilities. Migrant workers, both crossborder and within-country, often did not speak the language used by hospital staff. Well Paid Care Work, Low Paid Care Work and Unpaid Care Work There are many workers, formal and informal, paid and unpaid, in the care sector, and they are key in health and welfare provision. This work is central in the reproduction of the labour force. Paid care work is done in public and private sectors, and women predominate. It is undertaken in a hierarchy of occupations. Some are professional categories such as nursing, social work and occupational health. Low paid care work can include, in the health field, the work of very low paid assistant nurses. It also includes domestic workers whose tasks may be intimately involved with the care of family members. In some countries, domestic work is not recognised as ‘work’ at all. Unpaid care work is the production of goods and services for final consumption within the household (Budlender 2010). The System of National Accounts (an internationally agreed framework, processed through the United Nations, for measuring the performance of national economies regardless of their level of development) recognises unpaid care work as work; however, unpaid care work is not included in the calculation of country gross domestic product. Not having this data means not being able to include the contribution of unpaid care work to the reproduction of the labour force, the market economy, or to overall well-being (Budlender and Moussié 2013). Voluntary workers are commonly found in health and welfare services, in some countries as an integral part of formal social policies. Government spending on health and welfare can be used to provide direct services, or to subsidise private provision. The spending can provide the foundation for networks of volunteers who can assist with care work. Unpaid voluntary work often becomes conceptually elided with unpaid ‘work in the community’ (Moser 1993); this is almost always work undertaken by women, and is not properly recognised for its important contribution to the overall provision of health and welfare services.

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Unpaid care work in most societies is simply seen as ‘women’s work’, and may be accepted as such by women doing this work. Paid informal work, especially for those who are self-employed, offers many women some flexibility in being able to combine the necessity to earn with household caring responsibilities. At a macro policy level the unpaid care work which has to be done in all societies needs to be taken into account in all public policies, both social and economic. In particular, policies for ‘women’s economic empowerment’ are of little value unless they articulate the relationship between unpaid care work and women’s ability to earn in the labour market. Affordable child care provision has a direct effect on women’s ability to do paid work; such provision will have a more significant impact on the earnings of poorer women. Representation and Voice: Informal Workers Participating in Policy Change The formal employment relationship between worker and employer has, in the main, a clear regulatory regime, with set rules and procedures for collective bargaining around working conditions. Informal workers, and especially those who are self-employed, by definition have no such relationship. In urban areas, it is often the local authority which determines in large part their daily working conditions (see above). Informal workers across the world have organised into associations such as co-operatives, self-help groups and, less commonly, in formal trade unions. Martha Chen and colleagues (Chen et al. 2007) provide a framework for analysis of informal worker organisations, using the generic term ‘member-based organisations’ (MBOs). Leaders of MBOs are (or should be) accountable to a defined set of members. The MBOs are typically sector-based (for example, for transport workers or waste pickers or street vendors). They are usually very locally based, for example in a market or city block or commuter node. They are often led by men, but with the majority of members being women. Associations of informal workers can be a vehicle for inclusion in forums and platforms for participation in local and national-level social and economic policy formulation. Homenet Thailand organises homebased workers, and is well known for its two-decades-long participation in national health policy reforms. The Self-Employed Women’s Association in India, with its nearly 2 million paid-up workers, is well known for its engagement with national legislation governing informal workers, as well as its role in national and global social policy reforms around child care, health, housing and disaster management, among others.

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Global and regional networks of informal workers have emerged: StreetNet International for street and market vendors was formally launched in 2002; the most recently formed global organisation is the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF), launched in 2014. Homenet South East Asia and Homenet South Asia are regional federations for home-based workers. These help in broadening the acceptance of the informal labour market as a real labour market, and informal work as real work. An aim of the global networks is to boost the recognition of informal work, with the aim of mobilising for better working conditions. One of the routes for doing this is to find or build platforms for engagement in policy reforms. Box 13.1 describes progress made by organisations of domestic workers, including the formation of the IDWF.

BOX 13.1

RECOGNITION OF DOMESTIC WORK STARTS HERE

Worldwide, an estimated 50 million domestic workers do the vital tasks of cleaning and maintenance in employers’ homes. This may enable members of the employers’ households to do paid work. Furthermore, domestic workers may do a variety of tasks that are clearly in the field of social policy, such as care of frail elderly household members, care and upbringing of children, as well as general household management. The majority of domestic workers are women, and the majority earn well below a country’s average wage level. There are country differences in terms of the categorisation of domestic workers. In some countries they are classified as formal workers, or partially formal; in others they are not recognised as workers at all, or may be classified as self-employed. In many countries, domestic workers have been excluded from legislation covering basic conditions of employment, such as hours of work and paid leave. In 2014 the International Labour Organization passed a convention on domestic work, the Domestic Workers Convention C189. This occurred after vigorous global organising and campaigning by domestic workers’ organisations across the world, with support from rights-based and worker-based organisations, and from within the ILO itself. Domestic workers are now entitled to the same basic conditions of employment as other workers. The ILO processes of ratification and change in legislation, and then ensuring compliance, are important steps ahead, and are receiving the concerted attention of domestic workers’ organisations and their partners and allies. In 2014 the ILO passed a Convention on Domestic Work. More than 20 countries accepted C189 within the first four years, with Uruguay being the first to ratify. The list of these countries is striking for the regional spread across the globe, the diversity in country size and in population size: Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Finland, Germany, Guinea, Guyana, Italy, Ireland, Jamaica, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, South Africa, Switzerland and Uruguay.

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It is not unusual for organisations of informal workers to have internal divisions, to struggle to become financially independent, and to form alliances with other interest groups. Many remain purposely invisible for fear of conflict with local authorities or others who control their work places and distribution channels. Nevertheless, they are key interest groups which can participate in dialogues in both the social policy and the development domains, in local decisions about allocation of places for informal economic activity, and in enduring platforms for negotiations about access to resources in rural and urban areas. The ILO processes and instruments of recommendations, conventions and ratifications are useful as the basis for worker mobilisation. Alliances between informal workers’ associations and formal trade unions are often suggested as potential partnerships through which informal workers could strengthen their organisations. However, there is often hostility between informal workers’ associations and formal trade unions, with the formal unions being perceived to be arrogant and patronising. Boampong and Tachie (2017) present a detailed picture of this dynamic among waste pickers in Accra, Ghana, describing the density and complexity of working relationships in that sector. Other case studies in Webster et al. (2017) based on research in different informal sectors in Ghana, India and South Africa, flag this tension between formal and informal worker organisations.

LINES OF ENQUIRY: AREAS AND METHODS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH Twenty years ago, there was little reliable data about the numbers of people working informally. There has been a radical improvement in labour force data about the informal economy and about informal workers. A number of quantitative and qualitative methods or types of enquiry have been used to enhance the overall understanding of the informal sector. In this concluding section, pointers are given to areas that present fertile ground for smaller and larger research initiatives. They include qualitative and participatory methodologies that have been used to deepen the understanding of the economic and social aspects as well as issues of governance of the informal economy. Life cycle analysis has been used in developing a framework for social protection for informal workers (Lund and Srinivas 2000). Not yet sufficiently quantified is the impact of unpaid care work, and especially of child care provision or the lack thereof, on informal women workers’ incomes; the crisis in youth unemployment in specific relation to young

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people’s attitudes towards and job-searching in the informal economy; and how informal workers in their elderly years make the transition from informal work into doing less work, or different kinds of work, as they get older. Value chain analysis has been shown to be useful in identifying patterns of exclusion and inclusion of informal workers in the labour market, as well as illuminating the linkages between formal and informal economies. This approach was explored through two case studies: horticulture in Chile and South Africa (Barrientos and Ware Barrientos 2003), and workers in the garment industries of the Philippines and Thailand (Doane et al. 2003). More recent work is using value chain analysis in production sectors to identify likely points of entry for legal interventions that recognise informal workers (von Broembsen 2018). Case studies and personal narratives can be used to understand the individual journeys of workers who try, themselves, to move into greater formality, for example in attempting to register their small businesses, which might give access to lines of credit. In the same vein, specific studies of barriers of access to health services in different cities and countries can be used to guide health services to adopt more inclusionary practices. Costs are attached to informal workers’ wanting to keep their working environments clean and safe, for themselves, for those who work for or with them, and for the public. Reliable studies that estimate these costs are rare. A microstudy of the costs of operating of women informal workers cooking and selling food in Accra, Ghana (Alfers 2011) was done with and through an association of these ‘chop bar operators’, with the association endorsing the research. This study has had a policy punch well beyond its size; the authenticity of the data is unusual and convincing. Innovative research exercises have been used to prepare the way for policy dialogues between workers and local government. In a large commuter node in Durban, South Africa, informal street and market traders undertook walkthroughs with staff from the city’s emergency services and fire department, with the officials and the trader leaders identifying and discussing what they saw as potential hazards in the area (Alfers et al. 2016). This was a useful exercise for both traders and officials; furthermore, the two non-governmental organisations involved in organising the process could use it in preparing for interactions in the form of policy dialogues that focused on dealing with emergencies in the densely populated areas in the central city. National time use surveys have been used in some countries to estimate time taken daily to do paid work and unpaid care work

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(Budlender 2010). These surveys are useful for capturing gendered differences in time spent on paid and unpaid work. At a more micro level, using daily clocks can be useful in focus group discussion, or on their own, in understanding how women workers balance competing demands on their time allocated to productive work, reproductive work and community time. There are two policy areas where informal workers and their associations may be in danger of becoming more vulnerable than they already are. First, they receive almost no recognition in the frameworks for and implementation of global social protection floors. The main policy instrument being promoted through these floors is the cash transfer. Part of the unusual success of cash transfers in being accepted by governments and international organisations has been in the rich seam of empirical research that shows how cash transfers, given directly to poor people, have an immediate positive effect on some development goals. In many low income countries the level of cash transfers is so low that grants cannot, on their own, enable people to find ways out of poverty. Macroeconomic policies would have to enable and support synergies of opportunity; quality of education would have to be better; levels of early childhood education would have to be better (which child support benefits may help with doing). More research attention needs to be paid to the specific impact of transfers on the micro-enterprises of informal workers, as well as the impact of ‘cash transfers plus’, where the cash is supplemented by an additional non-cash service. This would assist in understanding the nature of the links between social policy and development. However, eligibility for cash transfers has historically been for those who are not able to be active in the labour force. They are typically restricted to young children, people with disabilities and elderly people. In very poor societies with limited revenue raising bases, and/or with corrupt or fragile states, the universal basic incomes (as one form of cash transfer) are unlikely to be adapted. More targeted transfers are unlikely to benefit directly those deriving any income at all from paid work, whether formal or informal. Second, informal workers are typically excluded from the provision of occupational health and safety (OHS) provision, and OHS provision is typically outside the domain of social policies, which are typically citizen-based, not worker-based. A contemporary global trend is for OHS to migrate into primary health care. This is a logical idea where health resources are scarce. However, it makes it likely that the worker-oriented aspects of OHS, which primary health care simply does not have, will be diluted. This is particularly the case in contexts where health resources are already limited.

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Theoreticians and practitioners in both social policy and development studies could usefully give more consideration to those in the informal labour market as a potential resource in implementing innovation and reform in delivery of programmes and service delivery. This is not to suggest that informal workers should become, by stealth, unpaid volunteers for the health and welfare services. Informal markets are common in densely populated urban spaces. Informal workers not only need to have their own voices heard; they also know about how urban space could be organised to accommodate the changing nature of work and the now fluid boundaries between residential space and working space. They can play a powerful role in the development of policy, and also in spreading information, for example about the organisation of health services and health campaigns. Finally, the labour market for development and social policy practitioners is itself subject to global forces of outsourcing, specialisation and privatisation. With the exception of academics and civil servants in more or less permanent jobs working with social policy and development, those doing and thinking about these domains are increasingly likely to be in self-employment as consultants, or in private sector firms which are driven by ‘performance deliverables’ within strict deadlines. There is little time for serious reflection and dialogue across disciplines and specialisations. There is little time for in-depth learning from those in the field and on the ground. Better recognition of the importance of the informal economy, and of its complexity, will enable social policies and development programmes to be more realistic about the possibilities and pitfalls of social development, social policy, and development in the more general sense.

REFERENCES Alfers, L. (2011), ‘Occupational Health and Safety for Indigenous Caterers in Accra’, WIEGO Research Report, Cambridge, MA: WIEGO. Alfers, L., F. Lund and R. Moussié (2017), ‘Approaches to Social Protection for Informal Workers: Aligning Productivist and Human Rights-Based Approaches’, International Social Security Review, 70 (4): 67–85. Alfers, L., P. Xulu and R. Dobson (2016), ‘Promoting Workplace Health and Safety in Urban Public Space: Reflections from Durban, South Africa’, Environment and Urbanization, 28 (2): 391–404. Barrientos, A. and S. Ware Barrientos (2003), ‘Social Protection for Workers in the Horticulture Industry: Chile and South Africa’, in F. Lund and J. Nicholson (eds), Chains of Production, Ladders of Protection: Social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy, Durban: School of Development Studies, University of Natal. Beall, J. and S. Fox (2009), Cities and Development, London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge.

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The informal economy and informal employment 263 Boampong, O. and B.Y. Tachie (2017), ‘Implications of private participation in solid waste management for collective organisation in Accra, Ghana’, in E. Webster, A.O. Britwum and S. Bhowmik (eds), Crossing the Divide: Precarious Work and the Future of Labour, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Budlender, D. (ed.) (2010), Time Use Studies and Unpaid Care Work, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Budlender, D. and R. Moussié (2013), Making Care Visible: Women’s Unpaid Care Work in Nepal, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda, London: ActionAid. Charlton, R. and R. McKinnon (2001), Pensions in Development, Aldershot: Ashgate. Chen, M. (2012), ‘The Informal Economy: Definitions, Theories and Policies’, WIEGO Working Paper No. 1, Cambridge, MA: WIEGO. Chen, M. and V.A. Beard (2018), ‘Including the Excluded: Supporting Informal Workers for More Equal and Productive Cities in the South’, WRI and WIEGO Flagship Paper, Washington, DC: World Resources Institute in collaboration with Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing. Chen, M., R. Jhabvala, R. Kanbur and C. Richards (eds) (2007), Membership-Based Organizations of the Poor, Abingdon: Routledge. Cook, S. and N. Kabeer (2010), Social Protection as Development Policy, Abingdon, UK and New Delhi, India: Routledge India Originals. Deacon, B. (2013), Global Social Policy in the Making: The Foundations of the Social Protection Floor, Bristol: Social Policy Press. Devereux, S. and R. Sabates-Wheeler (2004), ‘Transformative Social Protection’, IDS Working Paper 232, Brighton: Institute for Development Studies. Doane, D., R. Ofreneo and D. Srikajon (2003), ‘Social Protection for Workers in the Garment Industry: Philippines and Thailand’, in F. Lund and J. Nicholson (eds), Chains of Production, Ladders of Protection: Social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy, Durban: School of Development Studies, University of Natal. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990), The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gough, I., G. Wood, A. Barrientos, P. Bevan, P. Davis and G. Room (eds) (2004), Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hart, K. (1973), ‘Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 11 (6): 61–89. International Labour Office (1972), Employment, Incomes and Inequality: A Strategy for Increasing Productive Employment in Kenya, Geneva: ILO. International Labour Organization (2002, 2013, 2018), Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture, 1st, 2nd and 3rd editions, Geneva: ILO. International Labour Office (2003), The ILO Report of the 15th Annual Conference of Labour Statisticians, January 19–28, 2003, Geneva: ILO. Lund, F. and J. Nicholson (eds) (2003), Chains of Production, Ladders of Protection: Social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy, Durban: School of Development Studies, University of Natal. Lund, F. and S. Srinivas (2000), Learning from Experience: A Gendered Approach to social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy, Geneva: ILO; and Boston, MA: WIEGO. McKinnon, R. (2016), ‘Introduction: Pursuing Excellence in Social Security Administration’, International Social Security Review, 69 (3/4): 5–19. Midgley, J. (1995), Social Development: The Developmental Perspective in Social Welfare, London, UK; Thousand Oaks, CA, USA; New Delhi, India: SAGE Publications. Mitlin, D. and D. Satterthwaite (2013), Urban Poverty in the Global South: Scale and Nature, London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge.

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264 Handbook of social policy and development Mkandawire, T. (2004), ‘Social Policy in a Development Context: Introduction’, in T. Mkandawire (ed.), Social Policy in a Development Context, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Moser, C.O.N. (1993), Gender Planning and Development, New York, USA and London, UK: Routledge. Razavi, S. (ed.) (2012), Seen, Heard and Counted: Re-thinking Care in a Development Context, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Satterthwaite, D. and D. Mitlin (2014), Reducing Urban Poverty in the Global South, Abingdon: Routledge. Tendler, J. (2004), ‘Why Social Policy is Condemned to a Residual Category of Safety Nets and What to Do About it’, in T. Mkandawire (ed.), Social Policy in a Development Context, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Von Broembsen, M. (2018), ‘Constitutionalising Labour Rights: Informal Homeworkers in Global Value Chains’, International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations, 34 (3): 257–280. Webster, E., A. Britwum and S. Bhowmik (eds) (2017), Crossing the Divide: Precarious Work and the Future of Labour, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

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14. Employment-based social protection: ‘productivism’, universalism and social citizenship Michael Rogan and Laura Alfers

The origins of social policy1 in the industrialised countries of the Global North are linked strongly with the labour market both in terms of provision and in their assumption of near full employment (Heintz and Lund 2012). Particularly during the ‘golden era of capitalism’ (from roughly the 1950s to the early 1970s), welfare states were established within a context of near full and decent employment. Not only is employment now becoming less secure and more flexible in many of these countries, but social policy has generally been slow to adapt to the changing structure of employment (Heintz and Lund 2012). Within the development literature, the criticism is often that models of employmentbased social protection have been inherited from a context which differs considerably from that of most developing-country labour markets. However, critiques from the developing-country literature have also tended to be nuanced since resources are often highly constrained, tax bases are low, and the ability to collect taxes from powerful global firms is weak. In these developing-country contexts, it has been argued, for example, that employment-based provision of social protection has made an important contribution to the welfare of citizens. To forgo such arrangements in the interests of more ‘universal’ protections may, however unwittingly, feed into an agenda which frees employers from providing for the public good, and leave more people reliant on inadequate state 1

We highlight an important distinction between social protection and social policy, and refer to Heintz and Lund (2012, p. 3) in defining the former as ‘government policies and programmes that aim to reduce economic risks, directly address vulnerabilities and protect individuals from harmful actions by third parties that would compromise their well-being’. Social policy is, then, a broader term which includes social protection but also encompasses services such as ‘education, health care, family social services, social services for elderly and disabled people, and support for child care’ (Heintz and Lund 2012, p. 3).

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provision (Lund 2009). The drawback, of course, is that employmentbased provision does not cover the large segments of the population in developing countries that are in informal employment or are not in employment at all (Franzoni 2008). Adding to the complexity of debates, social policy within development discourses has recently become more residualist with a greater focus on needs-based social assistance (for example, cash grants) targeting select groups outside of the labour force (for example, children and the elderly). This chapter is structured into two main sections. The first section is concerned with situating the links between employment and social policy in historical context and includes a brief reflection on how this context is changing and the debates that have arisen as a result. The second section focuses on how these debates have played out in developing countries of the Global South. Finally, we conclude with a reflection on what the tensions highlighted throughout the chapter suggest for the future of employment-based social protection and the state–labour–capital social compact in both developed and developing countries as traditional employment arrangements continue to erode in both contexts.

SOCIAL POLICY AND EMPLOYMENT LINKAGES: AN OVERVIEW The original development of social policy – within the industrialised countries of Europe, but also in other countries of what can broadly be termed the Global North – was heavily intertwined with employment in a number of different ways. This section provides a brief overview of these linkages, as a way in which to contextualise the remainder of the chapter and to clarify certain terminology. Central to the development of social policy in Europe from the 1880s onwards was the fact that it was linked conceptually to the development of the labour force (Hobsbawm 1987). This was driven by productivist ideas about the need for human resources to raise production and promote economic prosperity. Investments in a nation’s human resources through better education and health care were seen to be a key strategy to improve the quality of the labour force: healthy, strong, educated workers considered the backbone of a stronger state and economy. This productivist orientation of welfare also framed the rights and responsibilities of social citizenship, implying a responsibility on the part of (male) citizens to participate in waged labour (Goodin 2001). Citizens have a right to access social insurance, social assistance and social services, but they also have the responsibility to contribute towards the funding of these

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systems through their participation in waged labour or, for women, the rearing of future generations of waged workers. ‘That individuals should work,’ argues Weeks (2011, p. 8), has been ‘fundamental to the social contract.’ At least in part, this resulted from the importance of employment to the financing of social policy. In the 1940s United Kingdom, for example, William Beveridge, the architect of the British welfare state, assumed a state of full or near full employment to finance the proposals contained within the Beveridge Report (1942) through the contributions of workers and employers to general taxation and to the National Insurance (NI) programme. At the same time, he considered the relationship between social policy and employment to be cyclical, arguing that it was the responsibility of the state to ensure that social spending was maintained even during difficult economic times. Social security would, in turn, contribute towards expanding private consumption and investment, and help to maintain the levels of employment which were necessary to finance generous social benefits (Komine 2004). Finally, it is important to note that the employment relationship has also been a key mechanism for the delivery of social protection. There has been some confusion in the literature, however, in defining terms such as ‘occupational welfare’ and employment-based ‘social insurance’. Farnsworth (2004) presents occupations benefits on a continuum in order to demonstrate differences between occupational social provision and so-called fringe benefits. Arguably, provisions such as pensions and health coverage are, however, at the core of what is generally understood as occupational welfare or employment-based social protection (Cutler and Waine 2001). These mechanisms differ, of course, according to the nature of the welfare state in each country. Esping-Andersen’s (1990) well-known classification of welfare regimes distinguishes three broad categories of welfare states: liberal, corporatist and social democratic. Under a liberal regime such as the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) there are minimal social benefits for those outside of employment. The US, with its reliance on employment-based social protections, is perhaps the most extreme example of a liberal welfare regime. Unlike the UK, where a certain amount of universal state protections are available independently of labour market status (most notably through the National Health Service), in the US private occupational welfare predominates. Basic protections such as health insurance and pensions are privatised, and primarily sourced through employers, not all of which will contribute equally to the social protection of their employees. Without a ‘good job’

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these social protections are difficult (if not impossible) to acquire (Kalleberg 2011). Corporatist regimes (such as France) are focused on maintaining the existing income distribution and class structure and have a strong emphasis on social insurance linked to employment, again with limited social assistance for those outside of the labour market. This is different from the US’s system of occupational welfare, however, in that the insurance funds are state-based and all employers are mandated to make contributions (that is, whether or not a contribution is made, and the value of the contribution, is not left up to the decision of individual employers). In contrast, the social democratic regimes of the Nordic countries provide universal access to social benefits, regardless of labour market attachment. These welfare regimes come closest to what Polanyi called ‘decommodification’: the idea that, by providing benefits through which those not employed can maintain a decent standard of living, social policies provide a degree of immunity from the labour market. The case of Japan, on the other hand, represents a special type of welfare regime characterised variously as ‘surrogate social policy’, ‘state-guided enterprise welfare’ (Kim 2010, p. 430), ‘productivist welfare capitalism’ or ‘East Asian productivism’ (Holliday 2000). Japan, as the high income member of the East Asian cluster, has a welfare regime characterised by a heavy reliance on both the market and family to provide benefits. Welfare provision, moreover, is comprised of occupationally divided social insurance schemes with provision differentiated by sectors and occupations, and tending to favour the employees of large firms (Aspalter 2001). The Japanese welfare system, despite recent pressure from an ageing electorate, remains resistant to Western forms of redistributive welfare programmes, and the state retains a largely regulatory role in ensuring coverage (Esping-Andersen 1997; Aspalter 2001).

SOCIAL POLICY AND EMPLOYMENT IN A DEVELOPMENT CONTEXT Social Protection in a Time of Crisis While many of the instruments and mechanisms through which social protection is provided are well established in developed countries, this is a relatively new feature of development discourse in the Global South and has its origins in a period of crisis. The need to mitigate the social costs of structural adjustment and various financial crises across the developing world during the 1980s and 1990s encouraged an emphasis

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on the targeting of social policy to the poorest segments of society (Barrientos and Hulme 2008). A subsequent flurry of social assistance programmes, packaged largely as targeted or conditional cash transfers, were introduced in a ‘quiet revolution’ (Barrientos and Hulme 2008) throughout much of the developing world in the 1990s and 2000s. One of the underlying questions prompted by this ‘quiet revolution’ is whether universal social protection or employment-based approaches modelled on the experiences of developed countries can best meet the needs of countries characterised by younger populations, high levels of unemployment, and large and growing informal economies. While reflecting some similarities with the period prior to the 1930s when precarious and insecure employment was the norm in the countries of the Global North (Quinlan 2012), the experiences of developing countries today require a return to thinking about the meaning of the social compact, social protection and the role of redistribution in a society. Such an observation has prompted one prominent commentator, Guy Standing (2008, p. 25), to suggest that ‘in the context of globalisation, there is a counter-movement, and it is being led by what is happening in developing countries. There the baggage of 20th century social security is light.’ Social policy or social protection in developing countries is also characterised by a much wider range of actors which includes governments, multinational donors, non-governmental organisations and employers (Barrientos and Hulme 2008). These actors embody different perspectives of social policy in a development context. For example, the World Bank approach identifies social protection as a mechanism for managing social risk, while the International Labour Organization (ILO) applies a human rights lens. There is, however, far more nuance within the central debates in the development literature (see Seekings 2008). For example, and although often unrecognised, both approaches seem to be, as Mkandawire (2001, p. iii) puts it, positioning ‘social policy away from its conception as a residual category of “safety nets” that merely counteract policy failures or developmental disasters’. Employment and Welfare Typologies in the Global South As in the North, the characteristics and structure of employment in the Global South are important to the design of social policy. In most developing countries, the standard employment relationship is not, and never has been, the norm (Scully 2016; Alfers et al. 2017). Rather, informal employment, or employment which excludes workers from employment-related social protection (Rogan et al. 2017), is the dominant mode of employment in most developing countries. Recent estimates

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from the ILO (2013, 2018) suggest that as much as 86 per cent of non-agricultural employment is informal in some regions of the developing world. Informal employment (see Lund, Chapter 13 in this volume) is therefore the reality in developing countries and poses some fairly obvious challenges to social policy. Within a development context there is a wide range of experiences in this regard. On the one hand, China and Taiwan are examples of countries with relatively high levels of formal employment that have been able progressively to extend coverage of employment-based social insurance, predominantly in the form of pensions, health insurance, disability and unemployment protection. A middle group of countries, such as South Africa and Brazil, have been described as ‘dualist labour markets’, with a core of the workforce covered by social insurance together with a relatively large informal economy covered only by more residualist social assistance programmes. In a country such as South Africa where the labour market is highly segmented, occupational welfare, moreover, is differentiated across sectors and occupational lines. Just over a third of the total South African workforce is in informal employment with about 20 per cent in the informal sector (ILO 2018). Illustrating the uneven nature of employment-based social protection, more than half of employees in the South African formal sector have a pension contribution provided by their employer, and only about 35 per cent have some type of contributory private health insurance scheme linked to their employment (own calculations from the 2016 (Q3) Quarterly Labour Force Survey). Civil servants (who comprise a fifth of formal employment), moreover, have very different levels of employment linked social provision. Roughly 75 per cent of public sector employees have a government pension and 70 per cent have health insurance provided largely through the Government Employees Medical Scheme (GEMS). In contrast, only a quarter of employees working for private sector firms have a pension contribution from their employer and only 5 per cent have employer provided health insurance (own calculations from the 2016 (Q3) Quarterly Labour Force Survey). On the other hand there is a group of countries (India, Ghana and Tanzania) in which the majority of the workforce is informal and/or agricultural, and where social assistance programmes remain fragmented and piecemeal (UNRISD 2010). In each of these countries, roughly 90 per cent of the total workforce is informal (ILO 2018) and the provision of social insurance through the standard employment relationship is not a possibility. There is considerable diversity, therefore, in the histories of developing countries and regions in terms of the structure of the labour

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market and the links between social policy and employment. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to give an exhaustive account of these diverse histories and experiences, a few are worth mentioning. Latin American countries, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, tended to feature a more productivist approach to social protection relative to other developing regions (Barrientos and Hulme 2008; Barrientos and Hinojosa-Valencia 2009). In implementing a social insurance model adapted from the Southern European context, countries in this part of the developing world were among the first to experience the limits to employment-based social protection (Barrientos 2004a, 2004b; Barrientos and Hinojosa-Valencia 2009). Such an approach, where social protection is provided through employment amidst high levels of informal employment, has been described as social policy ‘truncated’ at the margins of formal employment (Barrientos and Santibañez 2009a, p. 6). Costa Rica, in contrast, has been held up as the ‘social democratic model of Latin America’ (UNRISD 2010, p. 154; see also Franzoni et al. 2012; Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea 2017; OECD 2017) where the progressive realisation of universal coverage was pursued through a combination of increasing social insurance coverage for the employed (both formal and informal) and expanding innovative social assistance provisions to those outside of the workforce (UNRISD 2010; Franzoni and SánchezAncochea 2017). Among developing regions, the East Asian context is a particularly interesting example because it experienced a transition from a productivist welfare system accompanied by full employment to a labour market with high unemployment, high levels of non-standard or informal employment and working poverty (Heintz and Lund 2012; Lue and Park 2013). During the years of the ‘development state’ in these countries, there was what Holliday (2000, p. 709) described as an additional (that is, the fourth) category of Epsing-Anderson’s typology: that of ‘productivist welfare capitalism’. As outlined earlier in the discussion of Japan, this category is characterised by the use of industrial policy for both economic and social ends within the priorities of a state-driven economy. The result is social protection afforded to a narrow group of the workforce in sectors which were identified as being crucial to economic growth (Dostal 2010). The Case against Employment-Based Provision The use of the employment relationship as a mechanism of delivering social benefits has always sat in tension with a belief that the labour market should not be the primary means of accessing social benefits,

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because of the inequalities it creates. One of the founders of the study of UK social policy, Richard Titmuss, disapproved of the type of private occupational welfare which characterises the US system, arguing that attaching benefits to employment served to increase social inequalities because the already privileged were more likely to end up in the ‘good jobs’ with generous occupational benefits attached (Abel-Smith and Titmuss 1987). Similarly, in many developing countries, where levels of formal employment are low, the linking of employment and social protection has also been criticised for reinforcing inequality. In developing-country contexts where full employment has never been the norm, designing welfare systems based on a workforce in full-time, regular and unionised employment has been characterised as seeking ‘nostalgia for a mythical “golden age” and in “fighting yesterday’s battles”’ (Standing 2000, p. 8). Indeed, in both developed and developing countries, employment is becoming less secure and more flexible at a time when the employment relationship is expected to remain the basis of welfare provision. Not surprisingly, the argument for universal provision of social protection has found some traction among those (Barchiesi 2011) who see a contradiction in the eroding social compact between capital, employment-based citizenship and social policy. However, even in conditions of full employment, employment-based social protection fails to recognise the contributions of unpaid work (Standing 2000). This type of work, often undertaken by women, remains unrecognised and is largely unlinked to social policy in a productivist model. In many Latin American countries prior to the 1990s the social protection model was based on employment-based social insurance with a distinct ‘male breadwinner’ assumption (Barrientos and Santibañez 2009a). Falling outside of the social security system, then, were not only those in informal employment but those with no labour force attachment yet whose work is crucial to the reproduction of labour. In the case of the Latin American productivist model of the 1950s, social policy provision was also premised on the assumption that the proportion of the workforce in informal employment would decrease over time (Barrientos and Santibañez 2009a). In hindsight, the opposite has occurred, which has reopened the debates on the mechanisms for ensuring social protection for the majority of the populations in developing countries. Into this gap, the ‘quiet revolution’ of both conditional and unconditional cash transfers (for example, programmes such as Bolsa Familia and Oportunidades) has been inserted. While popular, their function is somewhat different from universal cash transfers, which do not distinguish between deserving and undeserving groups and are

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inherently more gender neutral since they do not penalise unpaid care work (Standing 2008). The case for universal social protection in a developing context, therefore, is premised on the realities of the structure of employment in most countries of the Global South, the likelihood of lower compliance in the provision of employment-based protection among the few existing formal employers (Standing 2000), and the gender disparities in a social protection system which only recognises a narrow form of paid labour. Universal protection, moreover, is linked with a rights-based conception of social protection which does not distinguish between the ‘deserving’ and ‘non-deserving’, and the concomitant goal of delivering citizenshipbased welfare in a context where employment has a very different meaning to a post-war Europe and US. Work-Related Social Protection, Cash Transfers and Productivism Given the context of residualist social protection delivered as targeted cash transfers, while social insurance is limited to a relatively narrow segment of the workforce, it is not surprising that the central debate in many developing countries and regions has pitted universal approaches to social protection provision against need-based social assistance (see UNRISD 2010). Some of these debates seem to exclude or overshadow the employment-based social protection component of provision. For example, in some of the social welfare regimes in Latin America, Asia and Africa in the 1990s, the productivist provision of social policy has been dismissed ‘as serving only the interests of a small privileged workforce and elite state employees’ (Deacon 2005, p. 21). Indeed, it is the perceived creation of a labour aristocracy, of sorts, which sometimes draws criticism of employment-based regimes in developing countries. As with other countries in which organised labour has influence over the policy process (see Weil 1997; Rosner and Markowitz 2003), the pension reform process in Argentina during the 1990s resulted in the fragmentation of the system. Trade union opposition to the moves towards universalisation resulted in a two-tiered pension scheme through which unionised workers were able to retain their original benefits (Barrientos and Hinojosa-Valencia 2009). However, despite the limited coverage of employment-based social protection schemes and the creditable objectives of a rights-based universal approach, there are also several reasons why there may still be a role for the provision of social protection through employment in the Global South. A recent literature has suggested that a more nuanced approach which is not too quick to dismiss the contributions of employers may

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bolster social protection regimes in ways which contribute meaningfully to broader debates about social policy. While many of the prominent cash transfer programmes in the South (for example, Bolsa Familia) have attracted substantial attention (see Barrientos and Hulme 2008) and have been linked with citizenship-based social protection, they also introduce several tensions which often go unexplored (Lund 2009). Lund (2009, p. 2) argues that, despite the well-documented successes of such programmes, the risk is that they ‘unwittingly detract from the responsibilities of the employers and owners of capital’. In other words, the current dominant focus on conditional or meanstested cash transfers in developing-country contexts not only challenges the principle of universal coverage but also endangers some of the productivist notions of social protection and the link between labour and capital (Alfers et al. 2017). Moreover, one of the weaknesses of these conditional cash transfer programmes, particularly in lower income countries, is that they are often unsustainable and have weak institutional structures. For example, ‘the reliance on external financing, the influence of international development agencies, and the reliance on networks constructed outside public agencies, all combine to weaken the institutionalization of the programmes’ (Barrientos and Santibañez 2009b, p. 422). In relation to the debates on employment-based provision versus universal protection, there are several important contributions in the recent literature. First, a key feature of developing countries is a lower tax base, and one of the main constraints to social protection in many of these countries is the fiscus (Barrientos and Hulme 2008). Not only do the level of funds required to finance social policy differ between developed and developing countries, but the potential sources of these funds differ between the social protection regimes that are productivist and those that are universal in structure. Here some proponents of retaining productivist links have argued that an established employment relationship is easier to regulate, while the funds for universal provision come from the national budget where oversight (for example, by social partners) is more difficult (Alfers et al. 2017). Moreover, financing social protection partially through contributions from employees and employers is both predictable and reduces reliance on the general tax base. An added benefit is that ensuring that workers and their families are covered adequately reduces the number of claimants on social assistance programmes or other social services financed from the national budget (Ortiz et al. 2017). Second, a discussion of universal versus employment-based social protection and health, in particular, introduces the notion of ‘cross-class

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alliances’ through which the provision of social policy must achieve a balance between improving access to, or coverage of, the poor while maintaining public services for the employed (whose taxes contribute to the funding of provision) (Deacon 2005). The Costa Rica experience, again, is perhaps a good example of the success of building cross-class alliances, as its social assistance programmes comprise almost 6 per cent of gross domestic product, while roughly two-thirds of the national budget is financed from payroll taxes (UNRISD 2010). Employmentbased provision therefore requires a transparent and equitable approach to the distribution of resources and can, in some cases, encourage policy makers to pay more attention to cross-class alliances, the social compact between capital, labour and the state, as well as notions of social solidarity. The case of Costa Rica (where 39 per cent of employment is informal; ILO 2018) also illustrates an example of ‘group-based universalism’ (UNRISD 2010) in which citizens are covered by at least one component of social protection, irrespective of their attachment to the labour market. Perhaps one signal of increasing acceptance of the complexity in the debates around employment-based versus universal social protection is that some of the standpoints of large international actors seem to be shifting. The move towards universal social protection in a developingcountry context is perhaps best associated with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development’s (UNRISD) work in which social policy has long been framed as the mechanism through which development and economic growth can be mutually reinforcing (Standing 2000; Deacon 2005). UNRISD has recently, however, demonstrated a more nuanced approach to employment-based social protection, through the acknowledgement that ‘there is also the danger of delinking social protection from the operation of the labour market. Narrowly conceived social protection agendas cannot be a substitute for employment creation and decent work agendas’ (UNRISD 2010, p. 126). In terms of the mechanisms for provision, UNRISD also acknowledges that social protection policies which cover citizens through a mixture of schemes such as social insurance for the employed and their dependants, and noncontributory cash transfers for the non-working age population, have the potential to address structural inequalities between individuals or groups (UNRISD 2010). This recognition that employment continues to have a role to play in social protection is also linked closely with the ‘decent work’ agenda. Within the approach of universal or comprehensive coverage, the goal of decent work is critical since ‘more people earning a living within conditions of decent work also allows the state to base social policies on

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sustainable funding mechanisms that promote solidarity and reduce financial and political dependence on external resources’ (UNRISD 2010, p. 157). This concept of ‘decent work’ is, however, threatened by employers not meeting their obligations to employees, such that ‘the growing citizen–state axis of social policy is likely to result, in [both] poorer and richer states, in further declining employment security for growing numbers of people’ (Lund 2009, p. 12). Finally, there is also a strong gender element to debates on employment-based social protection in the South. When social insurance schemes are linked with aspects of labour market attachment (for example, years of employment, tenure and earnings) where women have a disadvantage relative to men, social policy is not gender neutral (Orloff 2002; Razavi 2007) and women’s access to social protection is essentially ‘mediated by their relationships to men’ (Razavi and Pearson 2004, p. 1). A key question, therefore, is whether the provision of social protection through employment in developing countries has an added potency against the backdrop of the feminisation of the labour force in many of these countries (Razavi and Pearson 2004; Heintz and Lund 2012). In the case of the well-documented development of South Korea in the 1980s and 1990s, there is strong evidence of gender inequalities in the workforce. In terms of that country’s approach to developmental social policy, social insurance schemes were more closely associated with large firms or in high value added manufacturing, two sectors which had a particularly low proportion of women (Razavi and Pearson 2004). Similarly, in post-apartheid South Africa, the feminisation of the labour force in the 1990s–2000s was associated largely with an increase in female unemployment and in low paid and often informal employment (Casale and Posel 2002). In such cases, the gendered implications of linking social protection to employment require careful consideration. On the other hand, the gendered nature of disadvantages in employment poses important challenges to thinking about social protection holistically. As argued by Alfers et al. (2017, p. 81): For women, identifying as workers also challenges gendered norms that tend to render invisible their economic contributions through paid and unpaid work. Working from within rather than outside of the productivist paradigm, this allows women to push its boundaries, to make it more inclusive of those previously excluded. This brings the productivist paradigm closer into alignment with the universalist human rights-based approach, while maintaining some of its important principles.

Thus, the well-documented gender biases within employment-based social protection might be challenged without abandoning some of the

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important gains made in getting employers to contribute to the well-being of employees.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: THE FUTURE OF EMPLOYMENT-BASED SOCIAL PROTECTION IN THE NORTH AND SOUTH Globalisation, increased competition in product markets, changes in corporate employment practices, the weakening of government intervention in labour markets, the increasing flexibility of labour forces, loss of jobs due to technological advances, the expansion of the service sector and weakening of trade unions, have all led to substantial changes in the labour market (Heintz and Lund 2012). There is now greater unemployment, as well as an increase in what is often termed ‘precarious employment’ in high income countries and informal employment in middle and low income countries (Kalleberg 2011; Standing 2011; Weil 2014; Vallas 2015; Rogan et al. 2017). The standard employment relationship of industrial capitalism, which provided the bedrock for the post-war welfare regimes, is increasingly recognised to be under threat, and along with it, a model for extending social benefits to citizens (Hewison and Kalleberg 2013). This has led to important debates about the linking of social policy to employment, a debate which has a particular nuance in the development context because of high levels of informality, but which is also now relevant across the globe. There are similarities as well as some important differences in the way this debate has been shaped in different contexts. Perhaps most importantly, in both developed and developing countries, ‘globalisation, postindustrialisation and changes in the nature of work have led to rising job insecurity and declining financial resources’ (Lue and Park 2013, p. 2). Another important similarity is the way in which employment-based social protection can exacerbate existing inequalities through its failure to recognise both unpaid as well as some types of paid work. This particular critique of employment-based approaches has an obvious gender dimension in both developed and developing contexts, as described throughout the chapter. Given such concerns with an employment-based approach to social policy and citizenship, the call for rights-based universal social protection has a clear appeal in the North and South. Such efforts to decommodify labour have been more prominent in the North, with examples from the Nordic countries, in particular, leading the way in terms of imagining a

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future of work in which citizenship is not defined predominantly through increasingly tenuous employment arrangements (for example, through universal basic income or ‘flexicurity’). However, given some of the differences between developed and developing countries, and the fact that full employment within the standard employment relationship is the exception rather than the norm in developing countries, some new directions for social policy may actually be emerging in the South. Experiences from countries in Latin America have demonstrated both the limits (Argentina) and possibilities (Costa Rica) of employmentbased social protection in contexts where levels of informal employment and unemployment are high and tax bases are relatively low. In terms of some of the possibilities illustrated by developing countries, the case of Costa Rica was identified as an example of the way that cross-class alliances have been forged in order to finance social protection for those excluded from (formal) employment while, at the same time, expanding employment-based social protection (see UNRISD 2010). Such an approach might have particular relevance for countries such as South Africa where the existence of a ‘labour aristocracy’ is evident in a workforce that is segmented across formal and informal employment as well as between public and private sectors. In such contexts, retaining employment-based social insurance for the employees of the state and private enterprises, while expanding social protection for those outside of the workforce and for those in informal employment, is the challenge. Relatedly, the suggestion that the recognition of work can be achieved by working within a productivist approach which preserves some of the original social compact between labour and capital requires more attention in both a developed and developing context. The central question might be shifted away from delinking versus not delinking social protection from employment, but rather asking under what conditions different groups of workers can gain access to various types of protection (see Lund and Srinivas 2000). In the South, such a refocus could have the advantage of creating fiscal space while encouraging innovative approaches to linking workers with capital; while in the North, it offers a way to claim back some of the ground lost to capital in the wake of growing precarity and non-standard forms of employment.

REFERENCES Abel-Smith, B. and K. Titmuss (1987), The Philosophy of Welfare: Selected Writings of Richard M. Titmuss, London, UK and Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin.

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Employment-based social protection 279 Alfers, Laura, Francie Lund and Rachel Moussié (2017), ‘Approaches to Social Protection for Informal Workers: Aligning Productivist and Human Rights-Based Approaches’, International Social Security Review, 70(4), 67–85. Aspalter, Christian (2001), ‘Identifying Variations of Conservative Social Policy in North East Asia: The Welfare State in Japan, South Korea and Mainland China’, Discussion Paper No. 81, Canberra: Australia National University, Graduate Public Policy Programme. Barchiesi, Franco (2011), Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Barrientos, Armando (2004a), ‘Latin America: Towards a Liberal-Informal Welfare Regime’, in I. Gough, G. Wood, A. Barrientos, P. Bevan, P. David and G. Room (eds), Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 121–168. Barrientos, Armando (2004b), ‘Women, Informal Employment and Social Protection in Latin America’, in C. Piras (ed.), Women at Work: Challenges for Latin America, Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 255–292. Barrientos, Armando and Leonith Hinojosa-Valencia (2009), ‘A Review of Social Protection in Latin America’, Report prepared as part of a Social Protection Scoping Study funded by the Ford Foundation, Manchester: Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester. Barrientos, Armando and David Hulme (2008), ‘Social Protection for the Poor and Poorest in Developing Countries: Reflections on a Quiet Revolution’, BWPI Working Paper No. 30, Manchester: Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI), University of Manchester. Barrientos, Armando and Claudio Santibañez (2009a), ‘New Forms of Social Assistance and the Evolution of Social Protection in Latin America’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 41, 1–26. Barrientos, Armando and Claudio Santibañez (2009b), ‘Social Policy for Poverty Reduction in Lower-Income Countries in Latin America: Lessons and Challenges’, Social Policy and Administration, 43(4), 409–424. Beveridge, William H.B. (1942), Social Insurance and Allied Services: Report by Sir William Beveridge, London: HM Stationery Office. Casale, Daniela and Dorrit Posel (2002), ‘The Continued Feminisation of the Labour Force in South Africa: An Analysis of Recent Data and Trends’, South African Journal of Economics, 70(1), 156–184. Cutler, Tony and Barbara Waine (2001), ‘Social Insecurity and the Retreat from Social Democracy: Occupational Welfare in the Long Moom and Financialization’, Review of International Political Economy, 8(1), 96–118. Deacon, Bob (2005), ‘From ‘Safety Nets’ Back to ‘Universal Social Provision’: Is the Global Tide Turning?’, Global Social Policy, 5(1), 19–28. Dostal, Jörg Michael (2010), ‘The Developmental Welfare State and Social Policy: Shifting from Basic to Universal Social Protection’, Korean Journal of Policy Studies, 25(3), 147–172. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990), The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta (1997), ‘Hybrid or Unique?: The Japanese Welfare State between Europe and America’, Journal of European Social Policy, 7(3), 179–189. Farnsworth, Kevin (2004), ‘Welfare through Work: An Audit of Occupational Social Provision at the Turn of the New Century’, Social Policy and Administration, 38(5), 437–455. Franzoni, Juliana Martínez (2008), ‘Welfare Regimes in Latin America: Capturing Constellations of Markets, Families, and Policies’, Latin American Politics and Society, 50(2), 67–100.

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280 Handbook of social policy and development Franzoni, Juliana Martínez and Diego Sánchez-Ancochea (2017), ‘How Did Costa Rica Achieve Social and Market Incorporation?’, CEPAL Review, 121, 123–137. Franzoni, Juliana Martínez, Diego Sánchez-Ancochea and Héctor Solano (2012), ‘The Road to Universal Social Protection: How Costa Rica Informs Theory’, Working Paper No. 383, Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Goodin, R (2001), ‘Work and Welfare: Towards a Post-Productivist Welfare Regime’, British Journal of Political Science, 31(1), 13–39. Heintz, James and Francie Lund (2012), ‘ Welfare Regimes and Social Policy: A Review of the Role of Labour and Employment’, UNRISD Research Paper No.2012–4, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). Hewison, Kevin and Arne Kalleberg (2013), ‘Precarious Work and Flexibilization in South and Southeast Asia’, American Behavioral Scientist, 57(4), 395–402. Hobsbawm, E. (1987), The Age of Empire 1875–1914, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Holliday, I. (2000), ‘Productivist Welfare Capitalism: Social Policy in East Asia’, Political Studies, 48(4), 706–723. ILO (2013), ‘Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture (Second Edition)’, Geneva: International Labour Office. ILO (2018), ‘Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture, Third Edition’, Geneva: International Labour Office. Kalleberg, Arne (2011), Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States 1970s–2000s, New York: Russell Sage. Kim, Pil Ho (2010), ‘The East Asian Welfare State Debate and Surrogate Social Policy: An Exploratory Study on Japan and South Korea’, Socio-Economic Review, 8, 411–435. Komine, A. (2004), ‘The Making of Beveridge’s Unemployment (1909): Three Concepts Blended’, European Journal of History of Economic Thought, 11(2), 255–280. Lue, Jen-Der and Chan-ung Park (2013), ‘Beyond Productivist Social Policy – the East Asian Welfare–Work Nexus in Transition’, Journal of Asian Public Policy, 6(1), 1–9. Lund, Francie (2009), ‘Social Protection, Citizenship and the Employment Relationship’, WIEGO Working Paper (Social Protection) No. 10, Manchester: Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). Lund, Francie and Smita Srinivas (2000), Learning from Experience: A Gendered Approach to Social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy, Geneva: International Labour Organization. Mkandawire, T. (2001), ‘Social Policy in a Developing Context’, Social Policy and Development Programme Paper No. 7, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). OECD (2017), ‘OECD Reviews of Labour Market and Social Policies: Costa Rica’, Paris: OECD. Orloff, Ann (2002), ‘Women’s Employment and Welfare Regimes: Globalization, Export Orientation and Social Policy in Europe and North America’, Social Policy and Development Programme Paper No. 12, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). Ortiz, Isabel, Matthew Cummins and Kalaivani Karunanethy (2017), ‘Fiscal Space for Social Protection and the Sdgs: Options to Expand Social Investments in 187 Countries’, ESS Working Paper No. 48, Geneva: Extension of Social Security (ESS), International Labour Organisation Quinlan, Michael (2012), ‘The ‘Pre-Invention’ of Precarious Employment: The Changing World of Work in Context’, Economic and Labour Relations Review, 23(4), 1–22. Razavi, S. (2007), ‘The Return to Social Policy and the Persistent Neglect of Unpaid Care’, Development and Change, 38(3), 377–400. Razavi, S. and R. Pearson (2004), ‘Globalization, Export-Oriented Employment and Social Policy: Gendered Connections’, in S. Razavi, R. Pearson and C. Danloy (eds),

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Employment-based social protection 281 Globalization, Export Orientated Employment and Social Policy: Gendered Connections, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–29. Rogan, Michael, Sally Roever, Martha Chen and Françoise Carré (2017), ‘Informal Employment in the Global South: Globalisation, Production Relations and ‘Precarity’’, Research in the Sociology of Work, 31, 307–333. Rosner, D. and G. Markowitz (2003), ‘The Struggle over Employee Benefits: The Role of Labour in Influencing Modern Health Policy’, Milbank Quarterly, 81(1), 45–73. Scully, Ben (2016), ‘Precarity North and South: A Southern Critique of Guy Standing’, Global Labour Journal, 7(2), 160–174. Seekings, Jeremy (2008), ‘The ILO and Social Protection in the Global South, 1919– 2005’, CSSR Working Paper No. 238, Cape Town: Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR), University of Cape Town. Standing, Guy (2000), ‘Social Policy in a Development Context’, Report of the UNRISD International Conference held on the 23–24 September, 2000 in Tammsvik, Sweden, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). Standing, Guy (2008), ‘How Cash Transfers Boost Work and Economic Security’, DESA Working Paper No. 58, New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Standing, Guy (2011), The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury Academic. UNRISD (2010), ‘Combating Poverty and Inequality: Structural Change, Social Policy and Politics’, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). Vallas, Steve (2015), ‘Accounting for Precarity: Recent Studies of Labor Market Uncertainty’, Contemporary Sociology, 44(4), 463–469. Weeks, K. (2011), The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weil, D. (2014), The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weil, L. (1997), ‘Organized Labor and Health Reform: Union Interests and the Clinton Plan’, Journal of Public Health Policy, 18(1), 30–48.

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PART III SERVICES, PROGRAMMES AND POLICY SECTORS

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15. Health and development Amrit Virk

In the last two decades, health and health care reforms have come to occupy a high profile on the national policy agendas of governments in low and middle income countries (LMICs) and within the wider international development community (UHC2030 2018). Health features prominently in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as key global agencies and donors now regard good health as not an enabler but a precondition for sustainable economic progress. Without doubt, people are on average living longer than 30 years ago. Yet, there are sound ethical and pragmatic reasons for investing in health. For one, every individual is entitled a fundamental right to health. Additionally, there still exists a vast unmet need for health care within LMICs, with many lacking access to basic health care because they lack funds and knowledge or live too far from health care facilities. LMICs are a diverse and heterogeneous group in terms of their health indicators and health system capacities. The World Bank classifies ‘developing’ countries based on their gross national income per capita and this chapter focuses on health care systems in low income (up to US$995 per capita) and lower-middle income countries (US$996– US$3895). However, it is important to remember that classifying countries on strictly defined monetary measures often glosses over vast inequities both in utilization and distribution within countries. For instance, South Africa, a middle income country, reports an under-five mortality rate of 43.3 deaths per 100 000 live births, far worse than lower income countries such as Bangladesh (34.2), Vietnam (21.6) and Nepal (34.5) (WHO 2018a). Income-based demarcations also conceal the shared vulnerabilities of LMICs in terms of epidemiological and systemic challenges of scarce data, capacity and resource characteristics that make them distinct from high income economies. Even so, there are important distinctions between low- and middleincome countries on the one hand, and richer economies on the other, with respect to their development outcomes (improved poverty levels, literacy and health indicators), average incomes, and physical and financial resources. Consequently, health care priorities and strategies tend to vary: whereas provision of basic health care is a paramount concern for 283

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low income countries (LICs), for many middle income countries with high levels of population coverage such as Brazil, China and Malaysia the focus is clearly shifting to tackling non-communicable diseases, ageing population needs and overall improvements in health system efficiency (World Bank 2018a). This chapter provides an overview of health care systems particularly in low and middle-income countries, their structures, key debates and issues as well as ongoing efforts to universalize health coverage. It begins with a contextual description of the disease and human development profiles of LMICs, followed by an overview of their health care systems. It then describes the current focus on universalizing health coverage, before going on to discuss the interlinkages between health and development. The chapter concludes with general reflections on current trends and future pathways to universal health coverage (UHC).

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND EPIDEMIOLOGICAL PROFILE Remarkable improvements in health indicators have occurred over the last three decades, and especially since the United Nations Millennium Summit of 2000 which gave rise to the Millennium Development Goals. Even amongst least developed countries, life expectancy is on average higher, and child and maternal mortality lower, than in 1990 (World Bank 2018b). Yet, grim statistics are a reminder of persisting challenges. Communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, typhoid and cholera continue to afflict many in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. As compared to 7 per cent in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, communicable diseases cause 48 per cent of all deaths in least developed countries (World Bank 2018b). India alone has more than a fifth of the world’s tuberculosis patients, and 56 per cent of leprosy patients. In 2015, almost all (99 per cent) of the estimated 303 000 maternal deaths globally occurred in LMICs, nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) in the World Health Organization (WHO) African Region (WHO 2018b). Of late, LMICs are also facing a double burden of disease with the rise of chronic medical problems such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are typically long term problems resulting from genetic, physiological, environmental and behavioural factors, and these caused 37 per cent of deaths in LMICs in 2015 as compared to 23 per cent in 2000 (WHO 2018a).

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Epidemiology aside, environmental and social factors play into poor health in LMICs. Unplanned and rapid development has caused cities to swell, with incumbent increases in urban poverty and poor sanitation, water and air quality. More than half of the world’s 767 million extremely poor people live in sub-Saharan Africa (PovCal 2018). Despite new-found economic status as middle income countries, more than 20 per cent of people in India and Vietnam and more than 50 per cent in Nigeria, Uzbekistan and Kenya remain in poverty. At a global level, a mere 17 per cent of mothers and infants in the poorest fifth of the population, as compared to 74 per cent in the richest quintile, received at least six of the seven key interventions for maternal and child health (WHO/IBRD 2017). Even within individual nations, vast differences exist between social classes as well as amongst genders and regions. In Brazil, for instance, the life expectancy for 20-year-old men and women was estimated to be 6.2 years longer in the richer south and south-east regions as compared to poorer regions in the north and north-east (Szwarcwald et al. 2016). Similarly, diabetes levels were 48 per cent higher and heart disease 22 per cent higher amongst adults with no formal education in comparison with those with a college or higher level of education (Beltrán-Sánchez and Andrade 2016). Despite its strong economic position, even within the United States large health disparities prevail: the infant mortality rate for non-Hispanic black women is more than double that for non-Hispanic white women (CDC 2013). That large inequities in health status exist across and within countries is well known. The growing body of work on the social determinants of health has brought to international attention the fact that health imbalances also result from unjust environments which give some unfair advantages in terms of wealth, power and resources, including healthier work and living environments (CSDH 2008). Improving health and health inequalities will therefore need nations to address these wider socio-economic inequalities through a broad spectrum of economic and social policies that advance education, gender equality, fair trade and healthy cities. At the same time, how health care systems are designed, managed, funded and run is critically important for achieving better health outcomes.

HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS AND CURRENT ARRANGEMENTS The 2000 WHO annual report focused international attention on health systems as the backbone for tackling emerging and existing health risks

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and disease outbreaks within LMICs. Health care systems comprise the institutions, organizations and resources which collectively deliver services to meet health care needs (Mills 2014). Well-designed health care systems have sufficient capacities (fiscal, material and human) to produce good health outcomes efficiently, and are attuned to population needs (Atun 2012). Rooted in values of social cohesion and community-based fairness, most developed health care systems are designed to ensure that health care coverage is universal, and that ‘need’ rather than ‘ability to pay’ determines people’s access to care (Saltman et al. 2004). This partly stems from their historical evolution during the post-war period that saw the welfare state emerge across Western Europe, and a social contract based on a degree of state intervention and expanded public spending (Saltman 2002). Despite variations in funding (general taxes, contributory health insurance) and delivery arrangements (public, private insurers and providers), social solidarity is a core and non-negotiable principle underlying most Western health systems (with the exception of the United States), enacted through multiple cross-subsidies from the young to the old, rich to poor, healthy to sick, and from individuals to families (Saltman 2002). Conversely, their colonial past profoundly shapes health care systems across many LMICs in Asia and Africa. Initially established for colonial administrators, delivery systems based on Western medicine were gradually expanded over the late nineteenth to early twentieth century to reach the general population. Public health interventions were piecemeal, often limited to vaccination campaigns for smallpox, polio, bubonic plague and tuberculosis. The prevalent model of care was heavily urban-centric, hospital-centred and curative, and persisted across many countries in South Asia and Africa post-independence. With economic development and rapid industrialization being top priorities, investment in health care faltered and was generally outpaced by rising user demand through much of the later twentieth century. Across several LMICs, the private and non-governmental sector stepped in to address gaps in public provisioning, sometimes with active state encouragement, as in India, Malaysia and South Africa. In India, for example, the growth of private health services was disorderly and unplanned, with commercial clinics and hospitals proliferating across the country but with poorly enforced rules on location, pricing and professional ethics (Sen et al. 2002). Through their urban concentration and escalated treatment costs, private facilities in India and elsewhere have intensified health inequities. Notably in Africa, civil society organizations fill critical voids in public provisioning and are an important channel for foreign aid flows. However, their reach

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is often restricted to particular localities or diseases and the scale of their work limited by constrained capacities. The 1980s also saw the emergence of new public management (NPM) thinking across much of Western Europe (Hood 1991), which permeated through to LMICs’ health policies, often through intervention by external agencies. The 1980s debt crisis for which many countries in Africa and Asia sought emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank fundamentally restructured economies and instituted measures to cut down public spending, including on health. Independent evaluations have found that these measures weakened health care access and affordability and also worsened income and food security, factors on which health status is contingent (Thompson et al. 2017). Role of International Organizations Despite variable contributions to overall health financing in LMICs, powerful international donors have disproportionately high levels of influence on health spending: from encouraging the development of single disease vertical programmes, to the recent push towards universalizing health coverage. For example, the World Bank’s lending policies have seen Brazil and India direct more resources into HIV/AIDS as compared to other diseases with higher caseloads (Sridhar et al. 2017). Since 2000, major changes in global health governance have occurred with the emergences of new players such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The World Bank continues to be influential as the second-largest funder of global health after the Global Fund (ibid.). Even so, prominent donors have been influential in directing political attention on health and health systems reforms in LMICs. Ultimately, all health systems aim to improve people’s health status and protect them from financial hardship in the face of illness. The mechanisms for governing, financing, delivering and regulating health care are considered the system’s ‘building blocks’ to achieve its goals (WHO 2000). While simply increasing the quantity of funds or resources is not a magic bullet to good health, relative spending on health is often a good indicator of how much countries prioritize health. Similarly, increased health spending has been associated with major improvements in life expectancy: OECD data reveal that a 10 per cent increase in health spending per capita (in real terms) results in an increase of 3.5 months of life expectancy. OECD countries spend an average of 8.9 per cent of their gross domestic products (GDP) on health, and most of this comes

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primarily from public sources. In contrast, health care spending in LMICs is significantly lower: at 5 per cent of GDP, China is among the highest spenders amongst LMICs. Of total government spending in 2015, the proportion spent on health was higher in South Africa (14.1 per cent), Sudan (18.1 per cent) and Brazil (7.7 per cent); more modest in Nigeria (5.3 per cent) and Nepal (5.5 per cent); and extremely low in India (3.4 per cent), Liberia (2.7 per cent) and Mozambique (1.2 per cent) (WHO 2018a). Average health expenditure per person in Bangladesh ($32) was half that of India ($63), and less than a tenth that of China ($426) (WHO 2018a). China, along with Thailand, Kazakhstan and Malaysia, is also among a select group of emerging economies where, like most OECD countries, public spending on health exceeds the proportion funded privately. The proportion of public spending is important because it reduces the burden of paying for health care for individuals, especially those with limited resources. High levels of out-of-pocket spending on health put people at risk of poverty, compelling some to borrow money or sell assets to fund health care costs, and driving the poorest into avoiding health care altogether. It is not only how much is spent but also how it is spent that impacts upon health outcomes. Amongst developed countries, the United States is a well-known outlier which spends twice as much per capita on health as many OECD countries but reports far lower life expectancy and infant mortality (Papanicolas et al. 2018). Across LMICs, low public investment in health translates into understaffing and severe deficits in basic medicines and equipment. Timely access to safe and affordable medicines, vaccines and related health services could have averted 1.6 million deaths in Africa from malaria, tuberculosis and HIV-related illnesses in 2015 (UN 2017). Similarly, the dearth of qualified health care professionals and facilities poses a serious challenge for health care access and quality for many in South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. Indicating low levels of domestic health spending as well the sheer inequity in the distribution of health workers, the WHO reports less than one physician per 1000 population across 76 countries; in comparison, most OECD countries report 2–5 physicians on average. For an average patient in an Indian village, for example, this has meant travelling 4–6 km to reach the nearest facility (Gill 2009). Even when facilities are available, in urban areas for instance, the prohibitive price and poor quality of care is often a huge barrier to care. Das and Hammer (2010) present startling evidence from the Indian capital, Delhi, where they find poorer groups had reasonably easy physical access to providers and, in fact, use more health care services than relatively better-off individuals. According to the authors, access and availability of doctors is often a lesser problem than

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the quality of care patients receive in some parts of India. Highlighting the importance of government oversight, Das and Hammar find that better-skilled providers tend to be located in richer localities, which makes it much more likely for poorer people to receive substandard treatment compared to wealthier residents. The neglect of public facilities also highlights how government stewardship – directing health policy, regulating service delivery, and managing and using data effectively – which is a vital pillar of health systems, is often on shaky ground in an LMIC context. Up until the early 2000s, apathetic leadership across most low income countries resulted in a neglect of public facilities, poor monitoring and disease surveillance systems, weak regulation of private providers, and incoordination and duplication in health care delivery. In the ensuing cycle of inequitable health worker distribution, medical malpractice (informal payments, drug overuse) and poor treatment quality, patients are typically the worst affected. To be clear, resource shortages or their unequal distributions are not uniquely LMIC problems, but the nature and scale of the challenges varies. Like many LMICs, access to health professionals is limited for people in rural and remote Australia, Canada and the United States, and the Nordic countries. OECD countries have also been able to respond better to growing shortages through, for example, increased medical and nursing student intakes as well as drawing in overseas doctors; in 2013–2014, 17 per cent of active doctors in OECD countries were foreign-trained. Ironically, though, more than a third of these foreigntrained doctors belonged to lower income countries in Asia and Africa, many of which themselves face severe shortages of trained doctors (OECD 2016).

UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE REFORMS Universalizing health coverage (UHC) by 2030 is marked out as a global priority, and one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. UHC is defined as all individuals having access to good quality health care without being daunted by treatment costs (WHO 2010). By the late 1970s, most industrialized countries, with the exception of the United States, had achieved near total UHC, even though differently financed: largely through general taxes in the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand; and through contributory social health insurance (SHI) in

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Germany and elsewhere in continental Europe. SHI systems are structured around compulsory, wage-linked contributions into a general funding pool and the state typically provides top-up coverage for less-affluent and unemployed groups (Normand and Busse 2002). The SHI model is based on having a large and identified group of people who are formally employed, which makes it easier to collect payments from them and to ensure a stable flow of funds for the system. Tax-funded systems, on the other hand, are simpler and often less expensive to administer, but normally entail greater limits on the choice of available services. In reality, though, most OECD health systems are hybrid systems combining funds from general taxes and contributions, but essentially run as public systems with strong government oversight. Health care coverage is directly correlated with a region’s under-five mortality rates, life expectancy and the Human Development Index, underscoring the criticality of access to improved health and development outcomes (World Bank 2017). International and bilateral agencies have been hugely influential in championing UHC as a vehicle for sustainable growth, poverty reduction and population well-being in LMICs. Since 2010, the WHO and World Bank have delivered technical assistance to more than 100 countries on moving towards UHC. Global agencies are calling on LMIC governments to design pro-poor health services that are affordable and largely free at the point of delivery. Systems for advance payment (general taxes or insurance premiums) into a common pool ensure risk sharing (across genders, age, wealth, employment) and are expected to be equitable, efficient and sustainable. This marks an important shift in earlier health and development debates: from advocacy of ‘trickle-down’ health improvements resulting from overall economic advancement, to the World Bank’s backing for charging user fees in public hospitals to garner more resources for health in LMICs. From a policy and planning perspective, design and eventual success is determined not only by how many people are covered, but also by what extent of need is met and the proportion of direct costs covered. At least 40 countries have introduced universal health care reform since 2013 (World Bank 2018a). Amongst LMICs, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Cuba, Brazil and Colombia made an earlier start to extend health services and report near complete population coverage. For most other nations in Africa and Asia, UHC reform efforts are more recent and were initiated only after 2000. Different political and cultural histories, technical capacities and demographic contexts including the population size of the poor are often important factors that impact upon policy choices. Economic growth and the human and material resources available for

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health, the availability of infrastructures and trained administrators, dominant interest groups and their relative influence, as well as prevailing ideas, are some amongst the many factors that shape health policies. Dominant thinking within policy circles will determine whether benefits are targeted or universal in nature, the extent of private sector involvement, and adoption of market mechanisms. Despite near universal coverage in both countries, Brazil and Chile differ vastly in how their health care systems are structured and in relative access for poorer groups within their populations. Whereas more egalitarian thinking in Brazil led to the creation of an integrated social security system, more marketorientated reforms in Chile created a two-tiered system that unfairly disadvantaged poorer individuals who had access to lower quality of care and longer waiting times as compared to more affluent groups (De Vos and Van der Stuyft 2015). While LMICs are increasingly invested in health reform, ever conscious of limited funds, cost-efficiency remains of prime importance. A number of them have therefore opted to selectively target benefits towards more deprived communities. This ‘bottom-up’ approach has involved targeting benefits to the poorest and most vulnerable groups, with the intention to gradually extend coverage to the near-poor and beyond as resources become available (Cotlear et al. 2015). Countries are opting for one of two main approaches: either directing more funds into the services that the poor most need (primary care, medical providers or essential medicines), or reforming weak delivery systems through an inventive mix of incentives. Brazil’s Programa Saúde da Família (FHS), Ethiopia’s Health Extension Program (HEP), Malawi’s Emergency Human Resources Programme (EHRP) and South Africa’s Antiretroviral Treatment Program (ATP) are instances of the former. Sometimes both sets of programmes are found within a country: India’s National Rural Health Mission, for example, improved the quantity of medical providers and supplies in rural areas, whereas the country’s RSBY national health insurance programme offered hospital-based care to poorer people. In practice, many more countries have effected what are described as ‘demand-side’ changes that essentially direct more funds towards health care users, making services more affordable for them and giving them greater choice of what services to access and where. In other words, health care providers are funded based on the individual preferences of patients rather than through traditional budgeted transfers, with the expectation of improved treatment quality. Health insurance programmes are a common platform by which LMICs are implementing such reforms, although despite being labelled health insurance, several schemes are chiefly funded through general taxes and less through contributions, as is

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normally the case with insurance. Programmes across LMICs also differ in other important ways such as in their administration (centrally or autonomously managed), target populations (poor, non-poor) and whether they are stand-alone programmes or embedded within existing schemes for formal sector workers (Cotlear et al. 2015). Schemes in Ghana, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Philippines and Vietnam, for instance, operate under a single centralized fund for the entire population; whereas China, Thailand and Indonesia have distinct programmes for poor and vulnerable groups. More recently, Turkey and Indonesia have progressed to centralizing their programmes for the poor within national systems of social health insurance; which normally results in better coordination of resources for providing effective and equitable health care. Most LMIC governments have subsidized payments for the poorest groups in a bid to ensure their inclusion, whereas some offer partial subsidies for informal workers, and require contributions from formal and government sector employees who are far fewer in number. Common to many such initiatives is their inventive use of mixed sources of financing (general state revenues and payroll taxes) (World Bank 2013). For example, in conjunction with general revenue transfers and payroll taxes, 75 per cent of funding for Ghana’s National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) comes from a new VAT levy it introduced for the purpose. Similarly, Gabon generated $25 million in 2009 to fund health care for its non-insured population through a levy on mobile phone companies (Stenberg et al. 2010). Nations are also experimenting with decentralized institutional arrangements to manage new programmes, moving away from the traditional reliance on national health ministries to run all health initiatives. Public primary health facilities and non-governmental organizations in Kenya and Cambodia independently manage funds to run health care programmes for the poorest and most vulnerable individuals (World Bank 2013). In general, local contextual conditions determine countries’ reform choices: the size of the informal sector and their ability to pay, the extent of private sector penetration, and the capacity of public sector agencies. Despite some variations in service delivery arrangements, UHC programmes in most countries offer users the option of both private and public sector facilities. These policy changes are not without challenges. Health care reforms, in any setting, come up against various political, economic and technical barriers. In the political sphere, powerful actors and organizations at risk of reduced benefits or wealth need to be persuaded to support changes, sometimes through higher contributions to finance changes (Hacker 2004; Hanvoravongchai 2013). This requires high level political and

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negotiation skills, and leaders willing to make tough policy choices at the risk of short term political losses. Even so, there are additional practical difficulties when altering financing, payment and delivery systems to reach deprived communities in LMICs. For one, there are high administrative costs of checking recipients’ eligibility in countries where there are large numbers of people in poverty. New programmes are often larger and more complex, and a high level of technical expertise is needed for enrolling populations, managing incentives and payments, and monitoring outputs. A recent World Bank report finds that despite massive data being generated on new health programmes through, for example, performance indicators and medical audits, information is not adequately used to inform policy decisions to improve the cost or quality of care (Cotlear et al. 2015). As the report cautions, despite their best intentions, programmes in low income countries with limited capacities risk massive gaps between assured and received benefits. A lack of providers, distance from facilities, overcrowding and long waiting periods could all lead to unplanned rationing of care, and lower public satisfaction and support for new programmes. Extending coverage beyond the poorest groups has been contentious in many parts of Africa and South Asia with a large informal sector that is difficult to identify. The near-poor in the informal sector often earn more than the threshold below which people qualify as poor, yet this group is vulnerable owing to a lack of social security, and precarious working conditions. Thailand, Colombia and Argentina are offering to fully subsidize their informal workers, offering them a way into existing health programmes; whereas others such as the Philippines and China offer partial support for the non-poor informal sector workers to voluntarily enrol in health insurance. While high levels of subsidy have enabled some countries to rapidly expand coverage, the sustainability of this approach is called into question when there is a sizeable number of informal workers to cover and subsidies principally draw from general government revenues (Cotlear et al. 2015).

HEALTH AND IMPACT ON DEVELOPMENT A direct correlation between health and economic status is evident globally: poorer people are in worse health and live shorter lives on average than wealthier people (Marmot 2015). This is as true of deprived groups in India as it is for the poor in the United Kingdom or United States: the life span of a poor person in London, Glasgow or Baltimore is on average 20 years lower than the cities’ wealthier residents (ibid.). As

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the World Bank points out, it will not be possible to end poverty and achieve the SDGs without universalizing health coverage. Equally, the links between health and poverty run both ways. Poor health has a negative impact on human capital development and people’s productivity and employability. High out-of-pocket spending on health is known to thrust 100 million individuals into extreme poverty each year, even as a further 800 million people spend a substantial 10 per cent or more of their annual budget on health care, resources often diverted from spending on food and essential services (WHO 2018b). From a policy perspective, this means two things: one, there is an evident role for health policy and health services to address human deprivation and often this will require special measures to address the needs of poor and vulnerable groups, and secondly, that improved health cannot come about without reducing health inequalities through concerted policies to improve the living and working environments of people. The 2010 WHO Adelaide Statement and the 2013 WHO Health Promotion Conference on Health in All Policies (HiAP) are global petitions for integrated responses across social policies for improved health equity. Highlighting how factors outside the health system result in health and development gains, a recent OECD report finds small but significant life expectancy gains of 2–3 months resulting from a 10 per cent increase in education coverage, income per capita, and healthier lifestyles (James et al. 2017). The authors also make the important point that the positive effects of better diets or reduced air pollution on individual health are often not immediately obvious but may result over a longer duration. In recognition of the social determinants of health, the WHO has built on its definition of UHC to include taking ‘steps towards equity, development priorities, and social inclusion and cohesion’. Similarly, the WHO Health in All Policies (HiAP) framework offers countries a practical tool for monitoring the extent to which health is considered in public policies across sectors (WHO 2013). A recent study reports demonstrable albeit patchy commitment world-wide to addressing these wider social and environmental factors impacting health (Donkin et al. 2018). Amongst affluent countries, Canada has been at the forefront, introducing policies and governance arrangements accommodating the social determinants of health even as spending cuts in Europe have raised social risks. Amongst middle income countries, Healthy China 2030 sets a bold new policy vision integrating health across all government policies, developing healthy cities, the health industry, improved lifestyle and service quality (Donkin et al. 2018).

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Even so, the instrumental role of health and welfare programmes in improving people’s productive capacities has currency for LMIC governments. UHC appeals to LMIC governments for both moral and practical reasons: the intrinsic benefits of good health for individuals as well as the link between healthy populations and economic progress. Policymakers, tax-payers, and contributors alike are more easily persuaded to ‘developmental’ policies that aid the formation of human capital, raise people’s income generation capacities, and contribute to economic and social development (Midgley and Aspalter 2017; Virk and Atun 2015). Better health means that children learn better and are more employable and productive in the future. Investing in health and health systems is seen as an indirect investment in the economy and a means for more inclusive economic growth. Yet by committing to UHC, countries are pledging not only to protect people from the financial burden of health care and to improve access to services but also to ensure that good health is seen as much as an outcome of social and economic policies as financial attainment and productivity. Most nations today have to contend with the challenges of escalating medical costs, rapidly rising user expectations, and massive demand for health care. For all policymakers the challenge is in striking a balance between programmes that are cost-efficient yet effectively address health care needs. For developing economies, there are added difficulties which stem from overall resource scarcity but equally because they have many more poor and deprived people who need providing for. Additional challenges for low and middle-income countries spring not only from the disproportionately high disease burdens in these countries but also because of the unique and variegated mix of communicable and noncommunicable diseases and associated multi-morbidity that they are now grappling with. Partly down to poor socio-economic environments – low quality air, water, sanitation facilities, unsafe workplaces, poorly designed cities and unfair global trade practices – the contribution of ill-designed health systems to poor health is equally well recognized. Weak health systems limit populations’ access to health care often because services do not exist or are unaffordable. A combination of factors contribute to weak health systems – ranging from low state commitment to health and consequently low-levels of funding and poor regulatory oversight, and weak data management systems – all of which contribute to large regional and global inequities in health care. Functional health systems are the cornerstone for ensuring broad-based access across a range of health care needs and to improving health outcomes. Efficient, equitable and good quality health systems require robust

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governance, sufficient funds, medical supplies, human resources and information management. They are also responsive to users’ health care needs although ‘responsiveness’ in terms of addressing raised user demand or increased use of high-technology treatments will need to be balanced with total resource availability in a country. Most health systems will need to institute some degree of rationing of services in a way that is both cost-efficient and effective in terms of health outcomes. Historically, most donor funding has been directed to vertical diseasespecific programmes such as eradication campaigns for malaria, polio, and HIV/AIDS and not broad-based health system strengthening. Despite vertical programmes’ reasonable ‘success’ in improving surveillance systems and disease mitigation in some settings, they have often fragmented health care by created parallel systems driven by donor priorities. Over time, there is the realization that vertical programmes are at best interim measures and that have limited effectiveness without supportive health systems. There is now broad agreement on more investment being needed in health systems: in high-income countries to sustain health gains, and to improve coverage and health outcomes in low and middle-income countries. Yet, it is often as important to optimize resources and get better value for spending through for example, better coordination between ministries, amongst health and development programmes, better incentives, and professional standards for health workers, and appropriate use of evidence in planning and policy decisions. For low income countries, optimizing health spending could often be about directing resources away from problems affecting the few to ones affecting many, for example, primary care or drug supplies. It may also mean investing in problems that are likely to generate better health at a cheaper cost such as preventative and primary care. As a significant provider of health care services across Africa and South Asia, the private sector is recognized as a potential partner for UHC. Yet worries abound, not unfounded, given evident lack of information on and regulation of the private providers which is typically profit-motivated, pricier and concentrated in urban pockets. For all health systems, though, the first step is for them to be able to generate and manage evidence and develop the capacities to use that evidence to inform clinical and public health decisions. Countries such as the United Kingdom have instituted special agencies such as the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence to create evidence-based guidelines for health practitioners; and others such as Sweden and the Netherlands have established research bodies that collect routine data on health inequalities for tracking and redressing policies.

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In 2018, universal health coverage remains centre-stage on the global agendas of the WHO and World Bank, as well as governments in lowand middle-income countries. Progressively increasing the proportion of people being able to access and afford health care is considered a pathway out of poverty and towards human and inclusive economic growth. For low income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia the challenge is ensuring basic services for massive numbers who cannot afford, reach or find health care when needed. Conversely, middle income countries such as Thailand and Brazil with near total coverage are now bracing for new challenges in the form of non-communicable diseases and ageing populations. While there is fervent global debate about reforming health financing and delivery systems in a bid to universalize health care services, there is global acceptance that reforms need to be based on local realities and that there is no gold standard and one-size-fits-all solution for UHC. Even so, an important part of UHC policies will be about effectively managing stakeholders such as pharmaceutical companies and private sector providers, who despite their deep-seated profit motives will, in many settings, be crucial for affordable and accessible drugs, medical supplies and expertise. While individual country approaches for universalizing coverage have unsurprisingly been varied, some broad policy directions are evident. A prominent feature of post-2000 health care reforms is a distinct focus on reaching out to the poorest groups and on addressing health problems that affect them. Countries are also trying new and innovative ways to generate additional domestic funds for health through new levies and funds, and to involve existing private sector players into supporting UHC goals. Over the past decade, significant progress has been made and much achieved in terms of extending coverage of essential health services to larger numbers, even though the debate continues on how best to offer health protection to those in the middle – the non-poor or near-poor and informal workers – in ways that are effective and sustainable. Even as the world has begun taking notice of the importance of the social determinants of health, much more remains to be done especially at the practical level to develop the foundations and construct healthier, safer and more equitable societies.

REFERENCES Atun, R. (2012), ‘Health systems, systems thinking and innovation’, Health Policy and Planning, 27 (4), iv4–8.

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298 Handbook of social policy and development Beltrán-Sánchez, H. and F.C.D Andrade (2016), ‘Time trends in adult chronic disease inequalities by education in Brazil: 1998–2013’, International Journal for Equity in Health, 15, 139. CDC (2013), Health Disparities and Inequalities Report, ‘Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)’, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cotlear, D., S. Nagpal, O. Smith, A. Tandon and R. Cortez (2015), ‘Going universal: how 24 countries are implementing universal health coverage reforms from the bottom up’, Washington, DC: World Bank. CSDH (2008), ‘Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health’, Final Report of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health, Geneva: World Health Organization. Das, J. and J. Hammer (2010), ‘The quality of medical care in urban India: a summary of recent research’, India Health Beat, 3 (1). Donkin, A., P. Goldblatt, J. Allen, V. Nathanson and M. Marmot (2018), ‘Global action on the social determinants of health’, British Medical Journal (BMJ), Global Health, 3 (Suppl. 1), e000603. doi: 10.1136/bmjgh-2017-000603. Gill, K. (2009), ‘A primary evaluation of service delivery under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM): findings from a study in Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan’, New Delhi: Planning Commission of India. Hacker, J.S. (2004), ‘Dismantling the health care state? Political institutions, public policies and the comparative politics of health reform’, British Journal of Political Science, 34 (4), 693–724. Hanvoravongchai, P. (2013), ‘Thailand – health financing reform in Thailand: toward universal coverage under fiscal constraints’, Washington, DC: World Bank. Hood, C.C. (1991), ‘A public management for all seasons?, Public Administration, 69, 3–19. James, C., M. Devaux and F. Sassi (2017), ‘Inclusive growth and health’, OECD Health Working Papers, No. 103, Paris: OECD Publishing. Marmot, M. (2015), The Health Gap: the Challenge of an Unequal World, London: Bloomsbury. Midgley, J. and C. Aspalter (2017), ‘Developmental social policy: theory and implementation’, in C. Aspalter and Pribadi, K. (eds), Development and Social Policy, London: Routledge. Mills, A. (2014), ‘Health care systems in low- and middle-income countries’, New England Journal of Medicine, 370 (6), 552–557. Normand, C. and R. Busse (2002), ‘Social health insurance financing’, in E. Mossialos, A. Dixon, J. Figueras and J. Kutzin (eds), Funding Health Care: Options for Europe. Buckingham, UK and Philadelphia, PA, USA: Open University Press. OECD (2016), ‘Health workforce policies in OECD countries: right jobs, right skills, right places’, OECD Health Policy Studies, Paris: OECD Publishing. Papanicolas, I., L.R. Woskie and A.K. Jha (2018), ‘Health care spending in the United States and other high-income countries’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 319 (10), 1024–1039. PovCalNet (2018), ‘PovcalNet: an online analysis tool for global poverty monitoring’, World Bank, accessed 15 August 2018 at http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/ povOnDemand.aspx. Saltman, R.B. (2002), ‘The Western European experience with health care reform’, Copenhagen: European Observatory on Health Care Systems. Saltman, R.B., R. Busse and J. Figueras (eds) (2004), Social Health Insurance Systems in Western Europe, Buckingham: Open University Press. Sen, G., A. Iyer and A. George (2002), ‘Structural reforms and health equity: a comparison of NSS surveys, 1986–87 and 1995–96’, Economic and Political Weekly, 37 (14), 1342–1352.

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Health and development 299 Sridhar, D., J. Winters and E. Strong (2017), ‘World Bank’s financing, priorities, and lending structures for global health’, British Medical Journal, 358 (3339). doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j3339. Stenberg, K., R. Elovainio, D. Chisholm, D. Fuhr, A.-M. Perucic, D. Rekve and A. Yurekli (2010), ‘Responding to the challenge of resource mobilization-mechanisms for raising additional domestic resources for health’, World Health Report (2010), Background paper 13, accessed 14 August 2018 at http://wwwlive.who.int/entity/healthsystems/ topics/financing/healthreport/13Innovativedomfinancing.pdf. Szwarcwald, C.L., P.R.B. de Souza Júnior, A.P. Marques, W. da Silva de Almeida and D.E. Romero Montilla (2016), ‘Inequalities in healthy life expectancy by Brazilian geographic regions: findings from the National Health Survey’, International Journal for Equity in Health, 15 (141). doi: 10.1186/s12939-016-0432-7. Thomson, M., A. Kentikelenis and T. Stubbs (2017), ‘Structural adjustment programmes adversely affect vulnerable populations: a systematic-narrative review of their effect on child and maternal health’, Public Health Reviews, 38 (13). doi: 10.1186/s40985-0170059-2. UHC2030 (2018), ‘UHC2030’, accessed 30 July 2018 at https://www.uhc2030.org/aboutus/uhc2030-partners/. UN (2017), ‘Dying from lack of medicines: encouraging local production, right policies the way out’, accessed 18 June 2018 at https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/ december-2016-march-2017/dying-lack-medicines. Virk, A.K. and R. Atun (2015), ‘Towards universal health coverage in India: a historical examination of the genesis of Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana – the health insurance scheme for low-income groups’, Public Health, 129 (6), 810–817. De Vos, P. and P. Van der Stuyft (2015), ‘Sociopolitical determinants of international health policy’, International Journal of Health Services, 45, 363–377. WHO (2000), The World Health Report 2000 – health systems: improving performance. Geneva: World Health Organization, http://www.who.int/iris/handle/10665/42281. WHO (2010), ‘World Health Report 2010 – health systems financing: the path to universal coverage’, Geneva: World Health Organization, accessed 9 June 2018 at http://www. who.int/whr/2010/en/index.html. WHO (2013), ‘The Helsinki statement on Health in All Policies’, 8th Global Conference on Health Promotion, Helsinki, 10–14 June. WHO (2018a), ‘State of global health’, accessed 14 August 2018 at http://www.who.int/ news-room/facts-in-pictures/detail/state-of-global-health. WHO (2018b), ‘World Health Organization fact sheets’, accessed 30 July 2018 at http://www.who.int/. WHO/IBRD (2017), ‘Tracking universal health coverage: 2017 Global Monitoring Report’, World Health Organization and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank. World Bank (2013), ‘Universal Health Coverage (UNICO) studies series’, accessed 30 July 2018 at http://documents.worldbank.org. World Bank (2017), ‘Tracking universal health coverage: 2017 Global Monitoring Report’, WHO and World Bank, accessed 14 August 2018 at http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/ universalhealthcoverage/publication/tracking-universal-health-coverage-2017-globalmonitoring-report. World Bank (2018a), ‘Going universal: how countries are implementing pro-poor universal health coverage reforms’, Policy brief, accessed 13 July 2018 at http://pubdocs.world bank.org/en/157631516714445985/UHC-ONE-PAGER-2.pdf. World Bank (2018b), ‘World Bank open data’, accessed 30 July 2018 at https://data. worldbank.org/.

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16. Education, social policy and development Mayumi Terano

This chapter focuses on how education is conceptualized in the discourses of social policy and development. It examines some key issues and debates on education in relation to social issues and welfare. In the studies of social policy, education is treated as a distinct field, although it is considered an integral part of some welfare states. According to Wilensky (1975), this is because social policy has a stronger association with equality than with investment in education. Increases in educational investment and enrolment do not necessarily lead to equality, as education is shaped by the occupational structure of the country involved. The two, however, share some common attributes such as the way that global discussions shift from access and growth to quality, rights and sustainability, and also to the way global initiatives and priorities influence the local. However, in order to understand the unique nature of education, one needs a multidimensional perspective on the role of states, global governance, and the influence of social and political factors on the notion of rights. The implications for practice in social policy and education as well as research are relevant to the need for a multi-sector approach which also embraces the impact of diversified stakeholders, people’s mobility across state borders, a concept of ‘rights’ in transition economies, and the impact of cultural elements on the concept of education and policy designing.

SOCIAL POLICY AND PERSPECTIVES ON EDUCATION: COMMON PATHS Education is treated as one of the elements of social policy, along with health care and social security, in order to promote people’s well-being in society. In history, the Great Depression necessitated government intervention and support to alleviate poverty and inequality (United Nations 2011). Social policy, it was suggested, has two major goals: alleviating or reducing poverty, and promoting basic human rights in society (Hall and Midgley 2004a, pp. 9–10). In order to alleviate poverty, the World Bank prioritized measures to increase the labour 300

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productivity of the poor by maximizing their potential, as well as providing basic social services, from which some countries benefited. The notion of human rights in the context of development was highlighted in the 1960s through the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (1966). International development agencies argued for education, health care and basic necessities from a ‘rights’ perspective. Their practices, however, showed that they continued to treat these matters as instruments for economic development rather than as implements for the advancement of human rights, even though the human rights perspective in the development process was later foregrounded in the United Nations (UN) Declaration of the Rights of Development (1986). While social policy matters struggle to gain a purchase in development politics, as the claim is made by neoliberalists that they hinder economic well-being, education is generally seen as an important ingredient of economic growth. Scholars and international development institutions have argued for the positive impact of investment in education for economic growth in both developing and industrialized countries (OECD 2003; World Bank 1995). Education is thought not only to strengthen the capacity for economic growth and the reduction of poverty, but also to enable wider social benefits through enhancing health and nutrition through the education of women and children. Further analysis concludes that education is essential for the sound implementation of economic and social policies (World Bank 1995). This awareness led to the international agreement for Education for All (EFA) to be achieved by 2000, determined at the World Conference on Education for All, held in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990. The World Declaration on Education for All was adopted by the delegates at the Conference and education was designated as a fundamental human right (UNESCO 1990). This agreement became the cornerstone for a rights-based perspective on development (Shields 2013). Later in 2000, due to a concern about the lack of progress with EFA, the World Education Forum was held at Dakar, Senegal, and the international community reaffirmed its goal. The Dakar Framework for Action, agreed at the Forum, set six key education goals that focused on marginalized sections of society such as female children, women and ethnic minorities, and also on the notion of ‘quality’ as well as necessary life skills besides basic literacy and numeracy (UNESCO 2000). The EFA goals have contributed to the United Nations Millennium Declaration developed in 2000, which demonstrated an international commitment to alleviating extreme poverty and guaranteeing basic

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human rights (United Nations 2000). Eight goals, known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), were adopted, to be achieved by 2015, which addressed broad social initiatives including health, nutrition, education, gender and a need for a global partnership for development. The above objectives show that issues of social policy and education share similar intentions, as well as adopting an increasingly rights-based approach in the global framework. Such shared concepts, however, do not result in education being treated as part of social policy, as their links are not easily or always observed. Education is an integral part of some welfare states, but research studies show that when it comes to equality, other areas of social policy have a more direct impact, and that education such as schooling has not contributed to narrowing social gaps (Busemeyer and Nikolai 2010). The position of education in social policy has been the subject of discussion in the context of social policy and development in terms of, but not restricted to, the limited impact of education on development, despite the general consensus on the importance of education and the way education is linked to equality. This chapter reviews debates on the notions of social policy and education, linking the discussion to the development context, in order to clarify the conceptual framework of these debates. It also identifies key policy directions for education as part of social policy to achieve development goals, as well as enhancing conceptual and policy considerations.

A BRIEF HISTORY: EDUCATION AS SOCIAL POLICY According to Wilensky (1975), among social welfare policy initiatives, education should be treated separately from others such as housing and health. Health and welfare contribute to promoting absolute equality as they reduce differences between rich and poor. On the other hand, education, particularly at the higher levels, is linked to equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes, which are principles of social justice that policies serve. This allows education to make only ‘a peripheral contribution to absolute equality’ (Wilensky 1975, p. 6). This is because the outcomes of education are often conditioned by the occupational structure of the country. The move from elite, to mass, to universal education (Trow 1972) has increased access in industrialized countries, but has not reduced inequality. Part of the reason for this is the tendency for access to good quality education, which leads to lifetime job security, to be more easily accessed by children with higher social

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standing and better resources. This process protects the privileges of the upper class in terms of their life opportunities as well as their cultures (Wilensky 1975). This demonstrates the nature of education in which diversity of general and cultural advantages are linked to access, equality and security. As discussed earlier, however, education can be an important social policy instrument that promotes equal opportunity and social security, and education and other areas of social policy complement each other (Marshall 1964) as part of a welfare agenda. Wilensky (1975) suggests some key distinctions between education and social policies. First, while general social policy schemes require infrastructures that enable centralized distribution at the national level, and are controlled according to political boundaries, education can be provided in a decentralized manner. Second, education brings individual benefits, more than other social policy investments, as education enhances individual human capital and is compensated by individual pay-offs. Third, while other social policies help to compensate for income inequality, education helps to reduce the primary distribution of income in the labour market. In all cases, a meritocratic component of education is much higher than for other social policies, which reflects the tension between egalitarian and meritocratic ideals in welfare states. Despite these differences, Marshall (1964) argues that ensuring the right to education is an important component of social rights, and Busemeyer and Nikolai (2010) make claims for the importance of state intervention to achieve equality. One of the most important aspects of achieving equality here is that individuals have gained a capacity for employment as a result of educational services. This suggests that the focus needs to be on outcomes of education rather than outputs, such as the numbers enrolled. Focusing on education in this manner makes education a social investment from a human capital perspective, and is increasingly important in the knowledge economy (Busemeyer and Nikolai 2010). The challenge for the state is that job attainment is a condition of the occupational structure of the society, as described earlier. Moreover, the impact of globalization allows knowledge and capital to move beyond national borders, and this creates a problem for the state and its investment in public services. These perspectives reveal that the discussion of education and social policy has both normative and empirical dimensions: the former refers to theories, concepts, principles and ideologies; and the latter focuses on how they are delivered. Experiences of social policies and welfare states in both the North and the South are diverse, as they were developed

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through the interaction of social, political and economic factors in each context. Education in Development To examine education from a developmental context, we need to first examine the position of education in development. Studies on development emerged in the 1950s through the efforts of national reconstructions after World War II, especially in the rebuilding of their economies. Development, therefore, often refers to the process of economic growth, and wider aspects of nation building such as social and political aspects are prioritized. Social and political development is assumed to be a process for modernization and democratization, or even as a vehicle for anti-communism. Although there are no set conventions for designating countries or regions in ‘development’ (OECD 2006), they are often compared through macroeconomic indicators such as the level of gross domestic product (GDP) or gross national income (GNI) per capita (United Nations 2014). However, the claim is made that these economic indicators do not take into account the distribution of wealth within countries, so measures such as United Nations Human Development Indicators and other social indicators to measure infant mortality and literacy are also used. More recently, due to the argument that those measures cannot comprehensively assess individual and social wellbeing, a measure in terms of quality of life is also used, such as the Better Life Index, introduced in 2011 by the OECD (2018). These trends reflect the historical analysis that shows that investment in broader social sectors, such as education and health, leads to productivity and sustainability. Importance is also placed on individual well-being and relevant outcomes, rather than on inputs and outputs, such as the amount of money spent on schools or the number of teachers trained (OECD 2017). The above trends in the understanding of ‘development’ reflect a shift in perceptions about the relationship between economic and social development. Economic investment was thought to be more effective for the society, with social investment being understood as a drain on resources. However, historical analysis suggests that investments in key social sectors, such as health and education, leads to higher productivity. In the 1960s, this positive impact of social and political investment gained recognition, and the increased attention to balanced human development focused on human rights, freedom, sustainability and empowerment (Hall and Midgley 2004a). As part of these development discussions, there is a general consensus that education constitutes a key component of the socio-economic development of a society. Human

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capital theories, which were predominant in the past, made the assumption that human skills and knowledge, accompanied by physical and natural capital, led to modernization, industrial growth and, eventually, sustainable development. The direct impact of investment in education, particularly in schooling, on macroeconomic performance is disputed, however (Easterly 2001; Weale 1993). This is partially due to the difficulty of examining those links, because education interventions require lead-time to produce an effect. It is also difficult to isolate the impact of education from other interventions and changes in social, political and economic environments. The human capital approach assesses education in terms of manpower forecasting and cost–benefit analysis, and this approach considers secondary and tertiary education to be more directly linked with industrial growth; hence, it receives more political support than basic education. On the other hand, basic education is found to positively affect fertility and health, and to play a key role in social development, particularly in low and middle income countries (World Bank 1995), so the international community has engaged in numerous discussions about ensuring access to basic education in all societies. In relation to the social policy element, the concern may revolve around how access to different levels of education, considered to be a citizen’s right, and to promote equality and security in the society, can be achieved. Global, to National, to Local As discussed earlier in this chapter, education in development evolved with the global development agenda, especially after World War II, as part of post-war nations’ reconstruction efforts. Education in development was embedded in economic and political agendas that were developed out of discussions among countries’ representatives, with varying degrees of influence among them. This will be further discussed in the later section on global governance in education. Education in development cannot be discussed outside this influence, and continuing globalization. Globalization has become a key concern in education, business and media since the 1980s, as new approaches and problems needed to be addressed. The initiatives of Education for All, rights-based approaches, an emphasis on formal schooling, and structural adjustment impact that resulted in reductions of spending on basic education, were part of what shaped education provisions and priorities. More recently, neoliberal political-economic ideologies accelerated globalization practices that influenced education.

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Globalization, in economic terms, is ‘the increasing integration of economies around the world, particularly through trade and financial flows. The term sometimes also refers to the movement of people (labour) and knowledge (technology) across international borders’ (IMF 2008). This broader term is referred to as ‘the widening, deepening, and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life, from cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual’ (Held et al. 1999, p. 2). With regard to education, it refers to worldwide discussions, processes and institutions affecting local educational practices and policies. This means that events on a global scale affect national school systems (Spring 2009). In this process, the global education superstructure, involving governments, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, multinational education corporations and professionals, shapes national systems (Spring 2009). Rizvi and Lingard (2010) suggest that education policies established specifically in a national context have actually been framed in a global context, such as the way MDGs are interpreted and implemented in education in local contexts. Standardization of school education systems and curricula were promoted through systems such as the International Baccalaureate (IB) and the Cambridge IGCSE, which was developed 25 years ago and became the world’s most popular international qualification for 14-to-16year-olds, implemented in more than 140 countries (UCLES 2018). These standardized systems have influenced the standardized curriculum, tests, use of textbooks, teacher performance evaluation system, use of the English language, and the goal of focusing on individual competitiveness (Spring 2009). Relevant assessment systems, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), also used as international benchmarks, have contributed to curriculum uniformity and have encouraged educators and policy makers to empower children to perform well on tests (Spring 2009). The global education agenda in both the developed and developing world as well as globalized labour markets accelerated activities of relevant non- and for-profit institutions and became part of its regime. The question here is whether the education schemes developed through the global agenda and globalization trend benefited developing societies, and how they influenced social policies that cater to the equality and security of citizens in all sections of society. Formal Education for Modernization and Westernization As described above, education systems evolved through global agendas and globalization, and they were manifest in the development and spread

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of formal education. Formal education was used to achieve social and economic modernization and industrialization in the post-war period, as well as in the Cold War period as a means of discouraging communism (Hall and Midgley 2004b, p. 146). However, the positive impact of formal schooling systems was questioned as the international community witnessed a widening of the gap between urban and rural areas, where school dropouts and illiteracy problems persisted. The Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPS) implemented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1980s and 1990s in Latin American and African countries exacerbated these issues, as they imposed cut-backs on the public budget for education and hence increased the opportunity costs of schooling (Bonal 2002). Carnoy (1999) suggests that market mechanisms and economic liberalization, introduced particularly in urban areas, also widened the education gaps in some countries such as Brazil. In such contexts, in order to avoid socialism, the middle classes avoided the public education system and invested in private education, which gave better access to prestigious universities. This resulted in widening the gap between the quality of public and private education systems, as well as urban and rural areas. In this way, formal education in urban areas enjoys a clear link with further educational opportunities and, eventually, those employment opportunities associated with them. Formal education embedded in industrialization and individual competition in this setting attracted state investment, which led to rapid urbanization and a concentration of opportunities in developing economies. This, however, left unattended the needs of rural areas, which still occupy a large part of the developing world, and marginalized them in the education system. In rural areas, alternative forms of education, often provided by non-formal institutions, gained attention. Formal education is often offered in local languages and caters to locally specific needs, and therefore is ‘culturally sensitive, educationally relevant and politically engaged – providing a more meaningful experience than that available in formal institutions’ (McCowan 2013, p. 90). Non-formal education frequently addressed the needs of indigenous populations, who are often marginalized in the Western world and the Eurocentric knowledge system (Breidlid 2013). Non-formal education that addresses skills and capacity building of modern and traditional occupations, including health and agriculture, and which addresses a citizen’s immediate life needs, as well as community building to identify their needs and enhance existing capacity, are considered to be an integral part of social policy. These perspectives are acknowledged in the Jomtien Declaration, and a role for non-formal education along with formal education is emphasized. This provision, however, is still limited

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in its capacity to meet the educational needs of weak and vulnerable populations (Hall and Midgley 2004b). In securing basic needs and equality, attention needs to be paid to how a state can coordinate formal and non-formal education to produce education outcomes that help citizens to achieve employment.

DISCUSSION AND DEBATES IN EDUCATION In this section, historical paths and existing debates as described above will be examined from the perspective of how the notions of social policy, education and development are linked. There are some key considerations for understanding and providing education in a social policy framework relevant to development contexts. As explained earlier, the goals of social policy are poverty alleviation or reduction, and promoting human rights in societies (Hall and Midgley 2004a, pp. 9–10). The international consensus identified access to education as a basic human right, and as an important avenue for alleviating extreme poverty (United Nations 2000), and such an agreement framed the policies of participating governments. In this context, the key issues include: how can we conceptualize education? What role do states have? And how can and should a global governance regime influence local education systems and local responses to social needs? In addition, through examining the experience of some industrialized countries, this section examines how local economic, political and cultural elements determine the concepts of social policy and education. The above discussion demonstrates the way normative and empirical discussions of education have evolved at global, national and local levels. This includes a growing awareness of the impact of education in social development, although its direct economic return is unclear (Easterly 2001; Weale 1993). It is considered to be a citizen’s basic right, and its position in the discussion of sustainable development is addressed. At the same time, there is an associated dilemma to be considered in its role in social policy with respect to the notions of equality, rights and poverty alleviation. If we begin with the promotion of education, particularly in the form of formal schooling, this has exacerbated social gaps rather than brought about equality, with the result that the system is considered to promote meritocracy rather than equality (Wilensky 1975). This is partly due to a lack of focus on outcomes rather than inputs, such as school enrolment. As a state welfare provision, further challenges come from globalization trends, where the social returns on education expenditure cannot be guaranteed (Spring 2009). The global influence on education in

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the form of standardized education and curriculum poses a difficulty in meeting the needs of those who are marginalized in the urban job market. The question that arises here is how to determine which types of education contribute to equality and poverty alleviation in diverse and changing social contexts. Should education be treated separately from social policy? This section addresses these issues. Role of the State and Poverty Alleviation The role of the government in providing education as a means of ensuring equality and alleviating poverty requires further consideration. The question was raised with regard to the role of non-formal education in filling the gaps in access and participation in education between urban and rural areas (Breidlid 2013; McCowan 2013). Hall and Midgley (2004b, p. 143) suggest that education is no longer perceived as a precondition for economic growth, but is ‘a life-enhancing series of initiatives in both formal and non-formal education areas that may be used to promote human and social development’. Formal schooling was introduced, replacing traditional and indigenous education in some locations, to foster modernization, with the result that the provider of formal schooling was largely the government’s responsibility as it centralized the curriculum and its content. International promotion of universal education mainly focused on formal education as part of holistic social and economic measures. With the concern that existing education schemes are inadequate in responding to the immediate livelihood needs of all citizens, Hall and Midgley (2004b) call for further attention to be paid to vocational and transferable skills, in addition to basic education. The role of the government is to facilitate multi-sector approaches and partnerships to utilize the resources and network among institutions such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that offer both formal and non-formal education. To realize the objectives of the outcome-based approach presented earlier, the role of governments is to develop the means to strengthen institutional capacity for accountability. Development of accountability measures may enable decentralized provision of education to better respond to context-based needs to fill in educational gaps. Impact of Global Governance The role of states in education cannot be discussed without mentioning the impact of the global agenda, as national education schemes are largely shaped in the context of global governance (Rizvi and Lingard

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2010). The post-war development initiatives implemented through global governance regimes, principally through the United Nations, aimed for better coordination between governments to achieve development goals. With the acceleration of global influence and politics came the imbalances between countries and regions. As a result, more effective and coherent global governance for sustainable development post-2015 was advocated (United Nations 2013). Governance refers to ‘formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest’ (Commission on Global Governance 1995, p. 4). In the global sphere, it is arranged among intergovernmental organizations (IOs) as well as ‘NGOs, citizens’ movements, multinational corporations, and the global capital market’ (Commission on Global Governance 1995, p. 4). Social policies of individual states are bound by the regulatory framework set for them as well as by relevant norms and declarations (Snyder 1999). Regulatory frameworks and agreements that affect education include the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) formulated through the World Trade Organization (WTO), which affects ownership, quality assurance and licensing in education. Norms and declarations include Education for All and the Bologna Process that also regulates traditional education systems and provisions. Global governance on education contributes to a ‘deterritorialisation’ of education policy where policies are shaped by stakeholders outside the national terrain and then imposed on states (Robertson 2012). Concepts, priorities and goals of education are also established through global governance to fit neoliberal political and economic ideologies, and are treated as a global public good (Verger et al. 2012). While individual states are part of such global governance, the levels of influence of each state vary, which results in unequal power dynamics in policy making (Robertson 2012). Some countries, including Nicaragua, Bolivia and Cuba, have collaborated to reclaim their educational systems to suit their political contexts. In Nicaragua, new education provision was introduced while removing the neoliberal private sector and introducing curriculum, evaluation and administration protocols that focused on equality and a socialist approach to nation building (Muhr 2013). The involvement of global governance in education has blurred geographical and political borders in managing and setting priorities in education. This has resulted in varying social policy goals and arrangements among countries. The above examples in Latin America exemplify how some countries have re-identified unmet socio-political needs and reshaped the role of the state in education. The next section presents examples of how education services are shaped by local economic, political and cultural priorities.

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‘Rights’ or Economy or Ideologies? An examination of welfare systems in some industrialized nations in the West and East Asia provides some views on the influence of the economy, ideologies and culture that influence the perception of education as a social policy. Welfare policies of East Asian states are driven by economic growth and competitiveness. A state’s provision for education is influenced by its drive for enhancing productivity rather than the ‘rights’ of its citizens (Holliday 2000; Tang 2000). Among them, differing approaches are, for example, discussed in terms of demand and supply-side orientations, namely ‘welfare’ and ‘workfare’ states (Jessop 1993). Welfare states focus on interventions on the demand side, employment, security and collective consumption; whereas workfare states focus on the supply side, aiming to increase competitiveness through a flexible labour market (Jessop 1993, p. 9). In competitiveness-oriented states, access to education may be subject to the market. This means that an individual’s access to education depends on their economic resources rather than on the government’s measures for equal access. In the case of Western states, industrialization coupled with democratization constitute major influences on their education systems. After the late 1900s, when demands for educated labourers increased, the Bismarckian welfare state used social insurance as a tool of the ruling elite, and advocated social insurance policies that acted to restrict democratization and the rising powers of labour. Some countries, such as Germany, restricted access to education to those among the ruling elite. Where democratization was introduced early, as in the United States, educational opportunities were provided as a part of citizenship and expanded rapidly (Busemeyer and Nikolai 2010). Scandinavian countries also exhibited rapid democratization through egalitarian regimes (Allmendinger and Leibfried 2003), but competition was introduced later than in the United States (Lundahl 2002). These examples show how priorities of welfare systems, and the position of education within them, are understood; although a better approach would be to clarify the economic and political relations in each state. Rights or Culture? The proportion of government expenditure in education varies among East Asian states. To account for examples of those with relatively high proportions, some explanations draw on the cultural element: their Confucian culture makes governments prioritize education spending over other provisions (Jones 1993). In other cases where private expenditure

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on education is higher than that of the government, another cultural explanation is that parents invest in their children so that they can be expected to be looked after in old age (Rieger and Leibfried 2003). A similar cultural environment such as the case of Hong Kong, however, which is highly liberalized, shows that people assume that the state has a responsibility to provide education (Wong et al. 2002, p. 298). Among Western countries, religious traditions, especially in terms of church– state relations, have had a strong impact on the state’s educational provision. In Catholic states, churches kept their independence from state education, which resulted in relatively low spending on education. Lutheran churches in Scandinavian countries introduced religious education through public schools (de Swaan 1988). This integration approach increased public spending. Religious pluralism and reformed Protestantism in the United States favoured strong church–state separation, which resulted in decentralized and diverse provisions for the education system (Heidenheimer 1981). The varying levels of education spending cannot be explained simply through cultural differences, because other contextual factors affected their domestic policies. In some cases, a high proportion of the young population may result in the state’s relatively high expenditure on education. For others, a strong private education sector may be linked to a higher burden on individual citizens. There are some implications of this discussion. First, education as a means of meeting diverse context-based needs to alleviate poverty requires a multi-sector approach. The central government needs to commit to being available to facilitate these collaborative efforts at both macro and micro levels. This may include establishing a regulatory and accountability framework. Second, bearing in mind the limited capacity of the welfare state in globalization, education may be considered outside the boundaries of the nation. Providing and financing education, therefore, involves stakeholders such as international agencies, transnational private corporations, advocacy groups and other institutions with differing capacities. International agencies contribute to transnational politics, to identify priorities at different levels, and to establish collaborative frameworks and mandates through global governance to ensure that education promotes cooperation for common purposes such as ensuring human rights and social justice. Transnational corporations may contribute to the development of cost-effective measures to provide education opportunities using technologies and networks. Third, the role of the government will be to continue the careful analysis of the occupational structure, in order to design and finance education that leads to employment. The expected challenge will be to assess the types of education that

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lead to social security and alleviate poverty, and to ensure equality in volatile and ever-changing societies. In addition, there is a need to identify the necessary rights and education in transition economies where urban and local needs may be unclear, especially through the mobility of people and opportunities. Further consideration of the unit of analysis of social policy in education is needed where local, national and international actors are increasingly interdependent. This further questions the meaning of ‘social policy’ and ‘welfare’ in relation to education where non-state actors became influential in policy making (Dale and Robertson 2007). To better understand the concepts and processes of education for social policy between developing and developed countries may require further analysis and methodological approaches to examine social, political and economic factors. Further investigation of relevant factors is needed to understand how cultural elements affect educational priorities, and will contribute to the analysis of social policy and welfare provisions in varying contexts.

REFERENCES Allmendinger, J. and S. Leibfried (2003), ‘Education and the welfare state: the four worlds of competence production’, Journal of European Social Policy, 13 (1), 63–81. Bonal, X. (2002), ‘Plus ça change … the World Bank Global Education Policy and the Post-Washington Consensus’, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 12 (1), 3–21. Breidlid, A. (2013), Education, Indigenous Knowledge and Development in the Global South, Abingdon: Routledge. Busemeyer, M.R. and R. Nikolai (2010), ‘Education’, in Francis G. Castles, Stephan Leibfried, Jane Lewis, Herbert Obinger and Christopher Pierson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 494–508. Carnoy, M. (1999), Globalisation and Educational Reform: What Planners Need to Know, Paris: UNESCO. Commission on Global Governance (1995), Our Global Neighbourhood, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dale, R. and S. Robertson (2007), ‘Beyond methodological “isms” in comparative education in an era of gloabalisation’, in Robert Cowen and Andreas M. Kazamias (eds), Handbook on Comparative Education, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 19–32. de Swaan, A. (1988), In Care of the State: Health Care, Education and Welfare in Europe and the USA in the Modern Era, Cambridge: Polity Press. Easterly, W. (2001), The Elusive Quest for Growth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hall, A. and J. Midgley (2004a), ‘Social policy for development: local, national and global dimensions’, in Anthony Hall and James Midgley (eds), Social Policy for Development, London: SAGE, pp. 1–43. Hall, A. and J. Midgley (2004b), ‘Basic education for social development’, in Anthony Hall and James Midgley (eds), Social Policy for Development, London: SAGE, pp. 142–167. Heidenheimer, A.J. (1981), ‘Education and social security entitlements in Europe and America’, in Peter Flora and Arnold Joseph Heidenheimer (eds), The Development of

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314 Handbook of social policy and development Welfare States in Europe and America, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, pp. 269–305. Held, D., A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton (1999), Global Transformations, Cambridge: Polity Press. Holliday, I. (2000), ‘Productivist welfare capitalism: social policy in East Asia’, Political Studies, 48 (4), 706–723. IMF (2008), ‘Globalization: a brief overview’, accessed 15 December 2017 at https:// www.imf.org/external/np/exr/ib/2008/053008.htm. Jessop, B. (1993), ‘The Schumpeterian workfare state’, Studies in Political Economy, 40, 7–49. Jones, Catherine (1993), ‘The Pacific challenge: Confucian welfare states’, in Catherine Jones (ed.), New Perspectives on the Welfare State in Europe, London: Routledge, pp. 198–217. Lundahl, L. (2002), ‘Sweden: decentralization, deregulation, quasi-markets – and then what?’, Journal of Education Policy, 17 (6), 687–697. Marshall, T.H. (1964), Class, Citizenship, and Social Development, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. McCowan, T. (2013), Education as a Human Right, London: Bloomsbury. Muhr, T. (2013), ‘Optimism reborn: Nicaragua’s participative education revolution, the citizen power development model and the construction of “21st century socialism”’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 11 (2), 276–295. OECD (2003), Education at a Glance 2013, Paris: OECD. OECD (2006), ‘Glossary of statistical terms’, accessed 1 January 2018 at https://stats.oecd. org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=6326. OECD (2017), How’s Life? 2017 – Measuring Well-being, Paris: OECD. OECD (2018), ‘Better Life Index’, accessed 2 January 2018 at http://www.oecdbetter lifeindex.org/#/11111111111. Rieger, E. and S. Leibfried (2003), Limits to Globalisation in the Age of Welfare Democracies, New York: Blackwell. Rizvi, F. and Lingard, B. (2010), Globalizing Education Policy, Abingdon: Routledge. Robertson, S.L. (2012), ‘Researching global education policy: angles in/on/out …’, in Antoni Verger, Mario Novelli and Hülya Kosar Altinyelken (eds), Global Education Policy and International Development, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 33–51. Shields, R. (2013), Globalization and International Education, London: Bloomsbury. Snyder, F. (1999), ‘Governing economic globalization: global legal pluralism and European law’, European Law Journal, 5 (4), 334–374. Spring, J. (2009), Globalization of Education: An Introduction, New York: Routledge. Tang, K.-L. (2000), Social Welfare Development in East Asia, New York: St Martin’s Press. Trow, M. (1972), The Expansion and Transformation of Higher Education, Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press. UCLES (2018), ‘Cambridge IGCSE’, accessed 3 January 2018 at http://www.cambridge international.org/programmes-and-qualifications/cambridge-secondary-2/cambridge-igcse/. UNESCO (1990), World Declaration on Education for All and Framework for Action to Meet Basic Learning Needs, Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO (2000), The Dakar Framework for Action: Education for All: Meeting our Collective Commitments, Paris: UNESCO. United Nations (2000), ‘The Millennium Declaration (A/RES/55/2)’, accessed 15 January 2018 at www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.pdf. United Nations (2011), The Global Social Crisis, New York: United Nations. United Nations (2013), ‘Global governance and governance of the global commons in the global partnership for development beyond 2015’, accessed 5 January 2018 at http://

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Education, social policy and development 315 www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/untaskteam_undf/thinkpieces/24_thinkpiece_ global_governance.pdf. United Nations (2014), ‘World Economic Situation and Prospects (WESP) country classifications’, accessed 15 December 2017 at http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/ policy/wesp/wesp_current/2014wesp_country_classification.pdf. Verger, A., M. Novelli and H.K. Altinyelken (2012), ‘Global education policy and international development: an introductory framework’, in Antoni Verger, Mario Novelli and Hülya Kosar Altinyelken (eds), Global Education Policy and International Development, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 33–51. Weale, M. (1993), ‘A critical evaluation of rate of return analysis’, Economic Journal, 103 (418), 729–737. Wilensky, H.L. (1975), The Welfare State and Equality: Structural and Ideological Roots of Public Expenditures, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wong, C.K., K.L. Chau and T.K. Wong (2002), ‘Neither welfare state nor welfare society: the case of Hong Kong’, Social Policy and Society, 1 (4), 285–292. World Bank (1995), Priorities and Strategies for Education: A World Bank Review, Washington, DC: World Bank.

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17. Housing, development and social justice James Lee

Although widely accepted as a key pillar of social policy, the role of housing has remained opaque in social policy studies. Some term it a ‘wobbly pillar’ of the welfare state since it has remained unsteady policy-wise, and many researchers avoid it in favour of more mainstream focuses such as personal social services or social security (Torgersen 1987; Malpass 2003). There are two possible explanations. First, since housing requires substantial capital investment and its nature departs from the unilateral transfer form of welfare, it is considered too complex to handle, even for a scholar such as Harold Wilensky (1975). Second, housing not only produces a stream of residential services over time, but could also be exchanged in the market, with effects on family wealth. As a capital asset, no other social policy possesses this wealth-generating characteristic. Housing satisfies not only immediate housing needs, but also future financial needs as it eventually transforms from one type of welfare to another: from residential services to money and wealth (Elsinga and Hoekstra 2015). This makes housing policy extremely complex, with multiple economic and social consequences. Moreover, persistent house price inflation around the world greatly impacts upon macroeconomic performance and, as a result, housing policy emerges as one of the most controversial policy issues in development, especially in East Asia where intense urbanization generates exorbitant house price inflation (Forrest and Lee 2003; Doling 1999; Hyrayama 2003; Arku and Harris 2005). James Midgley rightly highlights the problem of disciplinary compartmentalization between social policy and development studies, and suggests at the outset of this Handbook that these two disciplines should collaborate more closely. The fact that housing has always been a common research domain for both social policy and development studies clearly represents one such collaboration. The key problem, however, lies in some long-standing neglected dimensions of the relationship between housing and development, hence affecting the overall effectiveness and equity of housing resources allocation. The purpose here is to highlight two such dimensions, namely: (1) the asset building aspect of housing; and (2) the possibility of a just and transformative social policy. The idea 316

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is simple: if housing is central to people’s livelihood, and likewise a key component of macroeconomic performance, unravelling their relationship will facilitate the maximization of both economic and social goals. To this end, the chapter explores the following questions: (1) What is the relationship between housing and development? (2) What are the key housing issues and problems? (3) What are their relevance for social policy and development?

HOUSING AND DEVELOPMENT In the post-war years of the late 1940s and 1950s, development was largely analogous with economic growth. The prevailing thinking then was very much influenced by development economists such as Roy Harrod and Evsey Domar (Harrod 1939; Domar 1947). Together they constructed the Harrod–Domar Model, epitomizing an era of economic development focusing on capital formation for productivity increases. The idea behind was that underdevelopment in the developing world was all about eradicating the low level of capital formation as a result of low real income and savings. As such, development should emphasize the importance of capital investment in the promotion of economic growth. Henceforth, money as a scarce resource should be spent on important infrastructure, power plants or communication facilities with direct relevance to strengthening growth. Housing policy back then was considered by economists as a resources absorber, contributing to inflation and wasted valuable foreign exchange resources (Samuelson 1955; Harris and Giles 1963). The argument was that in the early phase of economic development there was a need to use resources carefully and efficiently; housing investment simply tied up too many resources over a long period of time, consequently slowing down growth (Gilbert and Gugler 1992). In mainstream economic thinking, housing was thus seen as a by-product of economic development and hence should be postponed to a later stage when the economy is more developed (Arku 2006). This conservative view on housing and development was challenged by economists in the 1960s and 1970s. They argued that the positive effects of housing investment in development were grossly underestimated. Housing can be productive. It not only contributes to labour productivity, but also creates employment and economic values (Abrams 1964; Currie 1966; Grimes 1976; Strassman 1982). The work of John Turner in the United Nations (UN) and in a number of developing countries pioneered the view that housing must be seen from a process perspective rather than as mere consumption goods to meet residential needs. Studies have

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demonstrated that a decent housing environment generates important productivity-inducing consequences in the context of health, amongst other things (Cuenya et al. 1990). Good housing is likewise able to provide a stream of services over the family life cycle and therefore carries tremendous benefits for development. Turner advocated ‘selfhelp’ housing for low income households, and saw squatter settlements as a solution rather than a housing problem (Turner 1976). Strongly influenced by his ideas, the World Bank began in the 1970s to fund ‘site-and-service’ schemes, where low income households were provided with basic infrastructure by the government and were then encouraged to build their own homes (World Bank 1972, 1973). Turner’s favourable considerations on squatter settlements depended to a great extent on his faith in the ability of the poor to judge what was best for them if they were allowed to build by themselves. Moreover, the economic argument in favour of self-help was already widely endorsed by the UN. It not only helped families to reduce housing costs but also ensured that government was not overburdened by capital investment in large scale public housing projects (Harris 2003). Housing policy during this period was thus largely focused on meeting housing needs. The relationship between housing and development changed with more advanced research in the 1970s and thereafter. The idea of self-help housing was eclipsed by a slow but gradual shift towards policies for mass social housing. This policy shift was mainly influenced by economists discovering a more nuanced understanding of the economic benefits of housing: namely, its positive contributions to employment, macroeconomic performance and the building up of household savings. While housing contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) averaged 10.5 per cent in the 1960s and 1970s, it rose to 15.5 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s. Combined with its contributions to capital formation, housing accounted for 20–30 per cent of all contributions to GDP. More important, construction of mass public housing increased the demand for labour supply in the construction sector, and hence generated more jobs (Yuen 2002). Economists such as Turin (1978) and Drewer (1980) suggested that there was strong correlation between construction output and the level of economic development. In developing economies, the construction sector roughly contributes 3–8 per cent of GDP (Sethuraman 1985). Housing construction continued to play an important role in employment creation in the 1980s, as economists estimated that its labour accounted for 7 per cent of the total labour force in developing countries (Moavenzadeh 1987; Spence and Mulligan 1995). Other than employment creation through a strong construction sector, housing also plays a complex economic role in low income communities

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in Third World cities, going beyond conventional economic thought and practice. In less-developed countries, homes are used not only for shelter but also as a source of income through subletting and using the home as a shop front for small businesses (McCallum and Stan 1985; Chen et al. 1999). These home-based enterprises include carpentry, auto repair, hardware making, small restaurants, tailoring and shoe making. These home-related economic activities are prevalent even today in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China and, to some extent, in Hong Kong and Singapore. Apart from enterprises, homeowners in developing countries also use their home for renting and subletting, thus creating additional income. Kumar (1996), for example, suggested that 30 per cent of the residents in kampongs (low income residences) in Indonesia are tenants, meaning that renting and subletting constitute important economic activities for Third World homeowners cum landlords. Arku (2006) also questioned the old thinking that a house is purely a consumer item. For many households in the developing world, the house is their workplace, suggesting that housing can be considered a productive investment in its own right. Interestingly, one could argue that the new economic perspective in housing for developing countries has its roots in the United Kingdom (UK) housing policy of the 1980s. The Right to Buy policy under the Housing Act 1980 was a major policy shift of the Thatcher government in order to allow sitting social housing tenants to buy their homes with a large discount (up to 50 per cent). This policy has been recognized as an important starting point of a long process of housing commodification, lasting more than three decades until today, whereby the UK government jump-started a process of asset building amongst a majority of the urban population, with the purpose of helping citizens to build up asset wealth. Home ownership since then has become the cornerstone of social housing policy. In recent years, it is increasingly seen as a viable method to shun the financial burden of the welfare state as housing policy goes for an asset mode (Murie and Forrest 1988; Gregory 2016). The idea behind it is that given the enormous asset or wealth potential of home ownership, its positive effects on households’ saving and consumption could cover a part of existing social expenditures, henceforth allowing governments to release scarce resources for other social needs (Gregory 2016). In addition, subsequent to the global financial tsunami of 2008, in order to reaffirm and revitalize the UK’s position in housing and economic development, the Housing and Community Agency (HCA) commissioned Oxford Economics and Regeneris Consulting in 2010 to conduct a large-scale study on the role of housing in the economy (HCA

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2010). The subsequent report provides a number of important insights on the contemporary role of housing policy in the macroeconomy. First, ‘it confirmed that housing policy impacts the macroeconomy in two important ways: by the impact of activity in the housing sector and via the role of housing wealth in affecting consumption behavior’ (HCA 2010, p. 6). Housing activities refer not simply to the construction sector, but to all economic activities associated with housing, involving labour and raw materials, real estate agency, the legal procedure of property conveyance, furnishing and interior design. Second, ‘the role of housing wealth and assets plays a powerful role in the economy via consumption, investment and indirect effects on enterprises’ (HCA 2010, p. 8). However, ‘access to net housing wealth, which accounts for a large share of total personal wealth, is highly unevenly distributed’ (HCA 2010, p. 8). Third, in terms of neighbourhood segregation, ‘there has been a pronounced feature of changes in social housing … those living in social rented housing are much more likely to be economically inactive or in low paid jobs’; implying that home ownership has the potential to raise the standard of a neighbourhood (HCA 2010, p. 8). These findings echo what has been taking place in the developing world: a renewed focus on the developmental role of housing policy, not simply for the economy but also for its influences on family well-being and neighbourhood quality.

KEY ISSUES AND PROBLEMS Given this background, two broad issues are explored here: the failure in international leadership in housing and development, and the ambivalence of policy making in tenure choice. First, even armed with more advanced knowledge about the relationship between housing and development, world cities, particularly those in the developing world, are still far from solving their housing problems. Indeed, quite disappointingly, despite a strong policy call from the UN 1996 Habitat II Conference for a new ‘enabling approach’ (later supplemented by a Global Strategy for Shelter in 2000), housing policy has remained relatively peripheral in most world cities (UN-Habitat 2016). In 2010, it was estimated that as many as 980 million urban households still lacked decent housing, while 1 billion new homes are needed worldwide by 2025, costing an estimate of US$650 billion per year or US$9–11 trillion (UN-Habitat 2016). In 2014, 30 per cent of the urban population in developing countries still resided in slums, compared to 39 per cent in 2000 (UN-Habitat 2016). Why? It is now recognized that since 1992 the World Bank has made a major shift from pro-poor housing investment in sites and services schemes

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to focusing on housing finance and mortgage financing projects (UNHabitat 2016, p. 52). Although on the surface this represents a move in the asset building direction, most government involvement has focused on helping the emerging middle class to achieve home ownership rather than helping the poor. While countries such as Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Malaysia and Singapore continued to produce sufficient number of affordable apartments for middle income households throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, the slow shift towards favouring home ownership has somehow resulted in a gradual reduction in housing for the poor. Furthermore, housing privatization through owner occupation in the West has also exerted influence on housing markets in many developing economies, especially those in Eastern and Central Europe. Large scale sales of former state housing to sitting tenants has enabled many of them to attain a high rate of home ownership. Housing market liberalization has continued to push up house prices in the Baltic countries. Between 2004 and 2006, the average annual growth rate went up to 30 per cent for places such as Latvia and Romania (ECB 2007). As a latecomer to the developing world, China’s home ownership rate grew from 56 per cent in 1997 to 85 per cent in 2005 (Gallup 2005). The demand to own a stake in the country has apparently been the strongest driving force in the world’s housing markets in recent decades. The desire for home ownership, not just by the middle class but increasingly by the working class, has continued to fuel housing markets globally. With soaring house prices, governments of both developed and developing countries began to find home ownership financially risky for both households and the government. In developed countries, affordability usually means housing costs of not more than 30 per cent of family expenditures. However, in 2009, housing costs rose to 40 per cent or more for 12 per cent of households in the European Union (Lawson 2012). In the United States (US) in 2006, one in seven households spent more than half of their income on housing (UN-Habitat 2011). To strengthen international effort in better housing, the UN called for a new urban agenda in 2016 at the Habitat III Conference for developing countries (UN-Habitat 2016, p. 66). Unfortunately, there was nothing new. A cursory view of the main agenda illustrates this. The Housing at the Centre approach in 2016 sought to re-establish housing problems on the international development agenda (UN-Habitat 2016, p. 47). The proposals include: (1) to increase housing supply through the encouragement of small building contractors and to develop a housing ladder in supply to improve housing mobility; (2) to provide more housing allowances for low income earners; (3) to do away with the privatization of public rental housing; (4) to enable more efficient incremental building

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through small loans (US$500–US$5000); and (5) to encourage community-led microfinance for mortgages. A careful look at these proposals reveals two problems: (1) recognizing the problem of constant market failures through public housing, while governments still cling to a market-centred policy to provide affordable housing; and (2) keeping public rental housing as a last resort for the poor, but knowing that the state will eventually need ways to reduce its housing burden. This reflects a degree of ambivalence by governments towards committing to a policy on home ownership, for fear of its financial commitments and its possible adverse impact on public expenditures, reflected in the discussions of the 2016 Habitat International Conference. This then leads to the second broad issue, on tenure choice. While owning a home seems logical these days for the middle classes in the UK, the US, Singapore, Bangkok or Hanoi, home ownership is in fact a rather modern phenomenon. The desire to own a stake in one’s country all started after World War II, when massive housing destruction occurred in Europe. In the UK, home ownership was, and still very much is, seen as an aspiration of the political right, where owning and residing in one’s own abode denotes personal pride, encourages social stability, empowers the working people, and its growth is seen as both natural and unstoppable (Forrest 1983). As a central prerequisite for membership of the middle class, home ownership is considered an important life goal of the working class. For the US, home ownership has long been the ‘American dream’, associated with a wide range of positive outcomes from investment potential to social stability and personal well-being. Messages extolling the benefits of home ownership were common in public discourse throughout the twentieth century. President Hoover stated: ‘Home-owning is more than the provision of domiciles, it goes to the roots of family life, public morals and standard of living’ (Drew 2014). President Bush outlined a comprehensive agenda to help increase the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million before the end of the decade (Bush 2002). In the second quarter of 2017, the US home ownership rate stood at 63.7 per cent, a considerably more stable rate when compared to most English speaking countries. In the case of the UK, though home ownership is an extolled public policy, the home ownership rate declined slightly from a peak of 70.9 per cent in 2003 to 62.9 per cent in 2016, mainly due to affordability and price inflation problems. Nonetheless, such a decline did not lead to much change in social housing policy. A study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2011 suggested that the rapid increase in home ownership rates in OECD countries was due mainly to policy factors, such as the relaxation of downpayment constraints on

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mortgage loans and tax relief on mortgage debt (Andrews and Sanchez 2011). The study also revealed that demographic factors played a lesser role in the drive towards more home ownership. In the developing world, the growth of home ownership came much later, mainly in the 1980s, but was very much buttressed by state effort rather than the market, as housing is primarily considered a key component of the economic growth (Ronald 2008; Malpass 2008). A similar tendency is observed in China, where the housing and the construction sector plays a significant role in economic growth, despite the fact that overinvestment has led to the appearance of ‘ghost towns’ in some city suburbs, displacing farmlands for real estate development (Sorace and Hurst 2016). While increasing home ownership around the world improves the livelihoods of many, successive global economic crises have led to a number of housing bubbles and market failures, most notably the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, and the subprime crisis originated in Wall Street in 2008. They resulted in widespread housing asset depreciation around the world, with numerous households suffering from negative equity and financial hardship. When the global macroeconomy faltered as a result of plummeting house prices, housing policy took centre stage in national politics. Government began to push back its role in housing, for fear of being dragged down by it during global economic crises, resulting in shifting housing policies, hence further undermining the state role in housing. Around the world, spiralling house prices in the last five decades and repeated government failures to stabilize house prices have led to highly politicized social movements in housing (Harrison and Reeve 2010; Doling 1999; Forrest et al. 2000). While there is nothing wrong with the promotion of home ownership in social policy and development, the problem lies in the increasing fragility of housing markets around the world. A full explanation of the contemporary dynamics of the housing market and why house price inflation persists is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, what needs to be probed further here concerns developing a perspective on housing governance, one that explains why under conditions of economic uncertainty and worsening income inequality the role of the state in housing needs to be strengthened rather than weakened.

RELEVANCE FOR DEVELOPMENT An interesting development in housing policy has been observed in some Western industrial and East Asian economies in the recent decade. In a study by Lowe et al. (2011), it has been observed that homeowners in

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the UK managed to change their consumption and living standards by using credits released by the widespread availability of mortgage securitization and remortgaging activities. Mortgage securitization has provided households with new sources of income. The authors argue that British homeowners came literally to ‘bank’ on housing, considering it not just as a means to advance consumption but rather as a resource to fall back on during contingencies. Such behaviour goes well beyond planning for older age. It forms a trade-off between housing as pension and housing as alternative income. While critics cast doubt on the effectiveness of the implementation of a home ownership policy in the UK, evidence positively suggest that housing wealth has both increased and spread over the last 30 years (Gregory 2016). Smart and Lee (2003) have presented related evidence in East Asia to suggest that housing financialization in the 1980s carries important income and wealth effects for families in highly urbanized economies, and partly accounts for the prevalence of widespread housing speculation in East Asian economies such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. Such findings were echoed by later research based on OECD data. Lennartz and Ronald (2017) argue that welfare states in Western societies have quietly moved towards a policy emphasizing assets. Instead of focusing on the traditional income protection policies, the new social policy is about moving towards a productive social investment strategy focusing on asset-based policies such as education, health care and housing (Lennartz and Ronald 2016). But while we appreciate both education and health as important personal assets, it is much more difficult to assess their effectiveness and return over time. Sometimes it might even be impossible to identify their return, since there could be wastage in such policies. For example, there are high unemployment rates amongst young university graduates in many European countries despite heavy asset investment in higher education. Housing assets, however, are much more tangible and could easily be identified and assessed, explaining their increasing popularity as a core component of an asset-based socio-economic strategy. How could we account for such development on housing governance? The Asset and Wealth Effect of Housing A simple scenario serves to illustrate both the economic and wealth effects of home ownership for both households and the economy. If the production of 100 000 affordable homes by a government agency amounts to a total cost of US$15 million, assuming they are sold at a non-profit price of US$150 000 per unit, this creates two economic consequences. First, it contributes to a certain percentage of annual

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economic growth, given the inclusion of US$15 million in the GDP calculation. Annual housing production of industrial economies averages approximately 3–5 per cent of overall economic growth. Second, the production process requires construction workers, and hence the creation of employment opportunities, not to mention the various services required to maintain housing – for example, furnishing, plumbing, roofing and electric work – which adds to economic growth. Furthermore, assuming these units are sold to eligible low income families with hidden government subsidies in the house price, this means welfare transfer, not to mention tax benefits allowed in mortgage repayments under a policy of home ownership (for example, US and UK tax allowances for mortgages). Most importantly, the fact that over time these housing assets appreciate means that they form the wealth basis of low-income families, thus enhancing their life opportunities, especially at the time of retirement. In the US, the average 20-year return of residential assets is 10.6 per cent. Asset appreciation allows families to improve consumption choices, and in turn accelerates growth in the economy. The wealth effect coming from housing is fair in the sense that low-income families too could benefit from economic growth similar to that of rich families under a growth economy, though at a much lower rate. Nonetheless, this is a comparatively fairer situation compared to poor families who are never able to enter the housing market and must depend on rent allowance or highly subsidized rented social housing for life. This simple scenario presents an illustration to demonstrate the possibility of integrating social and economic policies under the social development approach in development studies (Midgley 1995, 2013). A low income affordable housing project like this benefits the individual and the family, and the economy, through asset accumulation and growth. All these benefits goes well beyond the traditional purposes of housing: to provide a place of abode and an environment to maintain health and family growth. Consider an alternative route adopted by the government where private developers are encouraged to develop affordable housing on exactly the same site, with subsidized land values as an incentive. The same housing will be sold at a price with a commercially viable profit margin, most likely more than US$150 000 per unit, even after factoring in land cost incentives. While only a small number of the targeted low income families might benefit, the overall effect is that developers will gain, while the government is left with unmet housing needs and the many more welfare issues coming from low income families who find no other means to cope with life contingencies other than to depend on social welfare. The relevance of this scenario on development is that it

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neutralizes the demarcation between developed and developing countries, since the housing process applies similarly to all open economies, whether in Hong Kong, Bangkok or Nairobi. In fact, as a result of global house price inflation and the general retreat from social housing policy by many governments trapped in successive policy failures, housing shortage and affordability issues are now widely present in London, San Francisco, Taipei, Guangzhou and Bangkok. These urban centres all suffer from periods of rapid growth and urbanization, with a housing policy barely able to meet the housing needs of the poor. The question is why existing housing policy becomes so problematic universally in development. The answer partly lies in governments ignoring the complexities of housing policy and its potential beneficial effects on distributive justice. Successive economic crises and the relatively high costs of social engineering for the government to implement a home ownershipcentred strategy have successfully deterred governments from adopting a long-term strategy. The result is a wait-and-see attitude, coupled with the progressive shedding of state role in housing, permitting an ‘untamed tiger’ to roam and rampage in the global housing markets. Distributive Justice and Housing: Rawls and Property Owning Democracy Despite the presence of dual advantages (residence plus wealth) of an asset-based housing policy, there is yet another larger societal issue at stake. It concerns the prospect of distributive justice, and hence the possibility of a ‘transformative housing policy’. I will first explain the justice part and then return to the transformative part. Thomas Picketty (2013), in his monumental work on twenty-first-century capitalism, has pointed out that the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth over the long term, hence resulting in a high concentration of wealth amongst a small number of people. It is understood that a major chunk of the return on capital comes from housing asset appreciations over time. The consequence is worsening social inequalities, and possibly social instability. Why has this happened, and how could this unfortunate situation be remedied? Fortunately, social philosophy managed to throw some light on this issue during the turn of the century. It is primarily based on the work of John Rawls, who was unhappy with the pervasiveness of social inequalities and injustice amongst modern welfare states. Re-examining his own ‘Theory of Justice’ at the end of the twentieth century, he made one important observation: the continued high concentration of productive resources by big capitals in many welfare states remains problematic,

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making the attainment of the conditions essential for a just society untenable (Rawls 2001). To remedy this, he proposed an alternative institutional framework termed the property owning democracy (POD). In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls (2001) argues for a new approach to social resources allocation. Instead of relying solely on transfer payments ex post to those who fall below certain social minimum, the new approach in social policy is to ensure that there is a more equitable and wider distribution of initial holdings ex ante by individuals, so that everyone can start with some assets. While the traditional income-based approach policies seek to provide a decent minimum standard of living below which no citizens should fall, an asset-based approach is about making sure that ‘all citizens have tangible property, and enough of it to materially affect their life prospects and possibilities for exercising personal liberty’ (Williamson 2012, p. 226). Rawls’s position is best summarized in the following quotation: The background institutions of property-owning democracy work to disperse the ownership of wealth and capital, and thus to prevent a small part of society from controlling the economy, and indirectly, political life as well. By contrast, welfare-state capitalism permits a small class to have a near monopoly of the means of production. Property-owning democracy avoids this, not by the redistribution of income to those with less at the end of each period, so to speak, but rather by ensuring the widespread ownership of production assets and human capital at the beginning of each period, all this against a background of fair equality of opportunity. The intent is not simply to assist those who lose out through accident or misfortune, but rather to put all citizens in a position to manage their own affairs on a footing of a suitable degree of social and economic equality. (Rawls 2001, p. 139)

In short, a Rawlsian POD calls for an allocation of a certain amount of tangible property to every citizen, and the restriction of exorbitant accumulation of wealth and capital. The key idea to note is the timing of social policy. Resources provided when an individual or the family faces difficulties are considered ex post consumption rather than social investment. For instance, providing access to the right education for young people early in their lives is far better than retraining them when they have dropped out of work. Historically, the idea of Rawls is nothing new. Thomas Paine had already advocated the provision of a minimum capital grant to all citizens in eighteenth-century America (Paine 1792/2012). Bruce Ackerman and Ann Alstott picked up this idea and argued that all citizens should be provided a one-off gift of US$80 000 when they come of age (Ackerman and Alstott 2000). Accordingly, to what extent a country can be fully or partially described as a Rawlsian POD can be

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judged by three criteria: (1) whether there are redistributive programmes aiming at giving every citizen some tangible property to begin with; (2) whether citizens are able to enjoy fair value of their political liberties as a result of a more equitable distribution of property ownership; and finally (3) whether there are institutions in place to prevent unchecked capital accumulation by big capitalists. In a POD, households are provided with housing assets in the form of assisted home ownership early rather than late in life. A house owned and occupied by the owner represents a stake in the country, and thus entitles the owner to the multi-arrays of lifelong services such as shelter, ontological security and, most importantly of all, a wealth basis leading to more life opportunities (Saunders 1990). A home ownership programme is thus about providing to the poor a foundation asset with the potential to appreciate over time, similar to what investment is about for capitals and firms. A high percentage of home ownership, to the extent of 80 per cent or above, actually represents a society with comparatively more dispersed property ownership, when compared to one having, say, 50 per cent. Singapore is one example of a POD where the state-directed home ownership programme monopolized 90 per cent of the housing market, resulting in a general rise of household wealth and a comparatively wider dispersal of property ownership, thus fitting well with Rawls’s idea (Lee 2009). Although Rawls did not single out housing policy, however, his observation and analysis is applicable to housing, and many studies have already provided evidence to this effect (Gregory 2016).

TOWARDS TRANSFORMATIVE HOUSING POLICY This chapter brings out the importance of housing policy not simply as providing social policy goods to meet housing needs, but also as an important agent to build life-long assets and wealth for the poor. The important rationale behind it is that through asset appreciation a household would be able to share the fruits of economic growth and be able to accumulate wealth and capital over time. Most importantly, when housing is made available to a wide spectrum of the population early in life, it will bring about a comparatively wider dispersal of property ownership, and thus enable a fairer income distribution and improve inequality. This lends us a new angle to look at the asset aspect of housing policy that has been somewhat neglected or misunderstood by the conventional UN-Habitat International approach to housing. Properly done, housing policy calls for a paradigm shift in the role of the state in housing. I term

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this the ‘transformative social policy’. The essence of this approach lies in the potential of using one type of social policy transforming to another type over time, both beneficial to families at different times of their life cycle. In the housing case, affordable housing policy to meet residential needs eventually transforms to form financial assets for future retirement needs. This is termed the ‘first-level transformation’. More importantly, when housing policy matures, it will successfully reduce, though not eliminate, income inequalities in macro income distribution. This is termed the ‘second-level transformation’. Such a state of affairs, as Rawls sees it, is the attainment of a POD where the conditions for fair value of liberties are more likely to occur, and possibly a more just society. While a home ownership policy for low income families is preferred, the thorny side of the housing market is recognized in the context of an unstable global economy. Home ownership is capable of doing both good and harm, depending on whether or not it is properly managed. John Rawls’s POD framework provides a possible justification for the pursuit of a more rigorous state role in preventing unfair concentration of property ownership. Successful examples of such housing policy along the POD line could now be located in Singapore (Lee 2009) and in some Nordic countries (Malleson 2014). Looking at the three criteria of POD fulfilment in Rawls’s terms, it is possible to predict that a nationwide housing policy based on asset building and an ex ante allocation or ‘pre-distribution’ (Kerr 2016) is able to satisfy the first criterion: a housing system that enables a wider societal dispersal of property ownership that to some extent ameliorates the concentration of capital in a few hands. However, it remains problematic for many societies to fulfil the second criterion, of fair value of political liberties; as well as the third criterion of institutions for the prevention of excessive accumulations of capital. These require much greater political and social efforts to make them happen. Nonetheless, given the volatility of the global economy and the highly speculative activities of the housing market, the state is left with very few governance choices, and certainly passivity and housing retrenchment is not the direction to go.

REFERENCES Abrams, C. (1964), Housing in the Modern World, London: Faber & Faber. Ackerman, B. and A. Alstott (2000), The Stakeholder Society, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Andrews, D. and A. Sanchez (2011), ‘The evolution of homeownership rates in selected OECD countries: demographic and public policy influences’, OECD Journal: Economic Studies, 2011, 207–243.

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330 Handbook of social policy and development Arku, M.R. (2006), ‘The housing and economic development debate revisited: economic significance of housing in developing countries’, Journal of Housing and Built Environment, 21, 377–395. Arku, M.R. and R. Harris (2005), ‘Housing as a tool of economic development since 1929’, Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29(4), 895–915. Bush, G.W. (2002), ‘A home of your own: expanding opportunities for all Americans’, accessed 2 December 2017 at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/ homeownership/toc.html. Currie, L. (1966), Accelerating Development: The Necessity and the Means, New York: McGraw Hill. Chen, M., J. Sebtad and L. O’Connell (1999), ‘Counting the invisible workforce: the case of home-based workers’, World Development, 27(3), 603–610. Cuenya, B., H. Almada, D. Armus, J. Castels, M. Loretom and S. Penalva (1990), ‘Community action to address housing and health problems: the case of San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina’, in S. Caincross, J.E. Hardoy and D. Satterthwaite (eds), The Poor Die Young: Housing and Health in Third World Cities, London: Earthscan Publications. Doling, J. (1999), ‘Housing policy and the little tigers: how do they compare with other industrialized countries’, Housing Studies, 14(2), 229–250. Domar, E. (1947), ‘Expansion and employment’, American Economic Review, 37(1), 34–5. Drew, R.B. (2014), ‘Believing in homeownership: where does the American Dream idea come from?’, Shelter Force: The Voice of Community Development, August, http://shelterforce.org/2014/08/20. Drewer, S. (1980), ‘Construction and development: a new perspective’, Habitat International, 5(3/4), 395–428. ECB (2007), ‘House price developments in Central and Eastern European countries’, European Central Bank ECB Monthy Bulletin, September, pp. 12–14. Elsinga, M. and J. Hoekstra (2015), ‘The Janus Face of homeownership-based welfare’, Critical Housing Analysis, 2(1), 32–41. Forrest, R. (1983), ‘The meaning of home ownership’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1, 205–216. Forrest, R. and J. Lee (2003), Housing and Social Change: East West Perspective, London: Routledge. Forrest, R., J. Lee and K.W. Chan (2000), ‘Focusing on housing in South-east Asia: editor’s introduction’, Housing Studies, 15(1), 7–10. Gallup (2005), ‘Homeownership soars in China’, by Economy Editor Raksha Arora, 1 March, accessed 22 February 2018 at http://www.gallup.com/poll/15082/homeowershipsoars-china.aspx. Gilbert, A. and J. Gulger (1992), Cities, Poverty and Development: Urbanization in the Third World, New York: Oxford University Press. Grimes Jr, O.F. (1976), Housing for Low Income Urban Families: Economic Policy in the Developing World, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gregory, J. (2016), ‘How not to be an egalitarian: the politics of homeownership and property-owning democracy’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 16(3), 337–356. Harris, R. (2003), ‘A double irony: the originality and influence of John F.C. Turner’, Habitat International, 27, 245–269. Harris, W.D. and J. Giles (eds) (1963), Capital Formation and Housing in Latin America, Washington, DC: Pan American Union. Harrison, M. and K. Reeve (2010), ‘Social welfare movements and collective action: lessons from two UK cases’, Housing Studies, 17(5), 755–771. Harrod, R. (1939), ‘An essay in dynamic theory’, Economic Journal, 49(193), 14–33. Homes and Community Agency (HCA) (2010), The Role of Housing in the Economy: A Final Report, London: Regeneris Consulting and Oxford Economics.

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Housing, development and social justice 331 Hyrayama, K. (2003), ‘Homeownership in an unstable world’, in R. Forrest and J. Lee (eds), Housing and Social Change, London: Routledge. Kerr, G. (2016), ‘Predistribution, POD and land value taxation’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 15(1), 67–91. Kumar, S. (1996), ‘Landlordism in Third World urban low-income settlements: a case for further research’, Urban Studies, 33(4/5), 753–782. Lawson, J. (2012), ‘Global shelter strategies for 2000 and beyond influencing housing issues and policy responses in North America and Europe’, Final Report to UN-Habitat Expert Group Meeting, UN-Habitat, Rio de Janeiro. Lee, J. (2009), ‘Developmentalism, social welfare and state capacity in East Asia: integrating housing and social security in Singapore’, Journal of Asian Public Policy, 2(2), 157–170. Lennartz, C. and R. Ronald (2017), ‘Asset-based welfare and social investment: competing, compatible or complimentary social policy strategies for the new welfare state?’, Housing, Theory and Society, 34(2), 201–220. Lowe, S., B. Searle and S. Smith (2011), ‘From housing wealth to mortgage debt: the emergence of Britain’s asset-shaped welfare state’, Social Policy and Society, 11(1), 105–116. Malleson, T. (2014), ‘Rawls, POD and democratic socialism’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 45(2), 228–251. Malpass, P. (2003), ‘The wobbly pillar: housing policy and the British postwar welfare state’, Journal of Social Policy, 32, 589–606. Malpass, P. (2008), ‘Housing and the new welfare state: wobbly pillar or cornerstone?’, Housing Studies, 23(1), 1–19. McCallum, D. and B. Stan (1985), ‘Low income urban housing in the 3rd world: broadening the economic perspective’, Urban Studies, 22, 277–288. Midgley, J. (1995), Social Development, London: SAGE. Midgley, J. (2013), Social Development: Theory and Practice, London: SAGE. Moavenzadeh, F. (1987), ‘The construction industry’, in L. Rodwin (ed.), Shelter, Settlement and Development, Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin. Murie, A. and R. Forrest (1988), Selling the Welfare State: The Privatization of Public Housing, London: Routledge. Paine, T. (1792/2012), Rights of Man, Second Part: Combining Principle and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Picketty, T. (2013), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (2001), Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ronald, R. (2008), The Ideology of Home Ownership: Homeowner Societies and the Role of Housing, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Samuelson, P. (1955), ‘The dilemma of housing’, in W.D. Harris and J. Giles (eds), Capital Formation and Housing in Latin America, Washington, DC: Pan American Union. Saunders, P. (1990), A Nation of Homeowners, London: Unwin Hyman. Sethuraman, S.V. (1985), ‘Basic needs and the informal sector: the case of low-income housing in developing countries’, Habitat International, 9(3/4), 299–316. Smart, A. and J. Lee (2003), ‘Financialization and the role of real estate in Hong Kong’s regime of accumulation’, Economic Geography, 79(2), 153–171. Sorace, C. and W. Hurst (2016), ‘China’s phantom urbanisation and the pathology of ghost cities’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 46(2), 304–322. Spence, R. and H. Mulligan (1995), ‘Sustainable development and the construction industry’, Habitat International, 19(3), 279–292.

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332 Handbook of social policy and development Strassman, W.P. (1982), The Transformation of Urban Housing, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Torgersen, U. (1987), ‘Housing: the wobbly pillar under the welfare state’, Scandinavian Housing and Planning Research, 4, 116–126. Turin, D.A. (1978), ‘Construction and development’, Habitat International, 3(1/2), 33–45. Turner, J. (1976), Housing by People, London: Marion Boyars Publishing. UN-Habitat (2011), Cities and Climate Change: Global Report on Human Settlements 2011, London: Earthscan. UN-Habitat (2016), Urbanization and Development: Emerging Future: World Cities Report 2016, Nairobi: UN Human Settlements Programme. Wilensky, H.L. (1975), The Welfare State and Equality: Structural and Ideological Roots of Public Expenditure, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Williamson, T. (2012), ‘Realizing property-owning democracy: a 20-year strategy to create an egalitarian distribution of assets in the United States’, in M. O’Neill and T. Williamson (eds), Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, Oxford: Blackwell. World Bank (1972), Urbanization, Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (1973), Housing: Enabling Markets to Work, Washington, DC: World Bank. Yuen, B. (2002), ‘Singapore’, in M. Argus, J. Doling and J. Lee (eds), Housing Policy Systems in South and East Asia, London: Palgrave.

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18. Social insurance, pensions and development James Midgley

Social insurance is a distinctive form of social protection characterized by the payment of regular contributions by the members of these schemes into a common fund where their contributions are pooled and used to pay benefits when specified needs arise. These needs are known as contingencies. Because they interrupt, reduce or terminate the income of the members of these schemes, they have an adverse effect on their wellbeing. The contingencies usually covered by social insurance include illness, maternity, work injury, unemployment, disability, retirement and death. Although the principle of pooling resources also characterizes commercial insurance and the mutual aid funds managed by voluntary organizations, the term ‘social insurance’ is primarily used to refer to the statutory schemes operated by governments. These schemes legally set membership criteria, contribution and benefit levels and other pertinent requirements. Generally, the members of social insurance schemes are workers in regular wage employment or self-employment. To be eligible for benefits, they must be formally enrolled in a statutory social insurance scheme, make contributions for a specified period of time, and meet other conditions such as citizenship or residence. Benefits are usually paid in cash, often for a specified period of time. Contributions are statutorily required and for this reason they are actually a dedicated tax rather than a voluntary premium characteristic of commercial insurance. The primary purpose of social insurance is to protect workers and their families against a loss of income rising from the contingencies mentioned earlier. By maintaining a flow of income to these workers, social insurance prevents them and their families from falling into poverty. In addition to maintaining income, some social insurance schemes supplement incomes by, for example, paying benefits to workers with children in order to meet the additional costs of child raising. Some also pay long term disability benefits that help to meet the costs of caring for disabled family members. However, social insurance is primarily concerned with maintaining income during times of adversity. Historically, these schemes 333

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responded to contingencies such as work injury, illness and unemployment, but retirement pensions also feature prominently in social insurance schemes around the world. Today, most governments have social insurance schemes of one kind or another, but they vary greatly in size and scope as well as the contingencies they address, the benefits they provide and the contributions their members pay. Some countries have established comprehensive social insurance schemes that offer protection against a large number of contingencies, but others only cover a few contingencies. Few developing countries provide unemployment insurance, and often retirement is not covered through social insurance but through social assistance or mandatory retirement savings schemes. Medical care in many countries is also financed by social insurance but generally these services are administered separately from those paying income benefits. Countries also vary in the extent to which their citizens are adequately protected by social insurance. In Western countries, where most people are regularly employed, they cover the majority of the population; but this is not the case in most of the Global South where only a small proportion of the labour force is in regular wage employment. The chapter provides an overview of the historical evolution and key features of social insurance. It pays particular attention to the role of social insurance in granting pensions to retired workers, which is not only a key element of these schemes in Western countries but of growing importance in the developing nations where populations are ageing. It also refers to other approaches to funding pensions such as social assistance and mandatory retirement savings schemes. Next, it reviews some of the challenges facing social insurance such as coverage, equity, administrative effectiveness and cost. Finally, the chapter considers future directions for social insurance. Contrary to the claims of market liberal critics, it argues that the challenges facing these schemes can be resolved without abandoning their basic principles. It also argues that steps should be taken to enhance social insurance’s relevance to development by ensuring that it raises living standards and enhances social justice for the world’s people.

THE EVOLUTION AND KEY FEATURES OF SOCIAL INSURANCE The principles on which social insurance is based can be traced back to preliterate societies where familial bonds and reciprocal community obligations ensured that needy people were cared for. However, paying

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regular contributions into communal funds to provide income benefits in times of need first emerged among artisans in the ancient civilizations, who drew on these funds when they were unable to work because of illness or injury, or whose families faced financial hardship in the event of their death. The practice of accumulating collectively held resources to meet income needs subsequently became widespread, and over the centuries mutual aid associations including community savings clubs, guilds, co-operatives and burial societies proliferated throughout the world. In nineteenth-century Europe, mutual aid associations expanded rapidly to cater for urban workers who faced new risks arising from industrial employment. In the United Kingdom (UK), the friendly societies, as they were known, typically paid benefits to members who were injured or unable to work because of illness, old age or disability. Benefits were also paid to the dependants of those who had died. Many also helped their members to meet the costs of medical treatment. Kidd (1999) reports that by the latter half of the nineteenth century more than 1 million industrial workers in Britain were covered by the friendly societies as well as the funds established by the emerging trade unions. As the trade unions became actively involved in electoral politics, the idea that the state should assume responsibility for income protection and medical care gained widespread support. Soon political parties representing workers’ interests campaigned on the promise that if elected they would establish a state managed social insurance scheme. In Germany, the Social Democrats were committed to this goal but, as Rimlinger (1971) explained, they were outmanoeuvred by Count Otto von Bismarck, the country’s conservative Chancellor, who sought electoral support from industrial workers by establishing the world’s first statutory social insurance scheme in 1883. This scheme provided income benefits when workers became ill and were temporarily unable work. In 1884, it was extended to pay benefits to workers injured at work, and retirement and invalidity benefits were added in 1889. Soon other Western countries’ governments also established social insurance, and in addition to covering sickness, disability and work injury they also began to provide pensions through these schemes. Previously, pensions were paid from public revenues to government officials, military officers, and other notables such as writers or scholars on a discretionary basis. Subsequently, the payment of pensions through social insurance became widespread, but in some countries social assistance pensions were established instead. This was the case in the UK where the country’s first social assistance pension was established in 1908. However, it was

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replaced with a social insurance pension scheme in 1925. Social assistance pensions were also introduced in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and subsequently in a number of colonial territories such as India and Mauritius. Social insurance was widely adopted to fund pensions in Latin American countries, which were among the first outside Europe to establish social insurance schemes. Mesa-Lago (1978) observes that in the late nineteenth century civil servants in the region created their own contributory pension funds known as montepios. However, because these funds encountered financial and administrative problems, pressures on governments to assume responsibility for their management increased, resulting in the emergence of the first of many occupationally linked social insurance funds in the region in the early decades of the twentieth century. Often, these funds also covered medical care, work injury and illness. Unlike the UK and Germany where social insurance was managed by a single statutory agency, the Latin American funds catered to different occupational groups so that separate organizations emerged, serving civil servants, military officers, dockworkers, bank employees, school teachers and others. The proliferation of these different schemes produced a complex and unwieldy social insurance system which eventually encountered serious financial and management difficulties. Some European countries such as France also established separate social insurance funds for different occupational groups, but most others created consolidated, unitary schemes that covered workers in all occupations. Initially, only workers with incomes below a specified level were covered, but in time, coverage was extended to all workers in regular employment. In 1913, Sweden became the first country to include all workers in its social insurance scheme. By this time, most European countries protected workers against sickness, work injury and disability, but the introduction of unemployment insurance lagged. The UK was the first country to introduce unemployment benefits in 1911, but it was only with the Great Depression in the 1920s and 1930s that unemployment insurance was widely incorporated into social insurance schemes in Europe and North America. Unemployment insurance was generally not available in the Global South until fairly recently, when some higher income developing countries introduced schemes of this kind. The global spread of social insurance was fostered by the International Labour Organization (ILO), which was founded together with the League of Nations at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. In addition to addressing labour issues and championing workers’ rights, the ILO promoted the spread of social insurance, and to a lesser extent social assistance, which it recognized also had a role to play in social

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protection. The organization urged the European imperial powers such as France and the UK to introduce social protection in their colonies, and although some adopted social assistance, social insurance was only established in a few colonial territories before the Second World War. However, in the 1930s, the organization’s influence waned and it was only after the Second World War that it again gave international leadership in promoting social insurance, primarily in the newly independent developing countries. Rodgers et al. (2009) note that the ILO’s Convention No. 102 of 1952 is widely recognized as a landmark in the history of social insurance, since it articulated the principles and procedures upon which these schemes, as well as other forms of social protection, should be based. The Convention reaffirmed the novel idea, first enunciated in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, that governments are obligated to provide social protection as a right of citizenship. Government’s responsibility for managing social insurance and ensuring its viability was clearly defined, as was the tripartite funding model by which governments as well as workers and employers contributed to social insurance funds. Initially, it was intended that contributions would be accumulated in a separate fund that would meet future benefit obligations, but instead, many social insurance schemes adopted a pay-as-you-go approach by which resources generated from current contributions are immediately disbursed to pay benefits. This is especially true of social insurance pensions. Social insurance was introduced in many countries of the Global South in the years following the Second World War, but there were significant variations in the way these schemes operated. Many former French colonial territories, particularly in Africa, replicated the metropolitan French social insurance system to protect workers in the modern sectors of the economy against sickness, work injury, disability and retirement. Uniquely, these schemes also provided family allowances. However, the vast majority of the population living in the rural areas was not covered by any form of social protection. This was also the case in the former British colonial territories, some of which had previously created limited social assistance schemes based on the English Poor Law. After independence, some introduced social insurance, but only a few contingencies such as sickness, work injury and disability were covered and pensions were not usually included. Instead, pensions were provided through provident funds, which are state managed mandatory retirement savings schemes. India is a good example of this dual system. The government’s Employees State Insurance scheme, which was established in 1952, covers sickness, work injury and disability; while the Employees Provident Fund established in the same year provides pensions. They are

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administered by separate government agencies and now cover many millions of workers in regular wage employment. South Africa also established a dual system, but here retirement is covered by means-tested pensions, while social insurance is used to protect workers against sickness, disability, work injury and unemployment. Kaseke et al. (2011) point out that provident funds were actively promoted by British colonial officials in the years prior to independence in preference to social insurance, which it was feared might obligate the UK government to subsidize these schemes as required by the ILO. Unlike social insurance, provident funds do not pool contributions, which are paid into a personal savings account instead. At the time of retirement, accumulations are distributed, together with interest, usually in a lump sum. Obviously, the accumulations of workers who become disabled prior to retirement may also be withdrawn. Similarly, the accumulations of deceased workers are paid to their families. Provident funds are established by statute and managed by the government or a parastatal agency, and as with social insurance, all workers in regular wage employment are required to participate. Together with India, provident funds were created in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore in the 1950s, and in the following decades they emerged in other British Commonwealth countries as varied as Nigeria, the Seychelles and Swaziland. However, some such as Jamaica and Pakistan introduced social insurance retirement pensions instead of provident funds, and in some cases provident funds were subsequently replaced by social insurance. This was the case in Zimbabwe, where a social insurance pension replaced the country’s provident fund in 1994. After the Soviet Union was established, a new approach to social insurance emerged. Instead of managing a nationwide scheme, the government devolved responsibility to the state owned enterprises and collective farms which operated their own schemes under the direction of the national government. When new communist governments emerged in Eastern Europe and elsewhere after the Second World War, countries which had previously established social insurance retained these schemes, while others such as China emulated the Soviet model of requiring the state owned enterprises and collective farms with more than 100 workers to operate their own schemes. Known as labour insurance funds, they levied a payroll tax of 3 per cent and paid sickness, work injury and maternity benefits; small retirement pensions were also provided. Dixon (1981) notes that these funds subsequently incurred substantial losses and government subsidies were required to meet their obligations. Since the 1990s, they have been replaced by a nationwide insurance scheme coupled with a mandatory state managed retirement

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savings scheme for urban workers, and a retirement savings scheme for those in agricultural employment. A major development in the 1980s was the decision by the military government of Chile to privatize the country’s social insurance system by creating a mandatory retirement savings scheme managed by commercial providers. Since the social insurance system had become fragmented and inefficient, it was not surprising that many chose to join the new system. An added attraction was the promise of high rates of return on savings. The new system had much in common with the provident funds established in British Commonwealth nations, except that it was managed by commercial firms rather than the state. In addition, workers could choose between different firms to manage their accounts and this, it was claimed, would foster competition and greater efficiency. As Borzutzky (2002) observes, this development marked a radical change in the history of social insurance. The privatization of social insurance in Chile reflected a wider global trend towards a reduced role for the state in economic and social affairs. With the coming to office of radical right-wing governments in several countries, and the embrace of neoliberalism by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, statutory services were retrenched and outsourcing to nonprofits and commercial providers became widespread. In social protection, these ideas were formalized in a landmark publication, Averting the Old Age Crisis, by the World Bank in 1994, which vigorously critiqued state managed social insurance pensions by pointing out that these schemes had not accumulated sufficient resources to meet their future obligations. Consequently, governments are compelled to subsidize these schemes to the detriment of their overall fiscal health and economic development prospects. To deal with these problems, the Bank urged that social insurance pensions be replaced with commercially managed retirement accounts, accompanied by social assistance for those unable to utilize the new system. The Bank also used these arguments to mount a global campaign to privatize social insurance pensions. Orenstein (2008) notes that it also gave financial support as well as technical assistance to governments willing to adopt its new market approach. The Bank’s agenda for pension privatization offered a new conceptual basis for social insurance which rejected the rights-based approach articulated by the United Nations and the ILO. Social protection, it argued, should no longer be viewed as a collective response to need, but as a means of managing individual risk primarily through the market. Although risk management pervaded the Bank’s publications on pensions and enjoyed some popularity in academic circles, subsequent studies of

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the Chilean privatization found that it had not fulfilled its promise. Borzutzky (2012) observes that returns fell below expectations, high management fees were charged, and many women and low income workers were unable to accumulate sufficient savings to meet their retirement needs. Far from minimizing state involvement, social assistance benefits were needed to prevent them from falling into poverty. In addition, the Chilean government allocated substantial resources to meet the costs of transitioning from social insurance to the new commercial system. Similar problems were encountered in other countries that privatized their social insurance retirement schemes, and since then some Latin American and Eastern European nations have reinstated the previous system. In Chile, a commission appointed by President Bachelet to review the privatized pension scheme recommended that significant modifications be introduced; however, it did not recommend its abolition (Borzutsky 2012).

ISSUES IN SOCIAL INSURANCE Since its founding, the ILO has actively promoted the spread of social insurance around the world. It has favoured a unitary and comprehensive approach in which a single statutory agency administers a national scheme that provides protection against all contingencies. It also favours standardization, so that contributions and benefits comply with internationally agreed norms; and it advocates universalism, so that all workers irrespective of income or occupation are covered. However, these goals have not been realized and, as mentioned earlier, there are great variations between different countries. Although most Western countries have achieved universal coverage and established schemes that provide protection against most contingencies, this is not the case in many other parts of the world where protection is limited to a few contingencies and where only a minority of the labour force is covered. There are also great variations in contribution and benefit rates, administrative arrangements and the effectiveness of social insurance schemes. In addition, social insurance faces many issues and challenges that need to be addressed. A major issue is coverage. While nearly all workers are covered by social insurance in Western countries, this is not the case in the Global South where only a small proportion of the labour force belongs to these schemes. In these countries, the majority work in traditional agriculture or in the urban informal sector and have no access to social insurance. However, coverage is higher in developing countries that have recorded

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steady rates of economic growth and a concomitant expansion of wage employment. Reviewing the evidence, Hall and Midgley (2004) report that the higher income countries of South America have comparatively high coverage rates, with as much as two-thirds of the labour force enrolled in social insurance. This is also the case in the East Asian ‘tiger’ economies which have similar and even higher enrolment rates. Coverage has also increased in North African and Middle Eastern countries, but here only about a quarter of the labour force is covered. On the other hand, coverage in most sub-Saharan African and South Asian countries is far lower, with enrolment rates of less than 10 per cent; in poorer countries the rate is even lower. As will be discussed later, the question of how to extend coverage to the excluded majority is widely debated in social insurance today. The issue of coverage is related to the appropriateness of social insurance to the economic and social circumstances of the nations of the Global South. Modern-day statutory social insurance is a Western invention based on industrial employment, reflecting what Pavard (1979) called an ‘occupationalist’ approach in which these schemes preferentially direct resources at workers in formal wage employment. When social insurance was first introduced in the developing countries in the years following the Second World War, it was widely believed that these countries would experience rapid economic growth and that most of the labour force would soon be absorbed into the modern economy and be covered by social insurance. While coverage has indeed expanded in some parts of the developing world, this is not the case in many countries where traditional agriculture and the informal sector still predominate. Clearly, innovative policies that address their needs and are appropriate to the economic and social situation in the Global South should be adopted. The issue of appropriateness also pertains to Western countries, where the relevance of social insurance to rapidly changing economic, social and demographic realities has been questioned on the ground that the occupationalist model is no longer applicable. Population ageing, the rapid increase of women in wage employment, and changing work patterns that reflect an increase in self-employment and frequent job changes over the life course, suggest that new approaches to social insurance and particularly retirement pensions are needed. The situation is further complicated by the more frequent use of robotics and automated production which, it is believed, will reduce the numbers of workers in formal wage employment. However, few attempts have been made to modify social insurance schemes so that they respond to these and other changes.

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Another issue is equity. Like other social programmes, social insurance involves complex resource flows that benefit some more than others and sometimes these flows have perverse and inequitable effects. In the developing countries equity is affected because the limited coverage of social insurance has created an unfair system in which people working in traditional agriculture and the urban informal sector are excluded from social insurance, while those in regular wage employment who are already privileged by having steady and well-paid jobs have the additional benefit of being protected by these schemes. To make matters worse, government subsidies to social insurance schemes in terms of the ILO’s tripartite funding model rely on regressive tax revenues which are disproportionately paid by the excluded majority. As Midgley (1984) argued many years ago, this inequitable transfer of resources exacerbates the wider social inequalities that characterize many countries. Although it has been proposed that government subsidies be withdrawn and that social insurance be funded entirely by the contributions of workers and employers, this proposal has not been widely adopted. The way resources flow within social insurance schemes also affects gender equity. Already by the 1990s, scholars such as Lewis (1992), Lister (1994) and Sainsbury (1996) had pointed out that social insurance schemes in many Western countries are based on a ‘male breadwinner’ assumption that discriminates against women who are covered through their husbands and receive benefits based on their contribution record. In addition, these schemes reinforce traditional, patriachal norms since women are excluded from male dominated occupations, paid less than men, and often find work in low-paying, part-time jobs. They also leave regular employment periodically to raise children and engage in other forms of caregiving. In addition, women are often required to retire earlier than men. Consequently, they usually have a lower contribution record than men and accordingly they receive lower benefits, particularly pensions, when they retire. Social insurance has a similar impact on equity in developing countries, but comparatively few women belong to these schemes, and the issue has not been properly addressed. However, as more women enter formal employment in countries experiencing industrialization, gender equity will become an increasingly important concern. Indeed, this is already the case in Latin American and East Asian countries. It has also been argued that social insurance schemes inequitably transfer resources from young workers to retired elders. Peterson (1999) and Kotlikoff and Burns (2012) believe that older people in Western societies enjoy privileges at the expense of young workers, which is fostering widespread intergenerational tensions. Since many countries

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now fund social insurance on a pay-as-you-go basis, elders rely on the contributions of younger workers for their retirement pensions, imposing an unfair burden on these workers who struggle to pay off college debts, purchase their first home and raise a family. In addition, they contend that many elderly people are already comfortable and do not need a government pension, since they have accumulated assets over their working lives and are usually in receipt of occupational pensions. These arguments have been invoked by critics of the social insurance pension scheme in the United States, which is known as Social Security, who claim that retired people receive more from the scheme than they contribute, exacerbating its inequitable resource transfers. The problem, they claim, needs to be addressed to solve the serious fiscal problems caused by the country’s ageing population. Administrative issues are also a major concern. There are formidable challenges in managing social insurance schemes that often cover millions of workers, and ensuring that they and their employers are registered, contributions are collected and benefits are paid. Although most social insurance agencies cope well with these challenges, others are less competent, resulting in dissatisfaction among their members and the discrediting of social insurance. This was the case in Chile and other Latin American countries where social insurance funds were often poorly managed, with the result that many workers opted to join commercially managed schemes. Despite efforts to improve administrative efficiency, problems persist. Staff are often poorly trained and motivated, records are sometimes lost, delays in paying benefits are common, and the responsiveness to members’ enquiries and concerns leaves much to be desired. Sometimes, the rules and regulations governing social insurance schemes are so complex that members and even administrators have difficulty interpreting them. Administrative problems are compounded by corruption and a lack of state capacity in some countries where governments have little commitment to the well-being of their citizens and fail to ensure that their social insurance schemes serve wider welfare goals. Corruption is a common problem. Sometimes, members have to pay bribes to have their applications processed; and sometimes, politicians intercede on behalf of constituents and even relatives to secure favourable decisions, further undermining the effectiveness of these schemes. The effectiveness of social insurance is also affected by violence. Sadly, many countries are beset with gangs engaged in trafficking, drug smuggling and extortion, and ethnic hostility and political violence are common. These conflicts not only have a negative impact on social insurance but also impede the realization of wider social development goals.

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Another important issue is fiscal viability. When social insurance was introduced in the nineteenth century, it was expected that the contributions of members and employers would be sufficient to meet benefit obligations, and since the labour force was comparatively young, social insurance funds in many countries did indeed accumulate sizeable surpluses. However, as noted earlier, the goal of ensuring that adequate resources are accumulated to meet future obligations has not always been met. Although some countries maintain healthy surpluses in their social insurance funds, others do not and government subsidies in many countries have risen, creating a burden on general revenues that many politicians believe to be unsustainable. Calls for these subsidies to be reduced have become common, as have proposals to replace social insurance with alternative forms of social protection. Various factors have contributed to the depletion of social insurance funds which have required additional and, in some cases, sizeable government subsidies. Sometimes, inept management and poor investment decisions have resulted in significant losses, and in some cases governments have borrowed liberally from these funds to meet their other spending needs. Another issue is population ageing, which has resulted in fewer workers paying contributions to support a growing number of pensioners. In addition, other social insurance schemes such as unemployment insurance are also struggling financially because of sluggish economic growth and high levels of youth unemployment. In Western countries, the numbers of people claiming disability benefits have also risen significantly, posing further fiscal as well as political challenges. Because of these problems, critics claim that radical alternatives to social insurance are required. Some argue that social insurance should be replaced by social assistance, while others believe that workers should purchase commercial insurance to protect themselves against the contingencies of illness, disability and unemployment. With regard to pensions, it has been noted already that the introduction of commercially managed retirement savings accounts has been widely advocated. On the other hand, some contend that the fiscal problems facing social insurance schemes can be addressed by modifying contributions and benefits and by incrementally raising the retirement age. In addition, Barr and Diamond (2008) point out that what are known as notional pension accounts have been introduced in several countries to respond to fiscal challenges. These schemes contain costs by mimicking the accumulation of contributions in fully funded retirement savings accounts, and by calculating benefits on the basis of contribution record and other factors. As will be apparent, these proposals reflect different ideological beliefs

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about how workers and their families can best be protected against the contingencies which affect their well-being.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN SOCIAL INSURANCE Although frequently dramatized, the challenges facing social insurance today are not as insurmountable as they may appear. In fact, many governments have taken steps to deal with the administrative and funding challenges facing social insurance, and innovative proposals for extending coverage and fostering equity have been formulated. In addition, international organizations such as the ILO have launched initiatives to address these problems. Nevertheless, social insurance continues to be subjected to sustained ideological pressure, as its critics stridently claim that it faces imminent fiscal collapse as well as other problems that require radical remedies. As mentioned earlier, these include proposals for the replacement of social insurance with social assistance or commercial insurance. They reflect a deep antipathy to state involvement, and the belief that self-responsibility and the utilization of the market, as well as traditional forms of care, offer preferable alternatives to government provision. Although these proposals are largely focused on retirement pensions, they extend to other contingencies such as sickness, disability and unemployment as well. There is no reason, critics contend, why workers cannot purchase commercial insurance to protect themselves, or why families cannot assist their needy members. In addition, workers should save so that they can meet their future financial needs. Although some opponents of social insurance accept that government assistance may be required as a last resort to help those who have no resources or family members who can care for them, they insist that strict meanstesting as well as other conditionalities that foster self-reliance should be imposed. These views have been promoted by market liberals and traditionalists for many years. In the United States, attacks on social insurance have been particularly vociferous. Although the country’s social insurance scheme, known as Social Security, has met the needs of elders and disabled workers for more than 80 years and currently has a huge surplus, right-wing think tanks and academics supported by wealthy foundations and the financial industry continue to disseminate wellcrafted messages that spread disinformation about its looming financial collapse. The success of this campaign is revealed by the sizeable numbers of young people who believe that the scheme will soon be bankrupt and unable to meet their retirement needs. Politicians on the

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right reinforce these views by falsely claiming that the country’s budgetary deficits are largely due to Social Security and other forms of ‘entitlement’ spending. As noted earlier, it is also claimed that elders are unfairly benefiting from social insurance while younger workers are struggling to make ends meet. This chapter rejects these arguments, noting that social insurance has effectively protected many millions of workers and their families for many years. In addition, the claims of social insurance’s critics have been rebutted, and it is now clear that the promise of privatization has not been fulfilled. Privatization has been reversed in some countries and support for market-based approaches to social protection has waned. As the ideological assault on social insurance has abated, there is renewed confidence in social insurance and a commitment to strengthen these schemes. This commitment is revealed in the incorporation of social insurance together with other forms of protection in the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the member states of the United Nations in 2015. Even the World Bank’s position has softened and the organization has recognized that governments have an obligation to ensure that their citizens are spared the privations resulting from income loss. The idea that social insurance, like other forms of social protection, should be a human right remains a viable rationale for these schemes today. It is also encouraging that the challenges facing social insurance are being addressed. The ILO and other international organizations such as the International Social Security Association (ISSA) are providing technical assistance to improve administrative effectiveness, and with the computerization of social insurance applications and benefits, managerial proficiency has improved. Nevertheless, more should be done to ensure that staff are well trained and that salaries are sufficiently remunerative to attract capable and highly motivated personnel. Also, greater efforts to eradicate nepotism and corruption must be made. To address the financial challenges facing social insurance, contribution and benefit rates are being more carefully calibrated to ensure long term fiscal viability. The need to extend social insurance coverage to workers in the informal sector and traditional agriculture is now widely accepted. This has been a major commitment of the ILO since 2001 when the organization launched the Global Campaign on Social Security and Coverage for All (Reynaud 2002). Its member states were urged to address the problem and its staff were requested to undertake systematic research on how this could be achieved. In 2012, the ILO’s member states adopted the Social Protection Floors Recommendation (No. 202), which proposes that governments establish a minimum level of social protection below which no one should fall. However, a major issue is how to meet the

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costs of extending coverage to excluded workers, since it is unlikely that they can make sufficient contributions to cover their future needs. In addition, including these workers in social insurance schemes poses difficult fiscal and administrative challenges. Nevertheless, innovative policies which offer useful lessons for extending coverage have been adopted in some countries. One approach is to use surpluses from the regular contributions of formal sector workers to cover some excluded groups such as domestic workers. Plagerson et al. (2017) reveal that this approach has been adopted in South Africa. Countries with provident funds are well placed to extend coverage in this way. In India, for example, women cigarette or beedi rollers were admitted to the Employer’s Provident Fund after an extended political campaign. Since provident funds do not pool resources, the costs of enrolling many more informal sector self-employed workers in schemes of this kind are relatively low. Certainly, provident funds in other countries should be encouraged to emulate India’s example and enrol these workers as well. They would benefit from having their savings managed and invested by well-established government agencies. In addition, more informal sector workers would participate in these funds if governments matched their contributions. As Schreiner and Sherraden (2007) demonstrate, matched savings accounts such as individual development accounts (IDAs) have proved to be an effective way of encouraging low income families to save in the United States. Another approach is to create specialized, government subsidized social insurance funds for informal sector workers. The Labour Welfare Funds in India are a good example of this approach. Van Ginnekin (2008) observes that these funds have been established in a number of states, covering construction and agricultural labourers, women home workers, local artisans, market traders and others in what is known as the ‘unorganized’ sector. Generally, they provide protection against sickness and disability and some also offer maternity benefits and health care. In many states, the funds are subsidized through a special dedicated tax known as a cess which is levied on agricultural and other commodities, or through special taxes on construction projects. Revenues of this kind should be more widely used to subsidize insurance funds for informal sector and agricultural workers. Coverage can also be extended by supporting the micro-insurance schemes operated by mutual aid societies and co-operatives. As Midgley (2011) points out, organizations of this kind exist all over the world. While some such as the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India and the Grameen Bank in Bagladesh are well established and have sizeable insurance schemes, others are small and limited in scope. This is

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the case with the countless grassroots savings clubs, burial associations and rotating savings and credit societies that can be found in both rural communities and urban informal settlements around the world. All would benefit from government subsidies as well as training and other support such as access to banks and other financial institutions. To limit mismanagement and fraud, these organizations should be registered and regularly audited. Unfortunately, these requirements are often imposed in an officious way that does little to encourage their activities. On the other hand, some countries have adopted policies that proactively support these organizations. In India, van Ginniken (2008) notes that the government requires banks and state owned insurance firms to assist mutual aid savings associations; and Sirojudin and Midgley (2012) report on an innovative government programme in Indonesia that contracts with community-based organizations to manage local insurance funds for informal sector workers. It provides both technical assistance as well as subsidies to ensure that these community organizations operate efficiently. By extending coverage in these ways, governments also address the challenge of appropriateness. Since mutual aid associations are rooted in local communities, assisting them to meet the needs of their members reinforces indigenous cultural practices. Crop insurance is another appropriate form of social insurance which is uniquely suited to the needs and circumstances of the Global South, and especially the large numbers of families who earn their living from agriculture. Although these schemes have been introduced in many countries, much more should be done to enhance their effectiveness. In particular, steps need to be taken to ensure that they not only cater to wealthier famers but also protect poor families who cannot meet the costs of crop insurance. Again, subsidies and special outreach programmes should be used to enrol poor farmers in these schemes. In addition to extending coverage to informal sector and agricultural workers, progress has also been made in dealing with gender inequity. Many Western governments have reversed the discriminatory effects of social insurance schemes and some have adopted policies that increase the pension benefits women receive by, for example, ensuring that they are compensated through subsidies and supplemental allocations for the years they are unable to contribute to these schemes. This is the case in Latin American countries such as Argentina and Brazil where minimum guaranteed pensions, carer credits and non-contributory benefits are paid in order to reduce what Amarante et al. (2017) call the ‘pensions gender gap’. On the other hand, more should be done to ensure that social insurance promotes equity by redistributing resources from higher to lower income

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workers, by calibrating contributions and benefits in ways that subsidize those with lower earnings. Atkinson (2015) points out that this is already the case with earnings-related social insurance schemes in many Western countries. In the United States, the Social Security programme has been designed to redirect resources from higher income to lower income earners to ensure that they have an adequate income when they retire. Reviewing the evidence, Kelly (2009) believes that the programme’s redistributive impact is quite dramatic. Although social insurance does not always function in this way in other countries, it has the potential to promote income equality. Market liberal critics have long claimed that social insurance is a major impediment to economic growth, but there is a good deal of evidence to show that these schemes actually facilitate sustainable development. Midgley’s (2008, 2018) review of this evidence demonstrates that they have a positive effect on growth by, for example, promoting capital accumulation, creating employment, counteracting economic downturns and raising the standard of living. Also, many believe that social insurance is a key element in achieving what the World Bank (2008) calls ‘inclusive growth’. However, to contribute effectively to development, social insurance must be properly configured to achieve developmental goals. In addition to addressing the challenges discussed earlier, social insurance must invest in human capabilities, promote economic participation, and reduce poverty and deprivation. It must also be harmonized with social assistance and other social protection programmes. In many countries, the social protection system is fragmented and inefficient, and poorly integrated with wider development policies and plans. Building on past achievements, these problems should be addressed to ensure that social insurance and other forms of social protection contribute positively to social and economic development around the world.

REFERENCES Amarante, V., Colacce, M. and Manzi, P. (2017). The Gender Gap in Pensions in Latin America. International Social Security Review, 70 (2), 57–85. Atkinson, A.B. (2015). Inequality: What Can Be Done?. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Barr, N. and Diamond, P. (2008). Reforming Pensions: Principles and Policy Choices. New York: Oxford University Press. Borzutzky, S. (2002). Vital Connections: Politics, Social Security and Inequality in Chile. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Borzutzky, S. (2012). Reforming the Reform: Attempting Social Solidarity and Equity in Chile’s Privatized Social Security System. Journal of Policy Practice, 11 (1/2), 77–91. Dixon, J. (1981). The Chinese Welfare System, 1949–1979. New York: Praegar.

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350 Handbook of social policy and development Hall, A. and Midgley, J. (2004). Social Policy for Development. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Kaseke, E., Midgley, J. and Piachaud, D. (2011). The British Influence on Social Security Policy: Provident Funds in Asia and Africa. In J. Midgley and D. Piachaud (eds), Colonialism and Welfare: Social Policy and the British Imperial Legacy. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 144–159. Kelly, N. (2009). The Politics of Income Inequality in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kidd, A. (1999). State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth Century England. New York: St Martin’s Press. Kotlikoff, L.J. and Burns, S. (2012). The Clash of Generations: Saving Ourselves, Our Kids and Our Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lewis, J. (1992). Gender and the Development of Welfare Regimes. Journal of European Social Policy, 2 (3), 159–173. Lister, R. (1994). She has Other Duties – Women, Citizenship and Social Security. In J. Falkingham and S. Baldwin (eds), Social Security and Social Change: New Challenges to the Beveridge Model. New York: Harvester Press, pp. 31–44. Mesa-Lago, C. (1978). Social Security in Latin America. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Midgley, J. (1984). Social Security, Inequality and the Third World. New York: Wiley. Midgley, J. (2008). Social Security and the Economy: Key Perspectives. In J. Midgley and K.L. Tang (eds), Social Security, the Economy and Development. New York: Palgrave, pp. 51–82. Midgley, J. (2011). From Mutual Aid to Microinsurance. Strengthening Grassroots Social Security in the Developing World. Social Development Issues, 33 (1), 1–12. Midgley, J. (2018). Social Protection, Social Investment and Inclusive Development. In C. Deeming and P. Smyth (eds), Reframing Global Social Policy: Social Investment for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth. Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 251–271. Orenstein, M.A. (2008). Privatizing Pensions: The Transnational Campaign for Social Security Reform. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pavard, F. (1979). Social Security Financing through the Contribution Method. In International Labour Organization (ed.), Methods of Financing Social Security, Geneva: International Labour Organization, pp. 13–24. Peterson, P. (1999). Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave will Transform America and the World. New York: Times Books. Plagerson, S., Stuart, L. and Ulriksen, M. (2017). How Can Social Protection Programmes Benefit Women in the Informal Sector? Reflections on Domestic Workers and Social Insurance in South Africa. Policy in Focus, 14 (1), 24–25. Reynaud, E. (2002). The Extension of Social Security Coverage: The Approach of the International Labour Office. Geneva: ILO. Rimlinger, G. (1971). Welfare Industrialization in Europe, America and Russia. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Rodgers, G., Lee, E., Swepston, L. and Van Daele, J. (2009). The International Labour Organization and the Quest for Social Justice, 1919–2009. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sainsbury, D. (1996). Gender, Equality and Welfare States. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schreiner, M. and Sherraden, M. (2007). Can the Poor Save?: Saving and Asset Building in Individual Development Accounts. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Sirojudin, S. and Midgley, J. (2012). Microinsurance and Social Protection: The Social Welfare Insurance Program for Informal Sector Workers in Indonesia. Journal of Policy Practice, 11 (1/2), 121–136.

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Social insurance, pensions and development 351 van Ginnekin, W. (2008). India: Inclusive Development through the Extension of Social Security. In J. Midgley and K.L. Tang (eds), Social Security, the Economy and Development. New York: Palgrave, pp. 287–304. World Bank (1994). Averting the Old Age Crisis: Policies to Protect the Old and Promote Growth. Washington, DC. World Bank (2008). The Growth Report: Strategies for Sustainable Growth and Inclusive Development. Washington, DC.

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19. Social assistance, poverty and development James Midgley

Social assistance is a distinctive form of social protection characterized by the use of the means test to determine eligibility for benefits. The means test is an administrative procedure used to assess whether claimants are entitled to receive benefits by having incomes and assets that fall below a specified level. Although primarily used to assess the eligibility of individuals and households, means tests are also administered to groups of people or whole communities. In these cases, everyone living in a poor community or all the members of a needy group are provided with benefits. Means tests may be rigidly imposed or generously administered, and there are also variations in the extent to which administrators exercise discretion in determining eligibility. Benefits may be paid either in cash or in kind. Although the term ‘social assistance’ has been used for decades, various alternatives including cash transfers, targeted benefits, residual schemes, public assistance, safety nets, minimum income programmes and welfare have also been employed. In recent years, the term ‘targeting’ has become popular and it is now often used as a synonym for ‘means test’. A related term, ‘conditional cash transfers’, refers to social assistance schemes that attach additional conditions to the means test – known as coresponsibilities – such as requiring the children of recipient households to attend school, have health checks and be immunized. (Conditional cash transfer programmes are discussed in Chapter 20 of this volume.) Another synonym for social assistance is ‘unconditional cash transfers’, which refers to social assistance schemes that do not require school attendance or other co-responsibilities. However, this term is a misnomer since all social assistance schemes impose conditions. In addition to the means test, they often have citizenship or residency requirements, compel claimants to seek employment and impose behavioural requirements. Unlike social insurance which is usually sponsored by governments, social assistance is provided by both statutory and non-governmental organizations. While social insurance is restricted to those who pay regular contributions to these schemes, social assistance is available to 352

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anyone in need, provided they comply with the means test and meet other conditions. Because social assistance is financed from government revenues or the funds raised by nonprofits, it is classed together with universal social allowances as a non-contributory scheme. Although residual social assistance schemes providing short term relief are to be found in many countries, social assistance is now widely used in the Global South to reduce poverty by subsidizing the incomes of poor families. Today, governments and nonprofit organizations in many developing countries sponsor a great variety of schemes of this kind. They including cash transfer programmes, nutritional supplements, public works projects, school fee waivers, subsidized housing and medical care, among others. As will be apparent, social assistance today is very different from the limited residual schemes that catered primarily for those in desperate poverty, usually on a short term basis, and it now encompasses a great variety of programmes that subsidize the incomes of poor families through both cash and in kind benefits. This chapter begins by tracing the evolution of social assistance from its formative association with charitable almsgiving to its current role in alleviating global poverty. It then provides an overview of the key features of social assistance. The challenges facing these schemes as well as their opportunities to enhance people’s well-being are also discussed. Although social assistance is hampered by implementation, funding and other difficulties, the chapter shows that it is making a major contribution to raising living standards around the world and helping to meet the poverty reduction targets of the Sustainable Development Goals.

SOCIAL ASSISTANCE IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT Social assistance originated in the institutionalized cultural norms and religious beliefs that have shaped charitable activities since ancient times. Although informal, they laid the foundations for modern-day social assistance. Almsgiving involved an assessment, however subjective, of whether needy people should be helped, and in time this assessment evolved into the means test. Similarly, the religious mandates that governed charitable giving prescribed how funds for the poor should be collected and how they should be distributed . In Judaism, almsgiving is regulated by religious law, while in Islam the payment of zakat and other forms of charity such as sadaqah are governed by the shariah. Like assessments of need, these prescriptions are the precursors of modernday social assistance.

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These religious practices were endorsed and sometimes enforced by the secular authorities, blurring the distinction between religious and secular responsibility. Laws requiring the payment of tithes were enacted by various mediaeval European monarchs including the Saxon kings of England who, de Schweinitz (1943) notes, passed the first law of this kind in 928 CE. Legislation was also enacted to govern the administration of poor relief funds. He reports that the earliest was an English statute of 1014 CE which required the churches to allocate one-third of the tithe for poor relief. The role of rulers in the provision of poor relief was also blurred in the Islamic world when, in the seventh century, the Caliph Umar ordered that citizens pay zakat into a public treasury known as a beit-ul-mal which managed and distributed these funds. However, since zakat had historically been an individual responsibility, dictated by conscience rather than statutory obligation, this decision was theologically controversial and it was subsequently abandoned. Government involvement in poor relief increased after the Protestant Reformation when Luther challenged Catholic teachings about the virtues of poverty and proposed that the municipal authorities rather than the churches be responsible for poor relief. His proposals were soon implemented by Protestant municipalities in Germany, Flanders and the Netherlands. National governments also became involved in poor relief. Legislation was enacted in France as early as 1536 requiring the parishes to register and support the poor, and a similar mandate was imposed on the churches in England at this time by the Poor Relief Act of 1576 which obligated the churches to provide for those in need. The statute made a clear distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, or in the quaint language of the time, between the ‘impotent poor’ and ‘sturdy beggars’. The former, who were also known as ‘paupers’, included destitute elders, orphans and people with disabilities; while the latter included out of work able-bodied adults and vagrants. Largely because of its haphazard implementation, this statute was replaced by the landmark Poor Law Act of 1601, in the 43rd year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The Elizabethan Poor Law, as it is usually known, established an innovative and comprehensive system of poor relief administered by local parishes under the direction of the national government. Each parish was required to levy a tax known as the poor rate and to employ an overseer of the poor responsible for implementing the law’s provisions. Advised by the parish council, he identified those in need and sought out relatives who could care for them. Often, those without relatives were ‘farmed out’ to local families who were paid to care for them. Subsequently, some parishes built residential institutions to

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accommodate the poor. The legislation also required the parishes to suppress mendicancy and vagrancy. The Elizabethan statute inspired the creation of similar schemes in the British colonies, including the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1642, Virginia in 1646 and Jamaica in 1682. However, their provisions only applied to indigent settlers, and the needs of local people were ignored. Midgley (2011) observes that most of these schemes were limited in scope, inadequately funded and poorly administered. Although the Poor Law was adopted in a few other colonies it was only in the twentieth century that social assistance was widely introduced in the British territories, but most of these schemes were residual in nature, providing limited benefits to destitute people, mostly in the urban areas. In the French and Iberian colonies, the church and religious charities were responsible for needy people, but their activities were usually subsidized by the colonial authorities. Although the English Poor Law was intended to provide minimal benefits under strict conditions, some parishes were relatively generous and in addition to paying benefits to worthy widows and elders, unemployed able-bodied adults and their families were often assisted. Many among the wealthy and expanding middle class disapproved of what they regarded as the overly generous attitude of many Poor Law administrators. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 gave expression to growing antipathy toward the Poor Law and its beneficiaries. Also known as the New Poor Law, the statute enshrined the concept of less eligibility, which dictated that those on poor relief should not be better off than those at work. It also urged the incarceration of those applying for assistance in residential institutions known as poor houses or work houses. Because these institutions were usually privately owned and cruelly administered, many workers lived in fear of being interned and few were willing to apply for poor relief. Despite the deterrent provisions of the New Poor Law, the numbers drawing benefits increased steadily during the nineteenth century. Also, many claimants, and especially poor elders, continued to live in their own homes. There was little appetite for incarcerating them in squalid institutions, and by the end of the nineteenth century proposals for creating separate means tested pensions garnered widespread support, with the result that legislation creating the first of these pensions was enacted in a few Western countries, including Denmark in 1891, New Zealand in 1898, Australia in 1905 and the United Kingdom in 1908. Some of these schemes were subsequently replaced with social insurance or universal pensions payable to all elders irrespective of their income or wealth. Social assistance also expanded in the Global South in the

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twentieth century when countries such as Barbados, India, Mauritius and South Africa introduced means-tested pensions. The government of Mauritius also introduced a generous means-tested child allowance. Its pension subsequently evolved into a universal scheme. On the other hand, some other developing countries retained the residual Poor Law approach. In the 1980s, following the imposition of structural adjustment by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank as a condition for bailing out heavily indebted developing countries, food subsidies in many of these countries were curtailed, user fees for education and medical services were imposed, and social assistance schemes were severely retrenched and even terminated. As the incidence of poverty rose, criticism of structural adjustment’s negative effects intensified. Hall and Midgley (2004) report that the World Bank responded by creating what were known as social funds. Managed by nonprofit organizations, these funds sought to alleviate the worst effects of structural adjustment by allocating resources for community-based poverty alleviation projects. At this time, the Bank also popularized the term ‘safety net’ to legitimate the provision of benefits as a last resort to families experiencing extreme hardship. However, some governments became critical of the Bank’s narrow safety net approach, and soon novel forms of social assistance focused on reducing poverty among the population as a whole emerged in a number of developing countries. These initiatives, which Barrientos (2013) contends amounts to a ‘quiet revolution’ in social protection, gave expression to the idea that the best way of reducing poverty is to transfer resources directly to poor families. Among the best known are the conditional cash transfers introduced by the governments of Brazil and Mexico and the ‘social grants’ launched by the Mandela government in South Africa in the 1990s. They paved the way for a plethora of social assistance schemes designed to reduce poverty by ‘just giving money to the poor’ (Hanlon et al. 2010). In the new century, many more national schemes targeted at poor families and especially poor women were established. In addition, Lewis and Kanji (2009) observe that the retrenchment of government programmes through structural adjustment facilitated the involvement of non-governmental organizations in poverty alleviation. Supported by international donors, they launched many social assistance initiatives in the Global South. The spread of social assistance in the Global South was also fostered by the 1995 World Summit on Social Development when the member states of the United Nations resolved to reduce the incidence of global poverty. Subsequently, with the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, the role of direct resource

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transfers in reducing poverty was recognized. The expansion of social assistance was also facilitated by the realization that traditional famine relief had failed to address the underlying problems of poverty and deprivation that characterized disaster prone communities. Ellis et al. (2009) point out that there was growing support for the idea that it was preferable to pay cash benefits to these communities on a regular basis than to provide rations and other forms of emergency relief. Today, many social assistance schemes provide long term benefits to food insecure communities in order to mitigate the harmful effects of famines and disasters. While the governments of many developing countries were expanding social assistance, some Western countries, and particularly the United Kingdom and the United States, were moving in the opposite direction. In both countries, political parties capitalized on growing electoral antipathy towards social assistance by requiring claimants to enrol in job training and to seek employment. This development was pioneered in the United States where the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) programme introduced in 1997 imposed work conditions on recipients, who were mostly poor women with children. Soon, many other Western countries followed by adopting what became known as ‘activation’ policies. However, ‘welfare to work’ in these countries focused primarily on unemployed men, and especially out-of-work youth, and single mothers with young children were generally exempted. Nevertheless, Moreira and Lødemel (2014) observe that welfare to work reflected an increasingly punitive attitude toward social assistance in several Western nations, and especially the United States, where despite its promise the TANF programme failed to reduce the incidence of child poverty. In addition, many Western countries tightened eligibility conditionalities. Although they had adequate resources to fund social assistance, austerity, popular antipathy to beneficiaries and political reluctance to support these schemes significantly hampered their effectiveness. Also, few used social assistance effectively to deal with the dramatic increase in unemployment, homelessness and poverty that followed the Great Recession which began in the autumn of 2007. Instead, Midgley (2014) observes that most Western governments concurred with the market liberal requirement that cutting social spending was a necessary condition for recovery. Even though their economies have improved significantly since then, the European Commission (2016) reveals that many of its member states perpetuate a residual approach to social assistance. On the other hand, there is international support for using social assistance proactively to reduce poverty. As discussed earlier, this has

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been a feature of these programmes in the Global South, and today many governments, with the support of international organizations, are expanding social assistance. The adoption of the Social Floors Recommendation (No. 202 of 2012) by the member states of the International Labour Organization (ILO) endorses the idea that all citizens should be guaranteed an adequate level of social protection. The member states of the United Nations also prioritized social protection when they adopted the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. In addition, the World Bank has changed its position, and in 2015 it announced a joint initiative with the ILO to promote universal social protection (ILO and World Bank 2015). This development marks a significant change in the Bank’s policy and bodes well for the role of social assistance in reducing global poverty. It is also encouraging that the European Commission (2016) is promoting the adoption of minimum income programmes among its member states. Although means-tested, they will ensure that no one has an income below an acceptable minimum level (Bahle et al. 2011).

VARIETIES OF SOCIAL ASSISTANCE A great variety of social assistance schemes which vary in scope, coverage, sponsorship, funding and effectiveness have been established all over the world. They are managed by national, regional and municipal governments as well as non-governmental organizations, including small community-based grassroots organizations and nonprofits. While some cater to small groups of needy people, others have many millions of recipients. They range from schemes that pay benefits on a short term, emergency basis to ‘categorical’ schemes such as means-tested pensions that continue for many years. They also differ in terms of the type of benefits they provide. In-kind benefits in the form of nutritional supports and fee waivers predominate, but cash benefits are also paid. A global database managed by the World Bank (2015) reveals that 157 countries had social assistance schemes and that about 1.9 billion people worldwide received social assistance benefits in 2015. Most Western countries had schemes of this kind, but they were also found in 48 African, 29 Latin American and 29 Asian nations. The World Bank’s database identified no fewer than 589 social assistance schemes in the Global South alone. Most countries have multiple schemes, and usually they are administered by different government agencies. Also, many needy families access different schemes, drawing cash as well as in-kind benefits. Often, cash benefits are augmented by nutritional supplements

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and housing support. In addition, many of these schemes target women with children. Although the number of Western countries providing social assistance has remained relatively stable over the years, the World Bank (2017) notes that the number of developing countries with these schemes has more than doubled since the beginning of the new century. The expansion of social assistance in the Global South has been truly remarkable. Midgley (1984) observes that very few developing countries had social assistance in the 1980s, and that these schemes were usually based on the Poor Law, providing meagre benefits primarily in urban areas. In addition to its rapid growth, the World Bank (2017) reports that social assistance in the Global South has also become more diverse and complex. Instead of having one traditional, residual scheme paying short term benefits to a few needy families, many developing countries now have multiple programmes, including cash transfers, school feeding schemes, public works and fee waivers. Some countries have no fewer than 20 different schemes. In-kind schemes are more common than cash transfers. About twothirds of all social assistance beneficiaries worldwide receive in-kind benefits (World Bank 2015). The most common are nutritional supplements, school meals and fee waivers. Usually, nutritional supplements are accessed by vouchers or debit cards honoured by approved retailers. Oliveira et al. (2018) report that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the United States issues debit cards which beneficiaries use to pay for groceries at more than 260 000 retail outlets. About 22 million households with approximately 45 million individuals benefited from the programme in 2015. However, food in the form of grains and staples is still distributed directly to poor people. Bhattacharya et al. (2018) report that this is the case in India where low income families enrolled in the government’s Targeted Public Distribution Scheme (TPDS) receive regular allocations of staples from participant retailers. Food for work schemes, such as those sponsored by the United Nations World Food Programme, are also common especially in low income African and Asian countries. Many governments have established school feeding programmes. The World Bank (2015) reveals that schemes of this kind operate in 131 countries. Although the means test is sometimes administered to determine which children qualify for free meals, all children enrolled in schools in poor communities are usually covered. In some cases, and especially the Western nations, all school children irrespective of their parent’s income or wealth receive free meals. Some of these schemes are very large indeed. In India, more than 100 million children receive free

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school meals, while in Brazil the figure is about 46 million. In China, free school meals are provided to more than 26 million children (World Bank 2015). Fee waivers that reduce the costs of medical care, education, transport and other public services to social assistance recipients are also very common. In many developing countries, children from poor families who attend school regularly receive a full or partial fee remittance which is often packaged in the form of a scholarship. In some cases, free books, school supplies or uniforms are also provided. Since many developing countries have abolished school fees at the primary level, these waivers are now often targeted at high school pupils or university students. One example is Mozambique, where more than 5 million children from low income families are granted secondary school fee waivers. Waivers for medical care are also common in the developing world. One of the largest schemes of this kind, which covers about 86 million people, is managed by the Indonesian government. Fuel and energy subsidies are also provided and travel passes are widely available to elders and low income people in many Western countries, but they are not common in the Global South. In addition to paying in-kind benefits, social assistance schemes providing cash benefits are becoming more common in the Global South. Of these, conditional cash transfers are spreading rapidly. Although residual schemes continue to operate, some governments have relaxed their strict conditionalities to cover many more needy people. One example is the Minimum Livelihoods Guarantee or dibao scheme in China, which was originally intended to provide time-limited benefits to workers who were laid off following the privatization of the state-owned enterprises. Leung and Xu (2015) report that claimants were often purposefully stigmatized to deter applications, but recently eligibility requirements have been relaxed and the programme has expanded rapidly. By 2013, it covered about 75 million recipients of whom 21 million were urban dwellers while about 55 million lived in the rural areas. The World Bank updated this figure in 2018, reporting that a smaller number, some 69 million people, were receiving benefits in 2015. Nevertheless, the dibao social assistance scheme remains the largest in the world. Leung and Xu observe that it is now the government’s policy to use the scheme to subsidize the incomes of poor families in order to prevent discontent and promote social harmony. In addition, residual social assistance schemes have been modified to respond to the unique needs and circumstances of developing countries. For example, most provide emergency relief to poor families who have lost their homes

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because of fires, which occur frequently in the urban informal settlements. Schemes that assist families affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and especially those that care for orphans, have also been introduced in a number of African nations. Social assistance also provides regular long term cash benefits to those with special needs such as people with disabilities, needy elders and poor families with children. These ‘categorical’ social assistance schemes, as they are known, are becoming more common in the Global South. Relatively few Western countries have schemes of this kind, relying on social insurance and universal social allowances instead. Several African and Asian countries have established social assistance pensions and in a few cases, such as Botswana, Lesotho and Namibia, they have been replaced with universal schemes. Bolivia, Mauritius and Nepal also have schemes of this kind. In India, social assistance pensions were first introduced by some state governments in the 1950s, and in 1995 they were augmented with a nationwide social assistance pension funded jointly by the union and state governments. Known as the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP), it was subsequently extended to cover people with disabilities, and widows. In addition, it pays a one-time cash benefit to families who have lost their primary earner. The scheme covered about 33 million elders in 2014 (World Bank 2015). In Latin America, social assistance is often used to pay benefits to low income elders who do not qualify for social insurance. Social assistance is also used in this way in many Western countries, or otherwise it supplements inadequate social insurance benefits. South Africa probably has the most comprehensive categorical social assistance programme in the developing world, paying benefits to elders, people with disabilities, poor children, war veterans and foster parents, among others. Patel (2015) reveals that in total these schemes cover about 17 million people. The country’s Child Support Grant pays benefits to carers irrespective of whether they are the child’s parent. Although the vast majority of recipients are women, men who care for children also receive the grant. About 12 million children are covered by the grant, while the Old Age Grant reaches approximately 3 million low income elders (World Bank 2018). Both schemes are intended to subsidize the incomes of poor families and reduce the incidence of poverty. Similar child allowance schemes have been established in many other countries in the Global South. In addition, a few countries have introduced schemes that target very poor families irrespective of whether they have needy elders or children, even though most do. These so-called ‘unconditional’ schemes are often contrasted with conditional cash transfers, but they still utilize the means

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test to determine who is extremely poor. One example is the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme established by the government of Ghana in 2008 which pays small, regular cash benefits to families in the bottom 20 per cent of the nation’s poor. A similar scheme is the Social Cash Transfer (SCT) programme in Zambia which was established as a pilot in a very poor community in 2003. Since then, the programme has been scaled up and it now operates around the country. The World Bank (2015) notes that about 85 000 people were covered by the LEAP programme, while the SCT programme had more than 100 000 recipients. Governments in the Global South are also using community or public works to reduce poverty. Augmenting emergency cash and food for work relief programmes, they pay long term benefits to supplement the incomes of poor families especially in rural areas. One of the largest is operated in terms of the Indian government’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). This scheme is designed to alleviate poverty by guaranteeing employment for 100 days annually. If no work is available, a cash benefit is paid. Mutatkar (2013) notes that a third of the jobs are reserved for women, but that actually about a half have been filled by women. The World Bank (2018) reveals that about 75 million rural people participated in the scheme in 2016. Another example is the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia which was established in 2005. The programme provides both cash and food to poor and food-insecure families who participate in infrastructural projects such as irrigation, road repair and the construction of schools and clinics. Although the scheme is ongoing, benefits are usually paid for six months during the dry season when needs are the greatest. About 8 million people benefited from the scheme in 2016 (World Bank 2018). A similar scheme is currently being introduced in the country’s cities. It will pay cash benefits to the adult members of low income families who enrol in local community work projects organized by the government. Benefits will also be paid to people with disabilities and elders who are unable to work. These initiatives contrast sharply with the welfare to work schemes introduced in many Western countries since the 1990s. Also, as mentioned earlier, many Western governments have tightened the eligibility conditions of their conventional social assistance schemes. A study of the member states of the European Union (European Commission 2016) found that few had comprehensive social assistance schemes, and that in most cases they function as residual programmes of last resort. One example of this austere approach comes from the United Kingdom (UK), where the government froze benefits and more recently collapsed several

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social assistance schemes into a single programme known euphemistically as Universal Credit. It is not surprising, as the Rowntree Foundation (2017) reports, that the incidence of poverty among elders and families with children in the UK has increased. On the other hand, there is optimism about the future of social assistance. Moreira and Lødemel (2014) observe that some Western countries are relaxing the conditionalities of their welfare to work programmes and, as noted previously, some European countries are seeking to alleviate poverty by adopting minimum income schemes. Although these programmes are means-tested, it will be shown later that they are similar to proposals for a universal basic income which guarantees a minimum income for all. In addition, the ILO’s Social Floors initiative and the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals have prioritized social protection as a key means of achieving poverty reduction. These developments suggest that social assistance will play an increasingly important role in poverty alleviation in the future.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES The livelihoods of many millions of needy families around the world have been enhanced by social assistance. However, despite this achievement, many challenges need to be addressed. One of these is that many who are eligible for social assistance do not claim benefits. Many are unaware of these schemes, and of those who know about them, many do not apply or otherwise face obstacles in obtaining benefits. Although India’s social assistance pension scheme serves approximately 33 million elders, only 18 per cent of those who are eligible receive benefits (United Nations Population Fund 2017). Similar take-up problems are to be found in many other countries. The World Bank (2017) reports that in the poorest nations, only 20 per cent of those who are eligible receive benefits; while in middle income developing countries the figure is about 36 per cent. Although take-up is far higher in the Western countries, here too many of those who are eligible do not apply; this figure may be as high as 20 per cent. These data lend support to the ILO’s (2017) contention that about 55 per cent of the world’s population, or about 4 billion people, are not covered by any form of social protection. Another challenge is that comparatively few countries have comprehensive national social assistance schemes which are well managed, readily accessible and responsive to claimants. In the poorest countries, social assistance often comprises many small and uncoordinated schemes sponsored by non-governmental organizations. Monchuk (2014) observes

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that this is the case in many African nations, where social assistance is fragmented and poorly coordinated. Many of these schemes are targeted at local communities and often their services operate in isolation from national, statutory programmes. Duplication is widespread. Similarly, social assistance in some Western countries is sponsored by municipal or state governments, resulting in significant variations in the quality of services. In addition, the effectiveness of social assistance is hampered by managerial inefficiency, poor targeting and bureaucratic rigidity. In many countries, staff are badly paid and poorly motivated and regrettably, corruption remains a serious problem. Few governments have outreach or public information campaigns about their schemes, so that many eligible claimants remain unaware of their rights to benefit. Another problem is that some governments have little interest in the welfare of their citizens and that state capacity in others is severely limited. In countries plagued by corruption, political indifference and violence, administrative reforms are unlikely to be implemented. Another challenge is the pervasive antipathy to social assistance and its recipients in many parts of the world. Unfortunately, myths about claimants’ moral flaws, lack of motivation and readiness to scrounge off governments and charities persist in many societies. These beliefs provide electoral fuel for politicians who oppose social assistance on ideological grounds, arguing that it is not the responsibility of the state but of families, communities and charitable organizations to provide for those in need. Negative opinions about social assistance comport with market liberal claims about its allegedly negative economic effects. These programmes, it is said, are an impediment to economic growth because they transfer scarce resources out of the productive economy to unproductive claimants, fostering dependency and dampening work incentives. The result is falling living standards and stagnation. To effectively address the poverty problem, they urge governments to abandon social assistance and embrace market-driven economic growth policies instead. The reluctance of needy people to apply for social assistance because of stigma presents another challenge. Many are deterred because they feel shame or otherwise fear being stigmatized by neighbours or treated unsympathetically by case workers. On the other hand, large anti-poverty programmes which target whole communities and enrol large numbers of people seem to be less affected. Nevertheless, a collection of country case studies compiled by Gubrium et al. (2014) reveals that stigma remains a major reason for the failure of social assistance to meet the needs of many poor families around the world. The problem is exacerbated in countries where governments deliberately deter claimants by

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imposing strict conditionalities, and award benefits only in the most desperate cases. Funding presents another challenge. The World Bank (2018) reveals that most governments in the Global South spend 1.5–2.0 per cent of gross domestic product on social assistance. In low income African countries, the figure is about 1 per cent. Although these figures suggest that the costs of social assistance are low, budgetary allocations are often insufficient to meet the extent of need. The problem is compounded by inadequate benefit levels. Another issue is that many low income countries rely heavily on international donors to fund their programmes. Monchuk (2014) points out that social assistance schemes in Africa are often financed entirely by these donors through low-interest loans which nevertheless must be repaid. In addition, Ellis et al. (2009) observe that many schemes sponsored by international donors are only supported for a few years at the most. Also, some governments are meeting the costs of social assistance by retrenching budgetary allocations to health, education and other social services. Hall (2017) observes that the expansion of conditional cash transfers in Brazil has put fiscal pressure on these services, and Patel (2017) makes a similar observation about South Africa’s social grants. Embracing Opportunities Although the challenges facing social assistance are formidable, they can be overcome and, building on past achievements, there are opportunities for policy makers to enhance social assistance’s contribution to enhancing living standards around the world. However, to achieve this goal, governments and nonprofits alike need to respond to the challenges discussed earlier. Steps need to be taken to improve the administration of social assistance, increase funding and address negative public attitudes towards these schemes. Regular assessments of their managerial effectiveness should be undertaken and deficiencies should be remedied. Better staff training, improved working conditions, increased salaries and higher morale are needed to motivate the staff who are responsible for the day-to-day administration of these programmes. Improved leadership that builds morale and inculcates a sense of mission into the management of these schemes is also needed. In addition, governments need to improve the image of social assistance by mounting campaigns to educate the public about its role in development. Some governments have already implemented administrative reforms, and in a growing number of countries enhanced training, more effective

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monitoring and computerization have resulted in significant improvements. In addition, some countries such as India have launched anticorruption campaigns which, Dutta et al. (2010) point out, have reduced leakage. Steps have also been taken to address the problems of fragmentation and duplication. The ILO and the World Bank are currently helping governments in many developing countries to formulate comprehensive social protection plans that seek to link different programmes coherently and to integrate them with national social development plans. Van Ginneken (2007) notes that Senegal was one of the first countries to adopt a plan of this kind, but since then, several others have formulated comprehensive social protection plans (World Bank 2015). The haphazard approach to funding which characterizes social assistance in many parts of the world should also be addressed. The adoption of the Social Protection Floors Recommendation and the Sustainable Development Goals provides an impetus for governments to mobilize adequate resources to meet the costs of social assistance and social protection more generally. The vast resources allocated to the military, prestigious construction projects and other profligate forms of spending in many countries should be curtailed so that increased funds for social protection are made available. On the basis of sophisticated budgetary modelling, Behrend and Hagemejer (2009) conclude that most low income countries can afford a basic package of social protection, including essential medical care. International aid should also be used more effectively to finance these programmes. Cichon and Hagemejer (2007) point out that an affordable increase in aid budgets could meet the costs of providing a basic social protection floor to everyone in the Global South. By addressing these challenges, there are opportunities to build on the past achievements of social assistance. Clearly, there is a good deal of empirical evidence to show that it has improved living standards in the Global South. Reviewing a number of impact evaluations, Barrientos (2013) reports that social assistance has raised incomes, increased food consumption and fostered higher levels of school enrolments among recipient households. In addition to improving the livelihoods of beneficiaries, there is evidence to show that social assistance has an overall positive impact on poverty at the national level. Levine et al. (2011) found that Namibia’s social assistance scheme has reduced the country’s poverty rate by about 22 per cent. Similarly, Patel (2015) reports that evaluations of the impact of South Africa’s grants show that the overall poverty rate has declined, especially in the rural areas. However, she cautions that poverty remains a serious problem, and this is also true in other countries with large scale social assistance programmes. Clearly,

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the challenges discussed earlier need to be addressed if social assistance is to contribute effectively to meeting the poverty reduction targets of the Sustainable Development Goals. Although hotly contested by market liberals, there is a good deal of evidence to show that social assistance contributes positively to economic development. Midgley (2008, 2018) contends that, if properly configured, these schemes actually facilitate economic growth. By augmenting the disposable incomes of poor families, social assistance increases their demand for goods and services and stimulates growth. In the United States, the SNAP food voucher programme sustains demand for groceries and keeps hundreds of thousands of small retail outlets in business (Oliveira et al. 2018). Cash transfers also help poor families to acquire assets and resources such as agricultural tools, seeds, fertilisers and other inputs necessary for development. They also help families to accumulate savings which permit investments in new technologies that increase production. Social assistance also contributes to economic growth by promoting employment and productive work. In addition to community works projects, cash transfers provide investments for micro enterprises. Midgley (2018) notes that social assistance recipients often use their benefits to acquire small livestock which are then raised and sold at a profit. In aggregate, these micro enterprises make a small but helpful contribution to growth. Social assistance also promotes human capital investments which are necessary for economic development. The nutritional and health status of families receiving benefits improve significantly, enhancing their productive capacity. In addition, their children attend school regularly, and although school attendance by itself does not foster the acquisition of knowledge and skills, Barrientos (2013) reports that they perform well on educational indicators. However, social assistance programmes must be carefully designed to maximize their economic impact. Social assistance also has an opportunity to contribute more positively to social justice. Although Drolet (2014) observes that access to these schemes is a right enshrined in international treaties and the laws and constitutions of many countries, the right to social assistance is not always guaranteed in practice. In addition, the imposition of work and other conditionalities has diluted the rights-based approach. Nevertheless, advocates of social assistance have an opportunity to ensure that people in need have the right to claim social assistance and that their claims are properly assessed and justiciable. Fortunately, there are indications that this is happening. Leisering and Barrientos (2013) believe that the expansion of social assistance around the world is strengthening the argument that social assistance should be a right of citizenship. In

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addition, some countries have made a commitment to a rights-based approach. In South Africa, Patel (2015) reports that the courts have frequently ruled in favour of claimants whose applications have been denied. The rights-based approach also challenges the counter-argument that social assistance should be narrowly targeted at those in extreme need. Advocates of this view contend that the use of social assistance to alleviate poverty is far too expensive, and likely to foster indolence and dependency. It is better, they believe, to direct scarce resources at desperately needy people rather than poor families in general. These claims mirror older debates between those who favour universal rather than selective social programmes. Although social assistance is usually classed as a selective programme, its proactive use as an instrument of poverty alleviation by many governments is likely to mitigate many of the problems associated with selective welfare such as stigma and poor quality services. As Titmuss (1968) argued many years ago, programmes directed at the poor are usually poor programmes in that they are inadequately funded, badly administered and lacking in political support. By improving access, managerial efficiency and funding, the right to social assistance can be realized. Social assistance is already fostering social justice by directing resources at poor women and their families, but it is clear that its contribution to gender equality must be strengthened. Although women have benefited significantly from categorical child allowance schemes as well as large scale anti-poverty social assistance programmes, more needs to be done to ensure that these schemes empower women rather than reinforcing traditional gender roles. Some critics have argued that paying benefits to women to care for children amounts to a ‘maternalist’ approach that fails to challenge patriarchal norms, but some studies show that social assistance increases their autonomy and ability to shape their own lives. In one study of this kind, Patel (2017) finds that the Child Support Grant in South Africa has fostered greater independence among women beneficiaries and enhanced their ability to command resources. Holmes and Jones (2013) concur, pointing out that social assistance can contribute effectively to transforming gender relationships if these schemes are appropriately modified to achieve this goal. In addition, there are opportunities for social assistance to promote social justice by reducing income inequality. Like other forms of social protection, social assistance mobilizes and redistributes resources in complex ways, but by directing resources at needy families it not only raises their living standards but also promotes income equality. However, small social assistance programmes sponsored by nonprofits are limited

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in their ability to achieve this goal. This is equally true of traditional, residual schemes. On the other hand, large scale programmes that cover many millions of people have a potentially powerful redistributive impact, provided that sizeable resources are mobilized and benefit levels are sufficiently high. As Midgley (2018) points out, redistributing resources through social assistance can be an effective means of achieving inclusive economic development. However, there is little evidence to show that national social assistance schemes are presently distributing resources on a sufficiently large scale to foster income equality. One exception comes from Brazil, where Soares (2013) reports that the country’s various social protection schemes have in fact helped to achieve this goal. Again, with appropriate modifications and a commitment to address the challenges facing these schemes, social assistance has the opportunity to serve as an instrument of what Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux (2008) call ‘transformative social protection’. In recent years, debates about the role of social protection in achieving social justice have frequently referenced the proposal that governments should introduce a universal basic income. As Van Parijs and Vanderborght (2017) explain, a scheme of this kind would pay benefits to all citizens irrespective of their income or assets, and be adequate to meet their basic needs. In this way, it would ensure that poverty is eradicated and that people have the freedom to pursue their interests. Despite attracting support from many scholars and politicians, basic income is controversial and raises numerous practical and fiscal challenges. Apart from a few local experiments, no government has yet introduced a national basic income scheme. However, it is seldom recognized that social assistance, designed to reduce poverty by paying adequate benefits to a large proportion of low income earners, is not dissimilar from basic income. Indeed, current experiments with basic income being undertaken in some countries are essentially social assistance schemes with relaxed conditionalities. By vigorously promoting a more inclusive and generous approach to social assistance, the idea that governments should raise the living standards of poor families by supplementing their incomes can be realized. This idea was championed in the United Kingdom more than a century ago by Beatrice Webb and her colleagues in their 1909 minority report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws. Governments, they argued, should ensure a ‘national minimum of civilized life’ which, together with housing, education and medical services will provide a decent standard of living for all. Clearly, social assistance has a vital role to play in guaranteeing a basic acceptable minimum standard of living for all, and in this way it may further the ideals of equality and social justice.

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REFERENCES Bahle, T., Hubl, V. and Pfeifer, M. (eds) (2011). The Last Safety Net: A Handbook of Minimum Income Protection in Europe. Bristol: Policy Press. Barrientos, A. (2013). Social Assistance in Developing Countries. New York: Cambridge University Press. Battacharya, S., Falcao, V.L. and Puri, R. (2018). The Public Distribution System in India: Policy Evolution and Program Delivery Trends. In H. Alderman, U. Gentilini and R. Yemstov (eds), The 1.5 Billion People Question: Food Vouchers or Cash Transfers. Washington, DC: World Bank, pp. 43–105. Behrendt, C. and Hagemejer, K. (2009). Can low-income countries afford social security?. In P. Townsend (ed.), Building Decent Societies: Rethinking the Role of Social Security in Development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99–121. Cichon, M. and Hagemejer, K. (2007). Changing the Development Policy Paradigm: Investing in a Social Security Floor for All. International Social Security Review, 60 (2/3), 169–196. de Schweinitz, K. (1943). England Road to Social Security. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Drolet, J.L. (2014). Social Protection and Social Development: International Initiatives. New York: Springer. Dutta, P., Howes, S. and Murgai, R. (2010). Small but Effective: India’s Targeted Unconditional Cash Transfers. Economic and Political Weekly, 45 (52), 63–70. Ellis, F., Devereux, S. and White, P. (2009). Social Protection in Africa. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. European Commission (2016). Minimum Income Schemes in Europe: A Study of National Policies, 2015. Brussels: European Commission. Gubrium, E.K., Pellissery, S. and Lødemel, I. (eds) (2014). The Shame of It: Global Perspectives on Anti-Poverty Policies. Bristol: Policy Press. Hall, A. (2017). Cash Transfers as Social Investments: The Brazilian case. In J. Midgley, E. Dahl and A. Conley Wright (eds), Social Investment and Social Welfare: International and Critical Perspectives, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 141–159. Hall, A. and Midgley, J. (2004). Social Policy for Development. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Hanlon, J., Barrientos, A. and Hulme, D. (2010). Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South. Sterling, VA: Kuamarian Press. Holmes, R. and Jones, N. (2013). Gender and Social Protection in the Developing World: Beyond Mothers and Safety Nets. New York: Zed. International Labour Organization (ILO) (2017). World Social Protection Report, 2017– 19: Universal Social Protection to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Geneva. International Labour Organization (ILO) and World Bank (2015). A Shared Mission for Universal Social Protection: A Concept Note. Geneva. Leisering, L. and Barrientos, A. (2013). Social Citizenship for the Global Poor? The Worldwide Spread of Social Assistance. International Journal of Social Welfare, 22 (3), 550–576. Leung, J.C.B. and Xu, Y. (2015). China’s Social Welfare: The Third Turning Point. Cambridge: Polity Press. Levine, S., van der Berg, S. and Yu, D. (2011). The Impact of Cash Transfers on Household Welfare in Namibia. Development Southern Africa, 28 (1), 40–59. Lewis, D. and Kanji, N. (2009). Non-Governmental Organizations and Development. New York: Routledge.

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Social assistance, poverty and development 371 Midgley, J. (1984). Poor Law Principles and Social Assistance in the Third World. International Social Work, 27, 19–29. Midgley, J. (2008). Social Security and the Economy: Key Perspectives. In J. Midgley and K.L. Tang (eds), Social Security, the Economy and Development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 51–84. Midgley, J. (2011). Imperialism, Colonialism and Social Welfare. In J. Midgley and D. Piachaud (eds), Colonialism and Welfare: Social Policy and the British Imperial Legacy. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 36–54. Midgley, J. (2014). Austerity versus Stimulus: Theoretical Perspectives and Policy Implications. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 41 (2), 11–32. Midgley, J. (2018). Social Protection, Social Investment and Inclusive Development. In C. Deeming and P. Smyth (eds), Reframing Global Social Policy: Social Investment for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth. Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 251–271. Monchuk, V. (2014). Reducing Poverty and Investing in People: The New Role of Safety in Africa. Washington, DC: World Bank. Moreira, A. and Lødemel, I. (2014). Introduction. In A. Moreira and I. Lødemel (eds), Activation or Workfare? Governance and the Neo-Liberal Convergence. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–18. Mutatkar, R. (2013). Social Protection in India: Current Approaches and Issues. In J. Midgley and D. Piachaud (eds), Social Protection, Economic Growth and Social Change: Goals, Issues and Trajectories in China, India, Brazil and Africa. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 102–116. Oliveira, V., Tiehen, L., Prell, M. and Smallwood, D. (2018). The Evolution and Implementation of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program United States. In H. Alderman, U. Gentilini and R. Yemstov (eds), The 1.5 Billion People Question: Food Vouchers or Cash Transfers. Washington, DC: World Bank, pp. 209–263. Patel, L. (2015). Social Welfare and Social Development in South Africa. Johannesburg: Oxford University Press. Patel, L. (2017). The Child Support Grant in South Africa: Gender, Care and Social Investment. In J. Midgley, E. Dahl and A. Conley Wright (eds), Social Investment and Social Welfare: International and Critical Perspectives, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 105–122. Rowntree Foundation (2017). UK Poverty 2017: A Comprehensive Analysis of Poverty Trends and Figures. York. Sabates-Wheeler, R. and Devereux, S. (2008). Transformative Social Protection: The Currency of Social Justice. In A. Barrientos and D. Hulme (eds), Social Protection for the Poor and the Poorest: Concepts, Policies and Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 64–84. Soares, S. (2013). The Efficiency and Effectiveness of Social Protection against Poverty and Inequality in Brazil. In J. Midgley and D. Piachaud (eds), Social Protection, Economic Growth and Social Change: Goals, Issues and Trajectories in China, India, Brazil and Africa. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 153–165. Titmuss, R.M. (1968). Commitment to Welfare. London: Allen & Unwin. United Nations Population Fund (2017). Caring for Our Elders: Early Responses. India Ageing Report – 2017. New Delhi. van Ginneken, W. (2007). Extending Social Security Coverage: Concepts, Global Trends and Policy Issues. International Social Security Review, 60 (2/3), 39–59. Van Parijs, P. and Vanderborght, Y. (2017). Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. World Bank (2015). The State of Safety Nets 2015. Washington, DC: World Bank.

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372 Handbook of social policy and development World Bank (2017). Closing the Gap: The State of Safety Nets 2017. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (2018). The State of Safety Nets 2018. Washington, DC: World Bank.

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20. Conditional income transfers, social policy and development Armando Barrientos

Conditional income transfers (CITs) are time-guaranteed public transfers of income and services offered to households in poverty with the objective of supplementing their consumption and facilitating human capital accumulation. The transfers are conditional on children attending school and on household members attending primary health care, especially expectant mothers and infants. The two pioneer programmes, Bolsa Escola and Progresa, emerged in Brazil and Mexico respectively in the mid-1990s. Bolsa Escola-type programmes emerged in 1995 from municipal strategies in Campinas and the Federal District (Rocha 2013). They spread to other municipalities, encouraging the federal government to provide counterpart funding to facilitate their adoption in poorer municipalities. Eventually Bolsa Escola became a federal programme in 2001 and in 2003 it formed the core of Bolsa Família. Mexico introduced Progresa in 1997 following a successful pilot (Levy 2006). Its design and implementation sought to avoid the clientelistic failings of previous anti-poverty strategies (Diaz-Cayeros et al. 2016). Progresa was intended to address extreme poverty in rural areas of Mexico and was initially restricted to poorer communities in seven estates in Mexico. In 2002, Progresa became Oportunidades and was gradually implemented in all states and in urban areas. In 2015, Oportunidades became Prospera. Bolsa Família and Prospera currently reach around a quarter of the population in these two countries. Conditional income transfers spread to all countries in Latin America and some in the Caribbean (Cecchini and Madariaga 2011); as well as some countries in Africa, inter alia, Kenya, Ghana and Tunisia (Monchuk 2014); and Asia, inter alia, Indonesia and the Philippines (Weber 2010). More recently, they have emerged in high income countries such as the United States and Italy. Conditional income transfers are well established in international development policy debates and practice (Fiszbein and Schady 2009), where they are referred to as conditional cash transfers. Because their main objective is to facilitate human development they could be 373

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described more accurately as human development conditional income transfers. This chapter provides a primer on conditional income transfers. It begins by discussing their rationale before moving on to exploring their core design features and outcomes. A brief section examines diverse practices in existing programmes and sketches their boundaries as a type of social assistance programme. This is followed by a consideration of their sustainability, institutional and political, before concluding.

RATIONALE At the core of CITs there is a specific understanding of poverty. Poverty is usually identified as income or consumption deficits observed in households. A household is in poverty if its consumption or income proves insufficient to meet a minimum living standard. Under the current extreme poverty international standard of US$1.90 per day, a household is in extreme poverty if the consumption of each of its members falls short of this standard. Most countries have a national poverty line reflecting their own minimum standard. The canonical income maintenance approach to poverty reduction in high income countries aimed to set social assistance transfers so as to close the gap between household consumption and a minimum standard (Atkinson 1995). The factors explaining why some households are unable to meet the minimum consumption standard are many. However, a key factor explaining why households are in poverty is their limited productive capacity. Studies profiling groups in poverty invariably find that these groups have low levels of schooling and insufficient physical or financial assets (Castañeda et al. 2018). They are in poverty because their productive capacity can deliver insufficient income or consumption at best.1 To the extent that poverty is associated with insufficient productive capacity, consumption subsidies might address current deprivation but will have limited effects on poverty persistence. Permanent exit from poverty requires an improvement in households’ productive capacity. This insight into the causes of poverty is at the core of conditional income transfer programmes. Their design combines consumption subsidies with support for household investment in their productive capacity. CITs focus on strengthening human development among households in poverty, with improvements in schooling, health and nutrition. This 1 In practice, a household’s limited productive capacity might be to do with the level of assets, the mix of assets, and their inclusion in economic processes.

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makes sense because the capacity to work is the principal asset available to lower income households in low and middle income countries. Labour productivity is key to their livelihoods and to their efforts to stay out of poverty.2

DESIGN FEATURES Conditional income transfers share many features with other types of social assistance programmes. They address poverty and vulnerability, target low income households, and are designed to avoid dependence and adverse incentives. In this section the focus is on their distinctive design features.3 Conditions To an extent, all social assistance programmes include conditions. Basic conditions include identification, the provision of information on household members, composition and resources, nationality or residence. Some social assistance programmes attach conditions to the continuation of transfer payments. Public works and employment guarantee programmes, Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme, for example, attach work conditions to participation in the programme, in part as a means to ensure self-selection among potential participants. CITs attach behavioural conditions to the continuation of transfers, and this is a core feature. Some programmes include conditions on attendance at nutrition training and community meetings. A handful of programmes include outcome conditions, say grade completion or educational achievement. Outcome conditions are rare.4 With variation across countries, most CITs condition school attendance and enrolment of children, and primary health care utilization. The latter often involves regular attendance at primary health care clinics, regular checks for expectant mothers and infants, and immunization. Table 20.1 describes the conditions attached to receipt of Mexico’s Progresa. Over time, CITs have adopted the term ‘co-responsibilities’ to encompass these 2

Policy instruments transferring financial assets (microfinance) or physical assets (livestock, land) have been shown to be more successful among low income households with assets, good health and basic education. 3 For a comparison of conditional income transfers and other social assistance programme types see Barrientos (2013). 4 Ingreso Etico Familiar in Chile includes school attainment conditions.

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‘demand-side’ conditions and the ‘supply-side’ conditions associated with the responsibilities and standards of performance of the programme agency (Ibarrarán et al. 2017). Co-responsibilities are formally established at the time households join the programme. Table 20.1 Schooling and health conditions attached to Progresa transfers Health conditions 16 years

1 check-up a year

Women prenatal

5 check-ups

Women postnatal

2 check-ups

Schooling conditions school-age children Source:

Enrolled and attending 85% of the time (monthly and annually)

Skoufias (2005).

The literature on CITs has discussed ‘demand-side’ conditions extensively. A natural concern with conditions is that they might turn out to be counterproductive. They might in fact penalize households least able to comply with the conditions. Failure to comply with these conditions can result in the suspension of transfers. Compliance involves additional costs to households – for example, school uniforms – and time restrictions for adults. A feminist critique of CITS makes the point that responsibility for ensuring compliance falls primarily on mothers, with no form of compensation available for their time (Molyneux 2006). Evidence that compliance costs are high or that they restrict participation among the poorest households is limited. There is a positive side to conditions. Some CITs such as Brazil’s Bolsa Familia approach non-compliance as a signal to trigger further support for the participant households. A distinction has been drawn between programmes with ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ conditions, depending on the way in which programmes deal with non-compliance (Cecchini and Madariaga 2011). It is also the case that conditions might enforce some

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degree of coordination between programme managers and other ministries, health and education for example, which could strengthen implementation effectiveness.5 Entry and Exit Programme entry conditions in CITs are not fundamentally different to those in place in other types of social assistance programme. The challenges involved in selecting programme participants are no less demanding. Exit conditions in CITs should be distinctive, given their social investment objectives but have not received sufficient attention, until recently. This section reviews recent developments. Without exception, CITs target poor and poorest households. Beneficiary selection involves a mix of selection strategies. Progresa used geographic targeting to identify communities in rural Mexico with the highest levels of marginalization, then a proxy means test to rank households in these communities along several deficit indicators, and finally community validation (Skoufias 2005). In communities with high poverty incidence, it makes more sense to select out the non-poor through an affluence test, as in the Honduras Programa de Asignación Familiar (PRAF) II programme. Brazil’s Bolsa Família relies solely on an income test: whether households have per capita incomes below a specific level. Studies on selection effectiveness in anti-poverty programmes find that a combination of selection strategies works better than reliance on a single selection method (Coady and Skoufias 2004). High labour market volatility implies that broad selection works better than narrow selection. Selection effectiveness improves with the size of the programme (Ravallion 2007). With increasing availability of registries of households at risk of poverty, selection techniques rank households from poorest to moderately poor, with eligibility thresholds dependent on financial and policy parameters. Colombia’s Sistema de Identificación de Potenciales Beneficiarios de Programas Sociales (SISBEN) and Chile’s Social Protection index compute welfare scores for low income households, facilitating differentiated selection for a broad range of social policies. Initially, CITs did not pay sufficient attention to exit conditions or to the optimal length of participation. This is due to the programme focus of early CITs. They were originally designed as time limited interventions 5 A different issue relates to the concern that conditions might be in place to secure political support from taxpayers. This is discussed below.

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as opposed to permanent policies (Barrientos and Villa 2016). Mexico’s Progresa had a five-year time window defined by the span of donor support. It was then extended for a further five years on the same basis while gradually becoming institutionalized. Exit was managed through a process of recertification of eligibility at regular intervals, or with demographic milestones such as children completing the education cycle. Exit resulted from applying entry conditions. The pioneer programmes have been forced to consider exit conditions more closely. Pressure on anti-poverty budgets is a constant. Public concerns with anti-poverty programmes generating dependency are readily articulated in most societies. And limited exit from anti-poverty programmes could easily be interpreted as a sign that they are not effective. On the other hand, CITs are aimed specifically to strengthen the productive capacity of low income households through facilitating investment in schooling, health and nutrition. The optimal length of participation might well be different for each of these different functions, and there is irreducible heterogeneity in household and community responses to programme participation. Exit in a context where participant households are dumped straight back into precarious livelihoods might simply undo the gains in human capital accumulation. Currently, CITs are experimenting with a variety of exit strategies to address this concern. Brazil’s Bolsa Família guarantees transfers for a period of two years independently of any subsequent changes in the income of participant households. Colombia’s Familias en Acción and Mexico’s Prospera offer time-limited reduced-level transfers as well as supplementary programmes to participant households that no longer meet exit conditions. The supplementary interventions are meant to ensure ‘propulsion’ away from poverty for these households. Other CITs are experimenting with highly structured ‘graduation packages’. Exit strategies remain a work in progress (Medellín et al. 2015; Villa and Barrientos 2016).

OUTCOMES A strong body of research has examined the outcomes of conditional income transfers and broadly concludes that they achieve their objectives (Baird et al. 2014; Fiszbein and Schady 2009). In fact, the high incidence of programme impact evaluations is a distinctive feature of these programmes. CITs are significantly more likely to be robustly evaluated than any other development interventions (Barrientos and Villa 2015). CITs have strong impact evaluation protocols. Impacts are estimated from dedicated quasi-experimental evaluation datasets capable of throwing

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light upon the causal relation between programme participation and outcomes. As a result, the evidence base on CITs is relatively stronger than for other anti-poverty policies. The word ‘relatively’ is key in the previous sentence, as there important gaps in our knowledge of the outcomes of CITs. Impact evaluations have naturally focused on whether programmes achieve their specific objectives. Studies for several CITs find that consumption rises after transfer receipt; as a rough average around 80 per cent of the value of the transfers is accounted for by higher consumption among participant households (Fiszbein and Schady 2009). Therefore CITs reduce consumption or income poverty. CITs are not designed to take households above the poverty line. As a rough average, transfer values are around 20 per cent of average participant household consumption, so that households below 80 per cent of the poverty line will remain in poverty. The main impact of transfers will be on the poverty gap of participant households, not the poverty headcount. An early impact evaluation of Progresa concluded that after two years of programme participation, from October 1997 to November 1999, participant households showed lower poverty headcount compared to a control group by 17.36 per cent, while the reduction in their poverty gap was estimated at 36.13 per cent (Skoufias 2005). Impact evaluation studies have also established that participation in CITs raises school enrolment and attendance. The rise in enrolments is smaller for primary school age participants than for secondary school participants. This is explained by relatively high primary school enrolment rates in middle income countries, compared to secondary school enrolment rates. Saavedra and García (2017) provide a meta-analysis of 42 CITs. They calculate that the programmes included generate on average a 3 percentage points (3.4 per cent) improvement in primary school enrolment rates and a 5 percentage points (9 per cent) improvement in secondary school enrolment rates. They conclude that CITs by themselves are unlikely to ensure full enrolment rates in the absence of supply-side improvements. Meta studies relying on programme impact evaluations examining health outcomes broadly confirm positive improvements in health care utilization (Gaarder et al. 2010; Glassman et al. 2013; Leroy et al. 2010). A meta study finds that participation in CIT programmes results on average in 1.26 additional visits per year compared to a control group (Gaarder et al. 2010). The improvement in health service utilization is more pronounced for maternal and newborn programme participants. The studies also report improvements in immunization and child development

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where health status is a determinant. As with schooling, supply-side factors explain part of the variation in results across programmes. Attribution and Valuation A critical issue is whether the effects from programme participation are mainly due to the income transfer lifting financial constraints on recipient households, or whether they are mainly due to the conditions encouraging behavioural change. This is critical, because if the change is due solely to the income transfer, an equal-sized transfer without conditions attached could deliver the same outcomes. The theoretical grounding of conditions can be found in the economics of consumption. Consider the following illustration: faced with an economic downturn, a Finance Minister might consider lowering the rate of value added tax, as a means of protecting living standards and encouraging households not to lower their consumption. Suppose the Finance Minister is also committed to reducing carbon emissions over the longer run. She may opt not to reduce value added tax for cars with high fuel consumption. The Finance Minister hopes to combine an income effect (the reduction in value added tax) with a substitution effect (consumers opting for more greener cars). In CITs, the transfer generates an income effect, while the conditions enforce a substitution effect, a shift in investment towards schooling and health. The empirical issue is how important is the substitution effect. Hard evidence on the separate effectiveness of conditions is scarce. Researchers have approached this issue through experiments and meta studies comparing programmes with and without conditions. Baird et al. (2011) and Akresh et al. (2013) tested for the role of conditions in an experimental setting. They implemented an experiment with alternative transfer design, with and without conditions. Baird et al. (2011) finds that girls allocated to the conditional transfer showed higher school attendance rates and lower dropout rates than in the transfer without conditions. However, care should be exercised in extrapolating this finding to CITs, as the experiments provided transfers only for one year, subsequently extended to two years. Researchers have also looked into the details of programme implementation to identify whether natural experiments could throw light on this issue. The extension of the Bono de Desarrollo Humano in Ecuador, a conditional income transfer programme, is interesting because the programme was advertised to beneficiary households, and the general public, as including conditions on schooling and health but in practice the government was not in a position to implement the conditions. A study

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compared information on schooling responses from households who understood there was a relevant condition in the programme, with schooling responses from households reporting having no knowledge of conditions. It finds that the belief that conditions were part of the programme did influence positively households’ schooling decisions (Schady and Araujo 2008). The initial introduction of Mexico’s Progresa seems to provide another natural experiment. Compliance with schooling conditions is monitored through a form that beneficiaries take to school to be filled in, but for administrative reasons a group of beneficiaries were not issued with the forms. A study compares the schooling responses of beneficiary households without forms or knowledge of conditions, and other groups of beneficiary households. It finds that knowledge of conditions seems to have influenced schooling decisions at the secondary school level (de Brauw and Hoddinott 2011). The studies suggest conditions may matter, but it is hard to generalize from these highly specific settings. An alternative approach is to compare the impact evaluation estimates associated with programmes with and without conditions. Baird et al. (2014) conducted a meta study of the schooling effects of conditional and unconditional transfers, identifying 35 such studies. The authors were particularly interested in identifying differences in schooling effects between programmes with and without conditions. In the course of their work they found that variations in the intensity of conditions have a measurable influence on programme impact. Their main findings are summarized in Figure 20.1. The control group refers to the sample group not receiving a transfer. For the set of programmes included in the study, children in households receiving a transfer show 1.36 higher odds of school enrolment. Compared to the control group, recipients of transfers without conditions show 1.23 higher odds of school enrolment, whereas recipients of transfers with conditions show 1.41 higher odds of school enrolment. Taking programme conditions as a range – including programmes providing transfers without conditions; programmes providing transfers with some conditions that are not implemented or are implemented lightly; and programmes with conditions that are explicit, monitored and implemented strictly – suggests that changes in school enrolment are positively related to the intensity of conditions. In programmes providing transfers with explicit conditions, children show 1.60 higher odds of school enrolment than children in the control group. The study also considered attendance outcomes and finds that cash transfer receipt raises the odds of children attending regularly. Children in receipt of transfers with no conditions have a 1.42 higher probability

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Change in odds ratio of school enrolment

CTs (vs. control)

1.36

UCTs (vs. control)

1.23 1.41

CCTs (vs. control) CCTs (vs. UCTs)

1.15

No conditions

1.18

Some conditions

1.25

Explicit conditions

1.6

Notes: The sample studies included: five on programmes without conditions, 26 on programmes with conditions, and four comparing programmes with and without conditions. The authors grouped programmes according to the intensity of conditions into three categories: programmes without conditions or where conditions where not implemented; programmes with some conditions implemented lightly; programmes where conditions are explicit, they are monitored and compliance is strictly enforced. CTs are all cash transfers; UCTs are unconditional cash transfers; and CCTs are conditional cash transfers (conditional income transfers or CITs in the chapter). In the studies, the control group are eligible households not receiving transfers. Source:

Data from Baird et al. (2014).

Figure 20.1 Conditions and programme impact on school enrolment of attending regularly compared to the control group; while children in receipt of a transfer with conditions show a 1.65 higher probability of attending regularly compared to a control group. The probability of regular attendance rises with the intensity of conditions. Even if conditions can be shown to be effective, a policy maker would also try to establish that the gains from conditions outstrip the additional administration and implementation costs. Research on this issue is almost non-existent. A sense of the orders of magnitude involved can be gauged from research on early Progresa in Mexico. Estimates of the impact of the introduction of the programme indicate girls’ secondary school enrolment rates increased by 9.3 per cent (from a base of 67 per cent) (Skoufias 2005), while simulations of the impact of programme participation suggest a mean increase in girls’ completed school years at around

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0.65 (Todd and Wolpin 2006). Estimates of the administrative costs of implementing conditions under Progresa suggest they absorbed around 2 per cent of the value of transfers. Key missing information is what social value Mexican society places on improvements in schooling among the poorest girls in rural areas. Assessing CITs as social investment suggest an alternative approach to this question. Glewwe and Kassouf (2012) estimated the schooling effects of participation in Bolsa Escola, one of the earliest conditional income transfer programmes and the core component of today’s Bolsa Família. They found that improvements in school enrolment and attendance among children participating households were equivalent on average to an 18 per cent increase in their education cycle or 1.5 additional years of education. From 2004 PNAD data they estimated that an additional year of education raised wages in Brazil by around 11 per cent, implying an increase in labour earnings of 16–17 per cent among the poorest third of the population, or around 1.5 per cent for the labour force taken as a whole. This is equivalent to an additional 0.8 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Programme costs are 0.4 per cent of GDP. Spreading the benefits over 40 years from the expected lifetime labour force participation in Brazil, and applying a 6 per cent discount rate, would yield a net present value for the investment at 0.3 per cent. The authors are cautious in their final assessment, as there are other benefits and costs not taken into account. While they conclude that ‘it is unclear whether the benefits exceed the costs’ (Glewwe and Kassouf 2012, p. 516), their rough calculations suggest that well-designed and implemented conditional income transfer programmes could pay for themselves. CITs’ main objective is to improve the productive capacity of households in poverty, through investment in the human capital of children living in these households. The expectation is that improvements in the nutrition, health and schooling of participant children will better prepare them for fundamental productive and reproductive responsibilities in adult life. Are CITs meeting these expectations? This is a hard question to answer at this point in time. Most CITs were introduced this century and it is too early to provide a reliable assessment of their long term effects. However, the paucity of research on the long term effects of CITs is also explained by methodological constraints. Impact evaluations grounded on quasi-experimental data are extremely effective in assessing short term effects of interventions. Well-executed impact evaluations can reliably attribute observed outcomes to specific interventions and therefore confirm causality. But deploying these techniques to assess long term effects is particularly challenging. An example might help to illustrate this point.

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The designers of Progresa were especially concerned about avoiding clientelistic practices that were long-standing in the anti-poverty programme in Mexico. They were also concerned with budgetary implications as the programme was introduced in the context of an acute financial crisis. Impact evaluation protocols were intended to protect the fledgling new programme. Programme eligibility was established in 1997 prior to implementation, with some communities integrated into the programme in 1999 acting as a control group. By 2000, all communities were in the programme. Further evaluation rounds in 2003 and 2007 involved, in each case, the construction of a new control group. Each time, the control group was eventually integrated into the programme, precluding treatment control group comparisons. Attrition among the original participants was very high, reflecting the incidence of migration in rural Mexico. In 2007, the evaluation survey round registered attrition among children in the 1997 original group as high as 60 per cent. Quasi-experimental evaluations of long term effects are hugely challenging, to the extent that alternative approaches and data might be required. Molina-Millan et al. (2016) provide a careful assessment of the longer term effects of participation in CITs in Mexico, Nicaragua and Colombia, reviewing both experimental and non-experimental studies. They focus on the transition to school of children exposed to the programme in utero or in early childhood, and on the transition to adulthood of programme participant children while at school. They conclude that the evidence for long term effects is mixed. As they put it: experimental evidence provides consistent evidence of impacts on schooling (in Mexico, Nicaragua and Colombia), as well as some evidence of impacts on cognitive skills and learning (in Nicaragua), socio-emotional skills (in Mexico) and off-farm employment and income (in Nicaragua). The effects on other outcomes are generally not statistically different from zero. (MolinaMillan et al. 2016, p. 24)

DIVERSE PRACTICES So far the discussion has focused on the core design features and outcomes of an ideal-type CIT programme. Practice in low and middle income countries has yielded significant diversity in programme scope, size, design and implementation, reflecting the influence of domestic policy and national adaptation. At the same time, international policy stakeholders have sought to redefine CITs, and other emergent forms of social assistance, in line with their operational needs. It might be useful to revisit our original question: what is a CIT programme?

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As noted at the start of the chapter, at the core of CITs is an insight into the role of low productive capacity as a key factor explaining poverty. CITs aim to combine income transfers supporting improvements in household consumption with support for household investment in human capital. In practice, the latter involves the provision of or access to basic services, especially health care and education. CIT programmes are rules-based, have an institutional base, and provide regular and reliable transfers for a pre-specified period of time. CIT programmes select beneficiaries based on their socio-economic status. In practice, CIT programmes have well-developed monitoring and evaluation protocols. This list is not exhaustive, but defines the core features of CITs that are met by a majority of existing programmes. In the course of constructing statements that apply to CITs understood as a class or type of social assistance programmes, as in comparative analysis or meta-analysis of outcomes for example, it becomes clear that boundaries are fuzzier in practice. Two boundary issues are discussed briefly below: scaled-down human development transfers, and scaled-up multidimensional programmes. In some meta studies (explicitly on conditional cash transfers), programmes providing transfers in cash and in kind to support education or health interventions are classified as CITs. Discussing the impact of conditional cash transfers on maternal and newborn health, for example, Glassman et al. (2013) make a distinction between ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ conditional income transfers. Broad conditional income transfers correspond to the ideal-type CITs studied in this chapter. Narrow conditional income transfers provide financial incentives to support specific forms of service utilization. The authors of this paper provide the example of India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana. Established in 2005, the programme provides financial incentives to expectant mothers to attend antenatal facilities. Another example provided in the paper is Nepal’s Safe Delivery Incentive Program, providing financial incentives to expectant mothers to guarantee delivery at a public health facility. These two programmes have considerable merit, provide transfers tied to conditions, but they differ from ideal-type CITs in significant respects. They do not support improvements in household consumption, do not select beneficiaries on the basis of socio-economic status, and consist largely of one-off transfers. The same can be said of scholarship or food/cash for education programmes. For example, Bangladesh’s Female Secondary School Assistance provides twice-yearly transfers to female students in grades 6 to 10 in order to facilitate their continuation in school. The transfers have specified conditions relating to attendance, attainment, and for girls to

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remain unmarried. Another example is Cambodia’s Scholarship Program, providing cash transfers three times a year to girls starting at grade 7; again, several attendance and attainment conditions apply to the transfer. In these two programmes, transfers are regular and tied to conditions, but the programmes are not designed to support improvements in household consumption, and do not select on the basis of socio-economic status. Undoubtedly the programmes have considerable merit, and do support human capital accumulation, but they fail to meet several core features of our ideal-type CIT programme. At the other end of the spectrum, there are social assistance programmes with a multidimensional perspective and combining income transfers and service provision along a range of welfare dimensions. Chile’s Chile Solidario, for example, was established in 2002 with the objective of ensuring families in extreme poverty had full access to the range of transfers and services offered by public agencies (Barrientos 2010). In 2012, the Ingreso Etico Familiar (Ethical Family Income) was introduced alongside Chile Solidario. The design of the Ingreso Etico Familiar is closer to our ideal-type CITs. It sets out monthly transfers with conditions on schooling, health care and employment, but also attainment. For our purposes, the point is that Chile Solidario diverges in significant respects from our ideal CIT programme type. Its core insight is that extreme poverty in Chile was not only due to low productivity, but also to inclusion deficits among families in extreme poverty. The explicit objective of Chile Solidario was to link up these families with their rights and entitlements. Service access was at least as important as the income transfer component in Chile Solidario. Whereas Ingreso Etico Familiar fits comfortably within our ideal CIT programme type, Chile Solidario is not a close fit. Yet Chile Solidario has been influential on the evolution of other CITs in Latin America, leading to the expansion of their service provision components. As CITs evolve, boundaries are likely to be reshaped. However, from a comparative research perspective it is essential to retain a focus on their core features.

SUSTAINABILITY Pioneer CITs were originally introduced to address the short term effects of crises on poverty. Their programme orientation reflects this context. Their unexpected longevity is largely explained by their fit with deeper changes in social policy associated with democratization and economic

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growth. Governments in low and middle income countries have increasingly acknowledged responsibility for the reduction, and eventual eradication, of poverty. The Millennium Development Goal 1, Target 1, signals this change, but the foundations are in domestic processes associated with the ebbing of authoritarianism and the end of structural adjustment, at least for Latin America (CEPAL 2015). How sustainable are CITs? This section sketches an answer to this question by focusing on the institutionalization of CITs, and likely political support. The focus is primarily on Latin America, as developments there have a longer period of time in which to identify broad trends.6 CITs’ evolution over time tracks continued expansion up to the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and then stagnation. Figure 20.2 shows the growth of CIT programme participation and programme expenditure for Latin America and the Caribbean from 1996 to 2015. The trend hides variation across countries. For example, the stagnation in the later period reflects a significant reduction in the number of participants in Ecuador’s Bono de Desarrollo Humano as a consequence of the introduction of stricter entry conditions and the implementation of exit routes to alternative programmes. Expenditure on CITs as a proportion of GDP show a continuous upward trends, including in the last five years shown. Alongside a rise in the reach of CITs, there is trend towards greater institutionalization. By ‘institutionalization’ is meant the embedding of the programmes within government structures, legal, financial and operational. CITs started life as self-standing programmes or pilots. Over time, domestic financing replaced external loans or grants, coming under the scrutiny of parliament. This required ordinary legislation. Executive agencies managing the programmes became embedded in government structures, eventually becoming Ministries of Social Development (Cecchini and Madariaga 2011). Székely (2015) constructed an index of institutionalization and tracked changes in several Latin American countries. Institutionalization captures the change in government structures associated with the new responsibility for addressing poverty. CITs have also contributed to change in the implementation of social policy. In order to manage the programmes, agencies developed registries of the population at risk. Information on potential and actual participants was collected at regular intervals. Labour market volatility and informality in Latin American countries ensures the population at risk of poverty

6 CIT programmes in Africa are dependent on international aid to a larger extent than in other regions.

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0

1.8 0.01

9.2 0.05

13.1 0.06

19.6 0.09

41.0 0.18

34.7 0.26

53.6 0.28

68.6 0.29

84.4

0.28 0.28

0.29

0.32

0.31

0.35 0.32

0.35

0.38

0.33

98.9 104.2 105.4 125.0 125.0 128.0 128.8 131.4 129.6 126.5

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Data from Cecchini and Attuesta (2017).

Expenditure as % of GDP

0.0

1996 1997 1998

Figure 20.2 Conditional income transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean

Source:



Reach (millions) Reach (millions)

0.0

20.0

40.0

60.0

80.0

100.0

120.0

140.0

0

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25

0.3

0.35

0.4

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is significantly larger than those in poverty at a point in time. Soon, registries covered a significant share of the total population. CITs are then able to rank the population covered by the registries and select participants. Beyond CITs, registries then become the main gateway to a range of social policies. An innovation brought in by CITs is now at the centre of social policy, providing up-to-date information on the target population and helping to identify changes in social risks and their geographical locations (Irarrazabal 2004; Paes-Sousa et al. 2013). The political dimension of CITs has received a great deal of attention in the literature. In discussions on the design of CITs, the point was often made that conditions might have been included to facilitate support from taxpayers. It is assumed that taxpayers prefer anti-poverty budgets to be as small as possible and are concerned to ensure that anti-poverty transfers do not generate adverse work-incentive effects. An alternative approach links public support for anti-poverty policies to the likelihood of experiencing poverty. Low or lower-middle income groups might be more likely to support anti-poverty policy, because they are likely to benefit from it. The literature on public attitudes to CITs is scarce. Zucco (2014) looked into public support for alternative social policies in Brazil and his findings fail to provide support for these two approaches. Among the population as a whole, he finds stronger support for Bolsa Família than for social insurance programmes such as unemployment insurance. In addition, he finds support for CITs to be higher among low income and high income groups in Brazil. Another dimension of the link between politics and CITs is the extent to which incumbents might rely on transfers for electoral gain. The issue was widely debated in the context of Brazilian President Lula’s re-election in 2006 (Bohn 2011; Hunter and Power 2007; Zucco 2008). Was Bolsa Família instrumental in ensuring his victory? Voters identified Bolsa Família closely with President Lula and there is measure of agreement around the view it boosted his support, especially in the north-east. But it is unlikely to have been decisive, especially as the economy was booming and likely to have a stronger influence on the electorate. Studies on the electoral effects of CITs in Latin America find that programme participants show stronger support for incumbents, but they also generate electoral losses among opponents of CITs (Sanches Corrêa and Cheibub 2016).

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THE FUTURE Predicting the future of social policies is always perilous, especially as conditional income transfers have a relatively short time span, but the longevity of these programmes to date and their rapid spread, growth and institutionalization suggest that they will continue to feature in international development debates. The expansion of CITs has been slower in low and lower middle income countries. They are less attractive in countries with limited service infrastructure and implementation capacity. Scaled-down programmes with human development components might be more appropriate in such contexts. But as conditions improve and human development policies come to the fore, they will be an attractive policy alternative. In middle income countries they are well established with a strong institutional base, and in Chile and Uruguay they have survived the countries’ transition to high income status. Their main contribution has been to demonstrate that eradicating poverty requires improving the productive capacity of low income groups, and children in particular.

REFERENCES Akresh, Richard, Damien de Walque and Harounan Kazianga (2013), ‘Cash Transfers and Child Schooling. Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation of the Role of Conditionality’, Report 82, Impact Evaluation Series. Washington, DC: World Bank. Atkinson, Anthony B. (1995), ‘On Targeting and Family Benefits’, in Incomes and the Welfare State. Essays in Britain and Europe, edited by Anthony B. Atkinson, 223–261. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baird, Sarah, Francisco Ferreira, Berk Ozler and Michael Woolcock (2014), ‘Conditional, Unconditional and Everything in between: A Systematic Review of Cash Transfer Programs on Schooling Outcomes’, Journal of Development Effectiveness 6 (1): 1–43. Baird, Sarah, Craig McIntosh and Berk Özler (2011), ‘Cash or Condition? Evidence from a Cash Experiment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 126 (4): 1709–1753. Barrientos, Armando (2010), ‘Protecting Capabilities, Eradicating Extreme Poverty: Chile Solidario and the Future of Social Protection’, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 11 (4): 579–597. Barrientos, Armando (2013), Social Assistance in Developing Countries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barrientos, Armando and Juan Miguel Villa (2015), ‘Evaluating Antipoverty Transfer Programmes in Latin America and Sub- Saharan Africa. Better Policies? Better Politics?’, Journal of Globalization and Development 6 (1): 147–79. Barrientos, Armando and Juan Miguel Villa (2016), ‘Economic and Political Inclusion of Human Development Conditional Transfer Programmes in Latin America’, Social Policy and Politics 15 (3): 421–33. Bohn, Simone (2011), ‘Social Policy and Vote in Brazil: Bolsa Família and the Shifts in Lula’s Electoral Base’, Latin American Research Review 46 (1): 54–79.

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Conditional income transfers, social policy and development 391 Brauw, Alan de and John Hoddinott (2011), ‘Must Conditional Cash Transfers Programs Be Conditioned to Be Effective? The Impact of Conditioning Transfers on School Enrollment in Mexico’, Journal of Development Economics 96: 359–370. Castañeda, Andrés, Dung Doan, David Newhouse, Minh Cong Nguyen, Hiroki Uematsu and Joao Pedro Azevedo (2018), ‘A New Profile of the Global Poor’, World Development 101: 250–267. Cecchini, Simone and Bernardo Atuesta (2017), ‘Programas de Transferencias Condicionadas En América Latina y El Caribe’, Report 224, Series Politicas Sociales. Santiago: CEPAL, División Desarrollo Social. Cecchini, Simone and Aldo Madariaga (2011), ‘Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes. The Recent Experience in Latin America and the Caribbean’, Report LC/G.2497-P, ECLAC. CEPAL (2015), ‘Desarrollo Social Inclusivo. Una Nueva Generación de Políticas Para Superar La Pobreza y Reducir La Desigualdad En América Latina y El Caribe’, Report LC.L/4056(CDS.1/3). Santiago: CEPAL, División Desarrollo Social. Coady, David P. and Emmanuel Skoufias (2004), ‘On the Targeting and Redistributive Efficiencies of Alternative Transfer Instruments’, Review of Income and Wealth 50 (1): 11–27. Diaz-Cayeros, Alberto, Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni (2016), The Political Logic of Poverty Relief. Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fiszbein, Ariel and Norbert Schady (2009), Conditional Cash Transfers: Reducing Present and Future Poverty. Washington, DC: World Bank. Gaarder, Marie, Amanda Glassman and Jessica Erin Todd (2010), ‘Conditional Cash Transfers and Health: Unpacking the Causal Chain’, Journal of Development Effectiveness 2 (1): 6–50. Glassman, Amanda, Denizhan Duran, Lisa Fleisher, Daniel Singer, Winnie Mwebsa, Rachel Sturke and Gustavo Angeles (2013), ‘Impact of Conditional Cash Transfers on Maternal and Newborn Health’, Journal of Health Population and Nutrition 4 (Supplement 2): 548–566. Glewwe, P. and A.L. Kassouf (2012), ‘The Impact of Bolsa Escola/Bolsa Familia Conditional Cash Transfer Program on Enrollment, Dropout Rates and Grade Promotion in Brazil’, Journal of Development Economics 97: 505–517. Hunter, Wendy and Timothy Power (2007), ‘Rewarding Lula: Executive Power, Social Policy, and the Brazilian Elections of 2006’, Latin American Politics and Society 49: 1–30. Ibarrarán, Pablo, Nadin Medellín, Ferdinando Regalia and Marco Stampini (2017), How Conditional Cash Transfers Work: Good Practices after 20 Years of Implementation. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank. Irarrazabal, I. (2004), ‘Sole Information Systems on Beneficiaries in Latin America’, Mimeo. IADB. Leroy, Jef L., Marie Ruel and Ellen Verhofstadt (2010), ‘The Impact of Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes on Child Nutrition: A Review of Evidence Using a Programme Theory Framework’, Journal of Development Effectiveness 1 (2): 103–29. Levy, Santiago (2006), Progress against Poverty. Sustaining Mexico’s ProgresaOportunidades Program. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Medellín, Nadin, Pablo Ibarrarán, Marco Stampini and Juan Miguel Villa (2015), ‘Moving Ahead. Recertification and Exit Strategies in Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes’, IADB Monograph. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank. Molina-Millan, Teresa, Tania Barham, Karen Macours, John A. Maluccio and Marco Stampini (2016), ‘Long-Term Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America’, Technical Note IDB-TN-923. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank.

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392 Handbook of social policy and development Molyneux, Maxine (2006), ‘Maternalism and the New Poverty Agenda in Latin America: The Progresa/Oportunidades Programme in Mexico’, in Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context, edited by Shahra Razavi and Shireen Hassim, 1–42. London: Palgrave– UNRISD. Monchuk, Victoria (2014), ‘Reducing Poverty and Investing in People’, Washington, DC: World Bank. Paes-Sousa, Romulo, Ferdinando Regalia and Marco Stampini (2013), ‘Conditions for Success in Implementing CCT Programs: Lessons for Asia from Latin America’, Policy Brief IDB-PB-192. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank. Ravallion, Martin (2007), ‘How Relevant Is Targeting to the Success of an Antipoverty Program?’, Policy Research Working Paper 4385. World Bank. Rocha, Sonia (2013), Transfêrencias de Renda No Brasil. O Fim Da Pobreza?. Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier. Saavedra, Juan E. and Sandra Garcia (2017), ‘Educational Impacts and Cost-Effectiveness of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs in Developing Countries: A Meta-Analysis’, Working Paper 23594, NBER. Cambridge MA: National Bureau for Economic Research. Sanches Corrêa, Diego and José Antonio Cheibub (2016), ‘The Anti-Incumbent Effect of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs’, Latin American Politics and Society 58 (1): 49–71. Schady, Norbert and Maria Caridad Araujo (2008), ‘Cash Transfers, Conditions, and School in Ecuador’, Economía 8 (2): 43–70. Skoufias, Emmanuel (2005), ‘Progresa and Its Impacts on the Welfare of Rural Households in Mexico’, International Food Policy Research Institute. Székely, Miguel (2015), ‘Cambios En La Institucionalidad de La Política de Protección Social En América Latina y El Caribe: Avances y Nuevos Desafíos’, Nota Técnica 810. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank. Todd, Petra E. and Kenneth I. Wolpin (2006), ‘Assessing the Impact of a School Subsidy Program in Mexico: Using a Social Experiment to Validate a Dynamic Behavioural Model of Child Schooling and Fertility’, American Economic Review 96 (5): 1384– 1417. Villa, Juan Miguel and Armando Barrientos (2016), ‘Entry as Exit in Antipoverty Programmes’, Working Paper 2016-002, Global Development Institute. Manchester: University of Manchester. Weber, Axel (2010), ‘Social Assistance in Asia and the Pacific: An Overview’, in Social Assistance and Conditional Cash Transfers, edited by Sri Wening Handayani and Clifford Burkley, 47–59. Manila: Asian Development Bank. Zucco, Cesar (2008), ‘The President’s “New” Constituency: Lula and the Pragmatic Vote in Brazil’s 2006 Presidential Elections’, Journal of Latin American Studies 40: 29–49. Zucco, Cesar (2014), ‘Conditionality and Support for Redistributive Transfers: Results from Observational and Survey-Experimental Studies’, Mimeo. São Paulo: FGV.

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21. Social work and family services Antoinette Lombard

The development of social work and family services is a reflection of what happens in society, and it has a direct bearing on communities and families and how well they can take care of individual members. From the mid-eighteenth century, the traditional practice of families taking care of themselves, known as non-formal welfare (Midgley 2017), could no longer counteract the impact of social change brought about by the Industrial Revolution in Northern Europe and USA. This shift inevitably gave rise to a need for formal social services to address emerging human needs (Healy 2012) and respond to growing social problems (Mwansa 2012) that had an impact on families’ and communities’ social well-being. Social work with families is undertaken in many nation states. The link between families and nation states can best be explained in the Chinese understanding of a ‘nation’ as something which is formed by individual units called ‘family’ (Hsueh and Chang 2016). Today, both nation states and their constituent families are increasingly affected by globalization, which widens the gap between rich and poor, and exacerbates the needs of families who are socially excluded, marginalized and disempowered (Walker 2012). Sherman (2016) asserts that social welfare challenges, which have been a long-standing concern of social work policy, have intensified under globalization in both the local and the global environments. The impact of globalization on social work practice is evident in the changes in service delivery and labour processes for professional social workers, and newly created social problems that practitioners have to address, such as people-trafficking and environmental issues; it also emphasizes the need for indigenization, or the development of localspecific forms of theory and practice (Dominelli 2010). Reisch (2016) argues that all social work practice occurs in a community context, and that virtually all social workers formally or de facto work in organizations that are affected by social policies. Therefore, understanding the dynamics of communities and organizations and the policy development process is an essential component of effective practice with every population, and with every problem that the profession has to engage with (Reisch 2016). Various role players are involved 393

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in this process, which can best be understood in the continuum between non-formal and formal welfare, which both play an important role in family services today. Most importantly, families and communities remain key partners in family services: they have cared for their members from early times, and continue to do so. The chapter begins with a historical overview of social work and the development of family welfare services. This is followed by a discussion of how non-formal welfare has been influenced by social change, and gradually gave way to formalized social welfare through faith-based organizations (FBOs), government intervention and professional social work. Changing family structures also influence the definition of ‘family’. For the purposes of this chapter, a wide definition of ‘family’ is adopted to accommodate all types of families and social work interventions at both the local and international levels. Approaches and interventions for social work with families are outlined, emphasizing the relevance of empowerment and strength-based approaches from a critical social theory viewpoint. Family services are outlined from a micro– macro practice focus, indicating that both are important for social work to achieve social justice for all people. Family services are linked to development in this chapter, using a developmental approach to social work, which is anchored in a sustainable development framework with global and local outcomes. Finally, future implications for practice, policy, education and research are highlighted in relation to social work families.

FEATURES OF SOCIAL WORK AND FAMILY SERVICES Social work emerged from the non-formal sector as a result of the impact of social change on families, who traditionally cared for themselves. Midgley (2017) groups non-formal welfare or traditional welfare practices into four overlapping categories, namely the family, community support networks, grassroots mutual aid associations and religious charity. Non-formal welfare differs from statutory, non-profit and commercial welfare services, which ‘have a formal, organizational basis and rely on regularized operating procedures rather than spontaneous or discretionary practices’ (Midgley 2017, p. 62). Such non-formal welfare was inadequate to counteract the impact of the Industrial Revolution in Northern Europe and USA. As a result there was an increasing call for formal social services to address the human needs that grew out of this process (Healy 2012). The social work

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profession was shaped by the Charity Organization Societies (COS) and settlement houses; both began in London, the COS in 1869 and the first settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in 1884 (Healy 2012). From the United Kingdom it was transferred to the United States, with the first COS in 1877 in Buffalo, and Hull House was founded by Jane Addams in Chicago in 1869 (Healy 2012). In response to harsh employment conditions, family services and settlement houses assisted orphans, widows, immigrants and young working women (Healy 2012). The extension of the poor relief approach of the COS to treatment fostered a scientific solution to the problem of poverty which became known as casework. This approach to social work practice was theoretically grounded by Mary Richmond with her book Social Diagnoses in 1917 (Richmond 1917). On the other hand, the settlement houses were not concerned with treatment but with improving local social conditions. This paved the way for community work practice and advocacy and emphasized the social reform role of social work. As Midgley (2017) points out, Jane Adams and other settlement leaders worked with African-American civil rights leaders in their campaigns. Healy (2008) affirms the social work profession’s leadership in human rights movements in its formative years in the early twentieth century, emphasizing that this was even before the time of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Social work in Europe began in many European countries in the twentieth century, but has diverse boundaries in different countries, such as a counselling and therapy route, educational and pedagogical focus, general approach, specialist route and charity aid work (Campanini 2012). Healy (2012, p. 56) recognizes some of the pioneers and founders of the social work profession and education in Europe: Alice Salomon in Germany, Manan Lüttichau in Denmark, René Sand in Belgium, and Helena Ralinska in Poland. It is because of the increasingly negative effects of a market economy and urbanization that social work was introduced in Africa and other developing countries (Mwansa 2012). Different mechanisms or ways of meeting human needs had to replace traditional structures that were no longer effective, so social services were introduced to respond to the emerging urban situation. Instead of shaping the practice of social work according to the local context (Mwansa 2012), the market determined government policies on development and social services. Social work thus emerged alongside the provision of services to respond to growing social problems due to the negative effects of a market economy and urbanization, and colonialism provided the socio-political context in which the practice of social work developed (Mwansa 2012). The

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question that then arises is how traditional practices, where relevant, can be included in policies that guide social work with families in conditions of rapid change and modernization, where professional services are needed to replace the kind of assistance that was once provided by informal systems (Healy 2012). Social welfare policy and social services, and their implementation, are shaped and structured by macroeconomic policy (Spolander et al. 2016), which in a liberal market context is defined by consumption, competition and profit (Houston 2012). Globalization is driven by neoliberalism, where the market and managerism have an impact on public expenditure on health, welfare and education; state expenditure and state assets are privatized, and liberalization of trade has devastating consequences for people (Sewpaul 2016). It is in this context that government social services came under budgetary pressure in many Western countries, with the implication that families should again assume greater responsibility for the well-being of their members and that friends and neighbours and local faith-based and non-profit organizations should assist people in need. However, Dominelli (2010) asserts that despite criticism against globalization, it has provided opportunities to bring the real and virtual world together in ways that could not have been imagined. What happens in one part of the world is relevant to receiving countries, as people, including families, move across different parts of the world to escape poverty, wars, famine and environmental degradation. Due to these cultural, demographic, ideological and economic structural changes, social workers encounter alternative family forms which create a need for more knowledge and an increased awareness of how social services apply to ‘family’ and family members as service recipients (Nygren and Oltedal 2014). The traditional Western notion of the nuclear family can no longer be taken for granted, as people now choose to construct familial relationships in hybrid and varied ways (Houston 2012). In order to give recognition to the broad range of family types and structures, the chapter adopts the view of Morris (2009) that a ‘family’ can be defined in various ways, that it can take various forms, inclusive of wide networks, and a rich and varied mix of resources, strengths and difficulties which social workers should analyse critically in considering how local or international practice can develop and respond appropriately.

ISSUES IN SOCIAL SERVICE PROVISION Social work with families is conceptualized in different service fields such as child welfare, in particular child neglect and protection (Nygren

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and Oltedal 2014), or service levels ranging from advice, support and specialist help geared to provide early preventive intervention, parenting support, education and marital therapy (Houston and Dolan 2008, in Walker 2012). Interventions can be directed at individual parents, couples, the child, the whole family or groups (Walker 2012). Due to inadequate government funding, child and family welfare services are shifting towards child protection, possibly including a strong focus on risk management, implying that services are only rendered to these families while services to other families are increasingly limited or non-existent (Strydom et al. 2017). Walker (2012) concurs that family support has been shifted by the government-backed expansion of the voluntary sector to more integrated community-based services, while professional social work is being more narrowly defined at the child protection end of the spectrum. Such service-driven models of social work assessments for children and families, according to Walker (2012, p. 616), ‘are the product of a reactive system geared to responding to concerns relating to child protection, developmental harm, or disturbed symptoms within a deficit framework’. Less emphasis is placed on psychosocial factors, including the effects of poverty, racism, unemployment, social exclusion and poor housing (Walker 2012). Spolander et al. (2016) rightly argue that, in order to render effective family services, it is important to understand the origins and influences of social distress, and the corresponding way in which this distress is manifested, because this forms the ‘backbone’ of social work. Awareness of the impact of the social, economic and political context on families and social services makes clear the importance of the dual micro–macro approach to practice which has defined the profession since its inception (Rothman and Mizrahi 2014. Structural factors such as poverty, unemployment and low income exacerbate family problems and child abuse and neglect (Strydom et al. 2017). Adopting a micro–macro framework for social work with family services ‘reflects and reinforces the understanding that social problems require complex and sustained intervention at all levels of social work practice’ (Rothman and Mizrahi 2014, p. 91). Macro practice explicitly embodies social work’s commitment to social justice and social change by promoting structural solutions to systemic inequalities and to various forms of oppression that go beyond individual adaptation and resilience (Reisch 2016). However, a macro practice does not imply that micro practice should be discarded. Reisch (2016) suggests that macro social workers promote systemic and institutional changes that address people’s problems that are not or cannot be solved solely by interventions at the individual or family level. Such social

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workers recognize how issues affect diverse communities differently and how race, ethnicity, class, gender, gender identity, age, sexual orientation, ability and immigration status influence people’s lives and life opportunities. Sewpaul (2016, p. 32) affirms that social work has a contribution to make in promoting social justice and human rights at the micro and macro levels, and ‘more especially at the intersection of these’. She argues that lifting micro levels of analyses and interventions to broader public issues brings social work into the realm of the political (Sewpaul 2015b, in Sewpaul 2016). Because of their ethical commitment to individual and social change, all social workers need to appreciate this interconnectedness (Reisch 2016). If macro social workers have to develop strategic interventions that can translate their awareness of structural problems into concrete policies and programmes to address them (Reisch 2016, p. 259), they clearly have to interact with social workers who work closely with families on a micro level. However, in a dual approach, social workers in micro practice also have to commit themselves explicitly to taking up their role in calling for and creating social justice. Harrison et al. (2016, p. 269) state that: ‘Throughout social work’s history, a false dichotomy has been presented of either working toward social justice or working in micro practice.’ They argue that social workers are uniquely situated to practice justly and tackle injustice through micro practice when they enhance individuals’ economic condition (for example, employment), their psychological condition (for example, self-esteem, social skills) and their social condition (for example, equality). Kiselica and Robinson (2001) also stress the interconnectedness between micro interventions and social justice when they say that social justice work calls for unconventional approaches to counselling, such as ‘advocacy counselling’. They foresee a role for counsellors engaging in social action, but add a caveat: they do not believe that this will be possible: unless we discover … a personal moral imperative to serve as the driving force behind our work. In the absence of that force, our efforts will be superficial, we will not be willing to stick our necks out time and time again, we will not have the emotional fortitude to persistently confront the establishment, and the clients we attempt to serve and the power brokers we attempt to influence will sense our half-hearted efforts and call our bluff. (Kiselica and Robinson 2001, p. 396)

Sewpaul (2016, p. 36) also acknowledges the importance of a personal moral imperative, but calls for it to stretch further, to the national and international levels, which are important for holistic service delivery to families. She indicates that social workers’ moral authority and integrity:

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Social work and family services 399 must be combined with an ability to build alliances across similarities and differences from personal to political levels; to mobilize others into a shared vision; and to support global social movements that work towards greater social justice, solidarity and respect for human dignity. (Sewpaul 2016, p. 36)

Reisch (2016, p. 261) points out that, contrary to what is often thought, ‘macro social work is not indirect practice’. This insight is helpful: family services need a holistic perspective where both the family and the community, thus people and systems, are equally important. As Reisch (2016, p. 261) explains, ‘all social work practice occurs in a community context, and virtually all social workers work in organizations that are affected by social policies’. In a dual approach where both micro and macro social workers are committed to the foundational values of the profession, and make an ethical commitment to individual and social change, the means by which they express these values in practice may differ. But these means should be complementary and mutually supportive, and ‘neither in conflict nor occur on parallel, nonintersecting tracks’ (Reisch 2016, p. 261). Social workers should actively promote social and economic justice at all levels of intervention (Harrison et al. 2016), and should select intervention approaches that effectively integrate social and economic justice competencies in practicing distributive justice with individuals, families and groups (Harrison et al. 2016). Empowering, strengths-based and emancipatory approaches to working with individuals, families, groups and communities can and do ‘help in transcending the micro–macro divide’ (Sewpaul and Larsen 2014, in Sewpaul 2016, p. 35). This implies a shift away from a ‘predominant pathology-based casework, and system-stabilizing modes of operation’ (Sewpaul 2016, p. 35). Houston (2012) values critical social theory in directing social work through the challenges of neoliberalism. In social work with families, Payne et al. (2009) argue that a critical social worker would first explore, from the client’s perspective, what kind of structure the client’s family has, as opposed to assuming a particular type. Furthermore, a critical social worker would be alert to who is setting the agenda and would emphasize ‘the value of openness and how this contributes to maintaining equality, inclusion and participation between workers and clients’ (Payne et al. 2009, p. 7). Walker (2012, p. 619) points to the links between indigenous viewpoints and community-based self-determination which ‘indicate a preference for ecological systems approaches, holistic processes, belonging at the community level, and reliance on traditional beliefs and values’. A community perspective aligns with a collective, or

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non-individualistic African culture, which requires that a person in distress be supported and be made to feel that they are valued by and belong to their community (Osei-Hwedie and Rankopo 2008). One way to generate resources in communities and the nongovernmental sectors to support families is the family group conference approach to child welfare (Walker 2012). This model is based on a cultural-religious concept which originates from the Maori people in New Zealand, and was later adopted and adapted to local contexts in the United Kingdom and elsewhere (Morris 2009; Walker 2012). The model has radical social, political and cultural associations, embedded in civil rights and oppression, where Maori families could use social work services without losing the right to care for their children (Morris 2009). Family group conferences place the child’s family, including blood relatives, family friends and significant others, at the centre of any planning process, which means they set the agenda, while professionals facilitate and support the work of the family, along with an independent coordinator (Morris 2009). Osei-Hwedie and Rankopo (2008) present an example in the African context in Botswana where social services are provided to the family, not under the institutional model, but rather as an extension of the family within its cultural context. The family and the community are thus seen as an extension of the public provision of services. In another scenario, especially involving domestic issues such as family violence, inheritance, child care and divorce, social workers routinely refer the problems back to the extended family as the primary agent for resolving personal and family matters, before being referred to the local chief and the elders. Only thereafter is the issue allowed to be dealt with in the public domain, where professionals such as social workers engage with clients (OseiHwedie and Rankopo 2008). Other examples of integration include governments giving support to families and community groups that provide care, through payments to caregivers, and extending it to non-family members (Midgley 2017). Community home-based care for HIV and AIDS and other terminally ill patients is one example where the family and the community volunteer support to care for these patients, but the package of care and associated resources is made available by professionals (Osei-Hwedie and Rankopo 2008). The important role of government in family services and development is evident in the rapid expansion of social assistance in many developing countries. According to Midgley (2017), this kind of assistance plays a positive role in reducing the incidence of poverty in many developing countries. One example is the government of Taiwan’s interventions: in

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the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis, it kept the main providers of more than 300 000 near-poor families in full-time positions through various supporting schemes throughout the crisis period (Hsueh and Chang 2016). Near-poor families live on minimum wages without social aid, and are therefore highly vulnerable to economic shocks and poverty, as opposed to poor families who are officially categorized as low income families and are covered under the Social Assistance Act (Hsueh and Chang 2016). The Near-Poor Families for Full Time Workers’ Program used welfare resources, including cash and supporting social welfare services, for one year, to lower economic risk and empower families. The programme showed that welfare recipients do not have to become dependent on public resources; instead, with sufficient support, they can become a stable workforce with enhanced productivity and greater social inclusion (Hsueh and Chang 2016). This is an example of an integrated social and economic policy that was proactive and developmental, and fostered social inclusion. These examples show the importance and growing capacity for service user partnerships based on approaches that capitalize on the strengths of families (Morris 2009). Morris (2009) points out the importance of advancing new approaches for social work in working with families that challenge oppression and inequalities within the context of a policy discourse where marginalized families are seen as too weak, or unwilling or unable, to take up the opportunities they are presented with. Partnerships are also important on an international level. As Midgley (2017) points out, despite significant social progress, there are huge disparities in welfare among different nations, which can be addressed through international social welfare and promoting continued improvements in well-being for people across the globe. This includes learning from other societies and cultures to strengthen local approaches to social services (Ahmad and Jariwala 2016). International programmes, projects and opportunities for social work and social welfare commenced in the restoration period following World War II (Kendall 1998, in Healy 2012) when social workers, in different ways, addressed the needs of refugees and displaced persons, orphans and other children (Healy 2012). Further opportunities for post-war expansion of social work originate from the nationalist and independence movements which emerged in developing countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean (Healy 2012). As a consequence of the impact of economic globalization, Reisch (2016) emphasizes that macro practitioners recognize the need to forge local–international linkages in their work, to respond to new issues such as global poverty, human trafficking, climate change, civil conflict, police violence and mass incarceration that affect communities of colour;

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lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning (LGBTQI) rights; and growing socio-economic inequality. It gives impetus to social workers’ advocacy and community organizing efforts to create new multicultural, cross-national and interdisciplinary alliances by using new technologies, such as social media, to adapt practice environments that are increasingly interdisciplinary and shaped by new economic realities (Mizrahi and Morrison 2013, cited in Reisch 2016, p. 264). The profession continues to grow in addressing new challenges and enhancing its contributions both globally and locally (Healy 2012). In striving to promote social justice, both local and international social work are called upon to be culturally responsive. Sherman (2016) affirms that social workers are now required to respond to issues of social justice and human rights in both local and international arenas, as intercultural diversity and connectivity become increasingly commonplace on the transnational and social stage. It is therefore important as a human rights-based profession to explore what ‘cultural’ or ‘traditional’ means in working with families who are negatively influenced by global social conditions. This applies particularly in the context of Sewpaul’s (2016, p. 35) remark that, ‘given the historical, cultural and intellectual interconnections across the globe it is often hard to differentiate what is Western and what is Eastern’. This is not only relevant across countries, but also applies to regions; for example, there is a great deal of cultural diversity in Africa, nationally and locally (Osei-Hwedie and Rankopo 2008). The collective responsibility which extended family systems take, and the communal caring which they engage in by caring for the elderly and children, has merit (Sewpaul 2016), and many people continue to provide for their elders. However, fewer accept that they are also responsible for other needy relatives. Values such as secularism and individualism because of modernization have weakened family obligations and religious mandates to give to those in need, and practices such as arranged marriages and traditional patriarchal practices which impede people’s freedoms and rights have long been challenged (Midgley 2017). Furthermore, the ability of traditional family and community support systems to provide care is undermined by diseases such as HIV/AIDS, disasters and violence, including religious, ethnic, political and civil conflict (Midgley 2017). These examples raise the question of ‘whether traditional values, beliefs, and practices are always benevolent and invariably enhance social wellbeing’ (Midgley 2017, p. 64). Sewpaul (2016, p. 32) poses similar questions: ‘Is culture used to make a virtue out of necessity? Is the presence of extended family structures and communal living patterns a reflection of cultural preference or a socio-economic necessity?’

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Sewpaul (2016, p. 32) claims that it is economics, influenced by other factors, rather than culture, which determines the structure of the family, and which often dictates that adult children in both the Global North and the Global South, who have been living independently, return to the parental home following job losses. She warns that social workers must be mindful ‘of the culturalization of the survival and struggle strategies of the poor, and of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers’ (Sewpaul 2016, p. 32). In her view, essentialist African, Asian or Western culture excludes the wide range of diversities within these contexts, and should indeed be questioned, as social workers work with differently structured families. Midgley (2017, p. 65) suggests that ‘while different views on traditionalism should be respected, this should not preclude a frank discussion about its merits and limitations’. In local and international contexts, social workers can, as Sewpaul (2016, p. 34) suggests, appreciate differences within and across groups, countries and regions, as long as these differences are not harmful to any group of persons. Therefore, social workers should, on all levels of practice, embrace Ahmad and Jariwala’s (2016) observation that efficient and effective social work services in a global society need to take a broad perspective, where peace and social justice, human rights and social development must always be at the forefront.

RELEVANCE TO DEVELOPMENT The Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development (Global Agenda) (IASSW et al. 2012) reflects social workers’ commitment to contribute to a more just, inclusive and peaceful society. Sewpaul (2016) suggests that social workers can strive towards integrated social, economic, cultural and environmental development by supporting the goals of the Global Agenda, because of its commitment to the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Decent Work Agenda and the United Nations’ Social Protection Floor Initiative. The Global Agenda is aligned with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2030 Agenda) to transform the world into a more ‘just, equitable, tolerant, open and socially inclusive world in which the needs of the most vulnerable are met’ (UN 2015, p. 5). Its intent is to leave nobody behind in achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which are indivisible, and balance the three pillars of sustainable development, namely social, economic and environmental (UN 2015).

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The social justice focus of both the Global Agenda and 2030 Agenda facilitates the local–global connectedness of social work in social workers’ role to contribute to social change through sustainable development. Social work can contribute to national social development within the global sustainable development agenda framework by adopting a developmental approach at the local or national level. Developmental social work was adopted as the post-apartheid social welfare policy in South Africa in 1997, and then spread to other African countries (Mwansa 2012). It has subsequently started to shift to the Global North (Gray et al. 2017). Developmental social work is embedded in a human rights-based approach. It embraces micro and macro practice, and it integrates socio-economic development, and promotes people’s participation and partnerships (Patel 2015) in promoting human development and social well-being. The following description by Gray et al. (2017, p. 2) captures the relevance of developmental social work in the broader sustainable development framework of the 2030 Agenda: ‘Developmental social work affirms the social work profession’s commitment to the eradication of poverty, recognizes the link between welfare and economic development, and construes welfare as an investment in human capital rather than a drain on limited government resources.’ It is an indigenous form of practice which is best positioned to intervene in situations of poverty, and to focus on community development, rather than casework, as a method of intervention (Gray et al. 2017). In addition to adopting a community focus, a developmental approach emphasizes socio-economic development and prevention, but acknowledges the context: the fact that individual problems find expression and solutions in relation to social conditions (Osei-Hwedie and Rankopo 2008). This view alludes to the importance of both micro and macro practice in developmental social work, particularly where they intersect. Both micro and macro practice social workers are committed to the foundational values of the profession: social justice, human dignity and respect for diversity in all its forms (Reisch 2016). These are all fundamental to developmental social work. However, macro practice explicitly embodies social work’s commitment to social justice and social change by promoting structural solutions to systemic inequalities and various forms of oppression that go beyond individual adaptation and resilience (Reisch 2016, p. 261). In working with families, the social, economic, political and cultural challenges that social workers have to deal with require a great deal of innovation (Mwansa 2012), especially from a developmental approach. Social work education is one way in which social work has attempted to

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enhance its developmental focus, especially its field education requirements (Gray et al. 2017). Students should be equipped with technologies, information, paradigms and practice knowledge that will enable them to work with communities for social change (Mwansa 2012). However, as important as it is to establish curricula and practice methods that embrace the local context in making a meaningful contribution to social development (Mwansa 2012), curricula have to equip students to practice social work in the local–global nexus. Sewpaul (2016, p. 30) aptly captures this challenge in saying that the: understanding of, and responsiveness to, local situations must be embedded in an understanding of broader national, regional and global transitions, and in an increasingly interdependent world, social workers must possess the epistemological frameworks, and the knowledge, skills and values to, when possible, work across national and regional boundaries.

Sherman (2016) affirms that social work education is uniquely situated to adapt its curricula to prepare students for the effects of globalization, especially because the scope of practice is based on the discipline’s principal levels of micro, mezzo and macro engagement. The urgency in the current global context to equip social workers for micro–macro practice is reiterated by Rothman and Mizrahi (2014, p. 91), who warn that it is high time to ‘recalibrate the imbalance between micro and macro social work’. Harrison et al. (2016) suggest that this should be done by social work micro practitioners and educators, who are responsible for teaching the next generation of justice-focused social workers; they need to instil a renewed passion for social and economic justice as a core and unique component of social work practice. An important factor in getting social workers committed to social justice at the local and international levels is encouraging students to engage in self-reflection by critically examining their own beliefs and attitudes, as well as their cultural and family traditions and views of social justice; this will help prepare them to respond in a professional manner to social conditions that have an impact on families and communities (Sherman 2016, p. 639).

FUTURE DIRECTIONS In the context of austerity, public sector cuts, and increased voluntary activity and subsequent welfare state retrenchment, Walker (2012) states that the future of family support services appears to be heading in the direction of a minimalist, crisis, reactive system involving different

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providers. However, in view of the ongoing role that the non-formal sector plays in family care and support, Midgley (2017) points out the need for governments to adopt policies that will strengthen traditional welfare institutions within a wider policy framework that integrates the services of statutory, non-profit, community-based and commercial providers (Midgley 2017, p. 66). He contends that although international organizations such as the ILO have made an important contribution to promoting closer association between statutory and non-formal provisions, progress has been limited. Furthermore, although some countries have made some progress to incorporate informal sector workers such as self-employed workers and casual workers into modern social insurance programmes (which usually cater primarily for employees in formal wage employment), agricultural labourers and domestic workers mostly continue to be excluded. Clearly, to make an impact on families’ social well-being, it should be a priority to extend social protection to these workers and/or to establish special programmes to meet their needs. Midgley (2017, p. 69) further states that the few countries in the Global South which have introduced policies which have extended coverage to informal sector workers are mainly higher income countries in Latin America, Asia and North Africa. More recently some, such as Peru and South Africa, have included domestic workers as well. The rapid expansion of social assistance in many developing countries is also playing a positive role in reducing the incidence of poverty in these developing countries. An indigenous or local knowledge base is important for social work practice with families to be effective. In its absence, social workers tend to assume a maintenance role and also fail to deal with the inequalities, social injustice, corruption and poverty that they face (Mwansa 2012). Osei-Hwedie and Rankopo (2008) also argue that social work can achieve positive social change through dynamic cultural appropriateness by blending new and old ideas, or making new ideas work in a particular manner and context that is appropriate for families and communities. A culturally appropriate focus emphasizes the role of communitysupporting systems in social work with families. Social work should therefore be context-based and draw on and respond to the values and norms of local cultures (Osei-Hwedie and Rankopo 2008). However, as earlier discussed, culturally appropriate practice should not inflict harm on any family member or group. To respond effectively to new practice challenges and practice realities requires the presence of more macro practitioners (Reisch 2016). However, the emphasis should be on the interconnectedness of micro–macro practice, which recognizes that the changes that macro social workers

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seek are purposeful and planned. Hence they should consciously make use of evidence gathered from research, but also from knowledge obtained from practice experience, including the interventions that facilitate changes in individuals and families (Reisch 2012). More studies on international social welfare are imperative, as they will allow for a more connected and cooperative world community (Ahmad and Jariwala 2016). Spolander et al. (2016) assert that international debate within the social work arena needs to understand neoliberalism as a socio-economic and political policy, with multiple levels of complexity, interests and impacts. Linking the local with the global in practice should begin with social work education. Sherman (2016) suggests that programmes and strategies allowing study abroad and ensuing curricula should prepare students for living and working in a world in which global awareness is a requisite for success. It means that students should work in community-based and international-based agencies which offer them learning opportunities so that they can come to understand more fully how global issues can have an impact on local environments, and the other way round, in working with individuals, families and communities where global and local issues interconnect. Sherman (2016, p. 636) suggests that in preparing social workers for local–global and micro–macro practice, the curriculum should at various points emphasize ‘awareness and appreciation of diversity and multiculturalism, social justice and human rights, empathy and compassion, sustainable development and responsible action’. As this chapter has shown, social work in general, and with families in particular, has policy implications at various levels within a sustainable development framework. One example is gender issues, especially the sustainable development goal on equality and empowerment of all women and girls; a goal which is regarded as critical in making progress across all the other goals. This point pertains to the continuing role that families, particularly women, play in providing care for vulnerable members of the family and community (Midgley 2017). It also relates to the prevailing patriarchal social structures, where parent support still largely implies mother support (Walker 2012, p. 615). If women’s roles are not mindfully watched in family services, and targeted in family and other equality and gender policies, women can be exploited further in the context of neoliberalism. As Spolander et al. (2016, p. 644) rightly observe, in this ‘age of austerity’ it is easy to forget the human cost associated with uncritical neoliberal policy, and the intended and unintended consequences and management implementation. Therefore, they assert that in order for the social work profession to develop critical public discourses, greater engagement in policy and politics is required.

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This means ‘being more vocal in policy debates, contributing to macro and micro welfare policy and practice development, and helping communities to understand the implications of social inequality’ (Spolander et al. 2016, p. 644). Such engagement, they state, emphasizes the role of the profession to develop policy specialists and forge greater links with citizens and civil movements. Within the framework of sustainable development, social work with families has to integrate an environmental focus with social and economic development. Dominelli (2010) calls on social workers to look for new paradigms for the practice in order to deal with the complexities arising from the financial and environmental crises; they should give greater priority to social and community development within an ecological framework that cares for both the environment and the people who live in it. She notes that the demands of indigenous people are particularly important in the formulation of new theories and models of practice, because they have given rise to new forms of practice that have been adopted elsewhere, such as family group conferences and new theories that emphasize spirituality (Dominelli 2010). She encourages social workers to become involved in anti-globalization movements that argue for social justice and human rights-based forms of practice in local, national and international fora; and to form alliances and partnerships with service users and community groups (Dominelli 2010). Effective social work requires an integrated non-formal and formal welfare framework, based on government policies that strengthen families and communities’ involvement in caring for their members. It adopts approaches and interventions that embrace a micro–macro practice focus within a sustainable development framework, and that reflect commitment to promote social justice and the well-being of families at the local and global levels, based on what is culturally appropriate.

REFERENCES Ahmad, M. and H.V. Jariwala (2016), ‘Living in a global society’, Part One of a Two-Part Special Issue, Journal of Social Service Research, 42 (5), 573–575. Campanini, A. (2012), ‘Social work in Europe’, in Lynne Healy and Rosemary J. Link (eds), Handbook of International Social Work: Human Rights, Development, and the Global Profession, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 55–62. Dominelli, L. (2010), ‘Globalization, contemporary challenges and social work practice’, International Social Work, 53 (5), 599–612. Gray, M., K. Agillias, R. Mupedziswa and J. Mugumbate (2017), ‘The expansion of developmental social work in Southern and East Africa: opportunities and challenges for social work field programmes’, International Social Work, 7 March. DOI: 10.1177/ 0020872817695399.

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Social work and family services 409 Harrison, J., K. VanDeusen and I. Way (2016), ‘Embedding social justice within micro social work curricula’, Smith College Studies in Social Work, 86 (3), 258–273. Healy, L.M. (2008), ‘Exploring the history of social work as a human rights profession’, International Social Work, 51 (6), 735–748. Healy, Lynne M. (2012), ‘The history of the development of social work’, in Lynne Healy and Rosemary J. Link (eds), Handbook of International Social Work: Human Rights, Development, and the Global Profession, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 55–62. Houston, Stan (2012), ‘Child and family social work’, in Mel Gray, James Midgley and Stephen Webb (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Social Work, London, UK and Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: SAGE, pp. 503–514. Hsueh, C. and Y. Chang (2016), ‘Social welfare policies during global financial crisis: an example of social inclusion in Taiwan’, Asia Pacific Journal of Social Work and Development, 26 (2/3), 142–151. IASSW, ICSW and IFSW (2012), ‘The Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development’, accessed 17 January 2018 at http://cdn.ifsw.org/assets/globalagenda 2012.pdf. Kiselica, M.S. and M. Robinson (2001), ‘Bringing advocacy counseling to life: the history, issues, and human dramas of social justice work in counseling’, Journal of Counseling and Development, 79, 387–397. Midgley, James (2017), Social Welfare for a Global Era. International Perspectives on Policy and Practice, London, UK and Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: SAGE. Morris, Kate (2009), ‘Family-based social work’, in Robert Adams, Lena Dominelli and Malcolm Payne (eds), Critical Practice in Social Work (2nd edn), London, UK and New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 280–292. Mwansa, Lengwe-Katembula (2012), ‘Social work in Africa’, in Lynne Healy and Rosemary J. Link (eds), Handbook of International Social Work. Human Rights, Development, and the Global Profession, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 365–371. Nygren, Lennart and Siv Oltedal (2014), ‘Families in transition’, in Sven Hessle (ed.), Global Social Transformation and Social Action: The Role of Social Workers. Social Work – Social Development Volume III. Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate, pp. 123–128. Osei-Hwedie, Kwaku and Morena J. Rankopo (2008), ‘Developing culturally relevant social work education in Africa: the case of Botswana’, in Mel Gray, John Coates and Michael Yellow Bird (eds), Indigenous Social Work around the World: Towards Culturally Relevant Education and Practice, Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate, pp. 203–217. Patel, Leila (2015), Social Welfare and Social Development, Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Payne, Malcolm, Robert Adams and Lena Dominelli (2009), ‘On being critical in social work’, in Robert Adams, Lena Dominelli and Malcolm Payne (eds), Critical Practice in Social Work (2nd edn), London, UK and New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 280–292. Reisch, Michael (2016), ‘Why macro practice matters’, Journal of Social Work Education, 52 (3), 258–268. Richmond, Mary (1917), Social Diagnoses, New York, NY, USA: Russel Sage. Rothman, J. and T. Mizrahi (2014), ‘Balancing micro and macro practice: a challenge for social work’, Social Work, 59 (1), 91–93. Sewpaul, Vishanthie (2016), ‘The West and the rest divide: human rights, culture and social work’, Journal of Human Rights Social Work, 1, 30–39. Sherman, P. (2016), ‘Preparing social workers for global gaze: locating global citizenship within social work curricula’, Social Work Education, 35 (60), 632–642.

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410 Handbook of social policy and development Spolander, G., L. Engelbrecht and A.P. Sansfacon (2016), ‘Social work and macroeconomic neoliberalism: beyond the social justice rhetoric’, European Journal of Social Work, 19 (5), 634–649. Strydom, M., G. Spolander, L. Engelbrecht and L. Martin (2017), ‘South African child and family welfare services: changing times or business as usual?’, Social Work/ Maatskaplike Werk, 53 (2), 145–164. United Nations (UN) (2015), Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. General Assembly A/RES/70/1, Seventieth session, Agenda items 15 and 16, Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015, accessed 17 January 2018 at http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/1& Lang=E. Walker, S. (2012), ‘Family support services’, in Mel Gray, James Midgley and Stephen Webb (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Social Work, London, UK and Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: SAGE, pp. 613–626.

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22. Financial inclusion and microfinance Philip Mader and Solène Morvant-Roux

Financial inclusion is an international programme to expand access to finance to all. In this sense, it refers to an idea – the goal of everyone being financially included; and a set of practices toward achieving it – making included; involving different actors, methods, technologies and sets of power relations. The key activity so far has been microfinance, which is also the best-documented and most researched part, and therefore at the centre of this chapter. Below, we offer an empirically informed discussion of financial inclusion, building on long-standing research results and debates about microfinance. We also aim to advance the reader’s critical engagement by questioning whether access to financial services really constitutes a universal human need, and probing for better evidence on whether financial inclusion in practice brings more benefits than harms. We begin by explaining key terms, key statistics, and clarifying how microfinance and financial inclusion fit together, as well as offering a brief history of microfinance and financial inclusion. We then examine the evidence for and against access to financial services causing poverty alleviation and women’s empowerment, and discuss some of the key problems of microfinance and financial inclusion: their susceptibility to financial crises, the inherent trade-off between profitability and impact, and the sector’s persistent fixation on credit. Next, we more broadly assess the place of financial inclusion on development agendas, reviewing claims that finance drives growth and development, examining how finance connects with nascent efforts to behaviourally re-engineer poor people, and situating financial inclusion within the broader financialization and marketization of development.

DEFINITION, DESCRIPTION AND HISTORY OF FINANCIAL INCLUSION AND MICROFINANCE Contemporary microfinance builds on a long-standing history of the promotion of financial services (for example, credit, savings, insurance, money transfers) for low income population segments, who otherwise are 411

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not of great interest to the formal banking sector. Microfinance refers to a financial infrastructure that incorporates a physical infrastructure (branch offices, information technology), digital information infrastructures and (self-)regulatory infrastructures, which are designed to facilitate flows of finance to marginal populations. The ‘micro’ here refers to the relatively small amounts of money involved in the individual transactions. These can be related to loans, savings, insurance or transfers. Contrary to the sector’s quasi-charitable public image, microfinance is today a predominantly for-profit sector, in which almost three-quarters of lending is done by explicitly for-profit organizations. Even many organizations that have formally remained non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or nonprofits also follow a profit-oriented lending methodology.1 Although promoters of microfinance have repeatedly avowed a strong commitment towards a broad range of services, a narrow credit-only approach has dominated. The quintessential service is microcredit. This is partly because the sector has been heavily fuelled by international money flows, such that external investors provide capital to microfinance institutions (MFIs) to on-lend. The newer agenda of ‘financial inclusion’ – the term only became popular since 2012 – posits that there is a universal need for formal financial services, felt by all people. At the same time, it signals an attempt to move beyond credit: Even the most efficient financial system supported by a strong contractual and information infrastructure faces limitations. Not all would-be borrowers are creditworthy, and there are numerous examples where national welfare has been reduced by overly relaxed credit policies. Access to formal payment and savings services can approach universality as economies develop. However, not everyone will – or should – qualify for credit. (Demirgüç-Kunt et al. 2008, p. 14)

Reaching financially marginal population segments remains at the core, but with financial inclusion the sector’s aims and practices have become more amorphous. A range of actors (not just MFIs) work for ‘universal financial inclusion’ (reaching everyone) and delivering ‘full financial inclusion’ (all services). Where microfinance often aimed at unleashing poor people’s entrepreneurial capacities through productive loans, proponents of financial inclusion argue that finance should serve broader 1

The profit orientation does not mean, however, that all for-profit microfinance institutions successfully generate economic profits (see Cull and Morduch 2017).

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purposes, such as enabling consumer expenditures, meeting housing expenses or serving health care needs (Collins et al. 2009). As Figure 22.1 schematically shows, microfinance is thus a distinct intervention at the core of the wider, emerging, financial inclusion agenda. Whereas microfinance focuses mostly on microcredit, specifically delivered to poor clients, financial inclusion is a broader agenda that encompasses microfinance, and has unclearer boundaries vis-à-vis the broader universe of finance. A host of new players, including mobile phone companies, fin-techs, formal banks, business correspondents, as well as governments, are part of the wider financial inclusion space. Because the microfinance sector never reached all people with all services (especially in rural settings), new technologies and infrastructures are considered key pillars for promoting universal and full financial inclusion. Digital bank accounts, plastic payment cards and mobile banking are increasingly core components, as the industry focuses on earning fees from payments (including government-to-citizen payments such as digitized pensions). Finally, financial inclusion also encompasses a growing focus on financial literacy and new tools to incite the ‘right’ financial behaviours among clients (see also below). Thus, where microfinance was a clear-cut and bounded intervention, financial inclusion is a broader and more opaque space. According to the Global Findex database, in 2014, 38 per cent of adults (or around 2 billion people) worldwide did not have a formal financial service account (bank or mobile banking). Account ownership varies greatly with income, age, gender, ethnicity, rural–urban location, and so on. Amid microfinance institutions, the Asia and the Pacific region

Microinance Poor clients served by poor-speciic providers (MFIs) with: -

microcredit (focus) microsavings microinsurance

… often via digital/unconventional

Figure 22.1 How microfinance relates to financial inclusion

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represents between 60 per cent (MIX 2018) and 85 per cent (Reed 2014) of the total number of clients, partly reflecting the geographic distribution of poverty worldwide, but also partly reflecting the focus on the relatively easier-to-reach poor in denser spaces. Some areas of the world have a strong concentration of microfinance or inclusive finance providers, and suffer from excessive competition and loan saturation, while others are not covered by any kind of provider. All ten largest MFIs worldwide are to be found in this region, including four in India and three in Bangladesh. However, the distribution looks different when examining loan amounts disbursed: Latin America has the largest microcredit sizes, and consequently accounts for almost one-third of the global microloan portfolio. Large disparities are also apparent between urban and peri-urban, and rural areas. Counting as many as 3718 MFIs, and around 211 million clients, the microfinance sector has loans amounting to between US$70 billion and US$100 billion (fluctuating in recent years) (MIX 2018; Reed 2014). The global average microfinance loan interest rate is around 35 per cent, having risen in recent years (The Economist 2014), although depending on local conditions and the extent of their commercial orientation, some MFIs charge much higher rates, often over 100 per cent. MFIs are increasingly part of a broader financial landscape characterized by increasingly heterogeneous pathways towards financial inclusion; other actors now include mobile money operators, larger banks and issuers of prepaid plastic cards. Mobile banking totals about 550 million account holders worldwide and appears poised to reach out to more geographically marginalized population segments (GSMA 2017). SubSaharan Africa, where microfinance has not developed as extensively as in other regions, makes up more than 50 per cent of mobile money accounts worldwide, with 277 account holders (GSMA 2017). This figure represents more than the total number of bank accounts in the region (GSMA 2017). The best-known example of successful mobile banking penetration is Kenya, where 70 per cent of adults have a mobile money account. A Short History of Microfinance Some scholars locate the roots of microfinance in centuries-old informal financial mechanisms (see Cull and Morduch 2017), while others argue for an analogy between contemporaneous microfinance and savings and credit co-operatives that emerged in Europe in the 1800s (Schmidt et al. 2016). We note that modern microfinance grew from initially humble beginnings among local NGOs in South Asia and Latin America in the

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1970s and 1980s, emerging as a donor darling and a global financial industry that has attained ‘macro’ scale. The origins of contemporary microfinance, which spawned the recent broader agenda of financial inclusion, can be traced to experiments in South Asia and Latin America during the Cold War period, which in turn drew on earlier colonial linkages. In South Asia, at the turn of the twentieth century, British colonial social reformers and government administrators introduced co-operative credit to tackle concerns about the power of village moneylenders (Turnell 2005). These early co-operatives collapsed in the 1930s, because weak governance mechanisms and internal class divisions undermined them (landlords and moneylenders often emerged as leaders), but their legacy profoundly shaped South Asian social policy. Credit as a pro-poor policy tool was carried forth by both Indian and Pakistani policy makers after independence. This legacy informed experiments in 1970s in the civil society realm, including the labour union Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) founding its own bank for women’s self-help (SEWA Bank), and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) which engaged in small lending activities to promote self-employment amid displaced communities after Bangladesh’s war of independence. Muhammad Yunus joined this movement later, founding the Grameen Bank (‘Village Bank’) in Bangladesh in 1983. Around the same time, North American NGOs working in Latin America, such as Accion International and FINCA International, were also engaged in experiments with group lending, primarily in Brazil and Bolivia (Mader 2015, pp. 51–56). These emerging practices of self-help-oriented lending intersected with profound shifts in development thinking and practice during the 1970s and 1980s. Government-led industrial development first fell out of favour ideologically, and then became financially impossible with the 1980s debt crisis. Scholars and policy makers increasingly recognized the importance of engaging with the informal sector, acknowledging women’s role in development, and a need for focusing on grassroots approaches and basic needs. Development economists who had long criticized subsidized credit as inefficient and socially unfair gained influence within the World Bank, and argued that the poor would be served better by credit at market prices (Bateman 2010). The first major impetus for the development of a real commercial microfinance industry came in the mid-1980s when international financial institutions (above all, the World Bank) recognized microcredit’s utility as a policy tool, and integrated microlending with structural adjustment (first in Bolivia, then in other countries) (Weber 2002). The World Bank particularly enthusiastically endorsed microcredit, and began

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to encourage MFIs to transform into commercial operations which could reach greater numbers of clients much more quickly. With the main objective of the nascent microfinance sector being to expand financial services to larger population segments in the South in a ‘financially sustainable’ way, policy makers argued that the scaling-up and outreach of MFIs necessitated reducing their dependence on public subsidies; for-profit organizations funded by external investments were expected to grow quicker and reach more clients. By the early 1990s, already nearly 1000 MFIs (each with more than 1000 clients) existed worldwide, and to accelerate their commercialization the World Bank founded a specialized entity in 1995, the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP – pronounced ‘see-gap’) (Mader 2015, pp. 56–58). CGAP guided the transformation of many erstwhile NGOs into companies that soon aggressively pursued growth and profitability. Some even ultimately floated their shares on the stock market: most (in)famously, Banco Compartamos in 2007 in Mexico, and SKS Microfinance (now Bharat Financial Inclusion Limited) in 2010 in India. These transformations, however, were also criticized by some early microfinance pioneers, who argued that commercial MFIs would undergo ‘mission drift’ and neglect their real target population among the poor. Indeed, Cull et al. (2009) showed that while commercial investments fuelled the expansion of the sector, institutions making use of subsidies better targeted the lowest income population segments, and especially rural areas, while commercial providers focused on easier-to-reach and less-poor clients. A period of particularly rapid growth was the late 1990s and the 2000s, when the bulk of the microfinance sector was commercialized, buoyed by popular optimism about financial markets and market-driven approaches to poverty reduction more broadly. Microfinance was championed to the public in high-profile events such as the Microcredit Summit in 1997, the United Nations Year of Microcredit in 2005, and the Nobel Prize for Peace awarded to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank in 2006. Not least thanks to organizations such as Kiva – a platform promising the opportunity to make person-to-person (P2P) microloans to borrowers in foreign countries – microfinance became a very popular instrument for ‘doing good’, while microfinance’s explicitly commercial and for-profit methodology promised investors to ‘do well’. Despite avowing a marketled approach to microfinance, the World Bank and other International Financial Institutions (IFIs) used subsidies and other financial sweeteners (such as profit guarantees and first-loss tranches) to lure mainstream investors into microfinance. Four high-profile share issues, which generated significant pay-offs for investors and managers, went forth in the

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mid-2000s, and established MFIs as mainstream investment targets (Mader 2015, pp. 61–68). However, with the rapid expansion of microlending came cases of overlending. The first country to experience repayment problems was Bolivia, in 2000. In this pioneer country of commercialized microfinance, after a year of negative economic growth and social protest, spontaneously formed borrowers’ associations challenged MFIs and lobbied for relief for clients from unsustainable debt loads. The years 2007 and 2008 saw crises in Pakistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Nicaragua; in Nicaragua a non-payment movement, ‘No Pago’, gained the support of political elites and won debt relief. Morocco was also hit by a major delinquency crisis in 2009, after ten years of very rapid growth championed by four leading microcredit providers. The crisis began when one of the main microcredit providers (Zakoura) was declared bankrupt, which in turn was caused by rampant fraud; non-payment spread to the entire industry as a result of cross-borrowing and weak sanctions against defaulters (Morvant-Roux and Roesch 2015). Yet these crises were overshadowed in size and severity by another crisis in India in 2010. The country’s economic liberalization in the 1990s allowed a highly commercialized microfinance industry to grow rapidly, with providers focusing on four southern states. Particularly in the leading neoliberal reform state Andhra Pradesh, the government aggressively cut social welfare and farm subsidies, leading already stressed rural populations to descend into unsustainable debt. A fiercely competitive MFI industry centred its efforts on Andhra Pradesh, where loans were easiest to make. Instead of balancing the market, competitive forces encouraged indiscriminate and irresponsible lending. Repayment troubles emerged suddenly in summer 2010 and were compounded by reports of between 54 and 88 clients of several MFIs having committed suicide due to overindebtedness. Subsequent protests and violence forced the government of Andhra Pradesh to respond with an emergency ordinance which temporarily prohibited all microfinance activity; repayments never restarted, and more than US$1 billion in loans were written off (Mader 2013). After decades of successful lending growth, what caused the sudden proliferation of crises in some microfinance markets in the 2000s? Internal governance problems, unchecked lending growth, high concentration of loans, unfair competition (loan officers ‘poaching’ other programmes’ clients), and a lack of regulatory supervision are important explanatory items. MFIs’ self-destruction by overlending was driven in no small part by the pursuit of profit, but was combined with political upheavals driven by borrowers recognizing their own interests as being

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opposed to MFIs’ interests, and collectively organizing repayment defiance. In Morocco, a debtors’ movement (named Victimes du Microcrédit) grew out of the Arab Spring, and challenged the microfinance industry politically (Morvant-Roux and Moisseron 2019); in India, support for MFIs became an untenable position for politicians in light of the suicides and violence (Mader 2013). In other countries, crises have not erupted openly, but it has been noted that many borrowers struggle to make repayments and see their relationship with MFIs as difficult or fundamentally antagonistic (Schicks 2014; Afonso et al. 2016). The microfinance crises of the 2000s were instrumental in the turn to financial inclusion, because borrower discontent and financial distress not only tainted the microfinance industry’s reputation, but also raised fundamental questions about the industry’s unilateral focus on credit. In addition, the disappointing results from major impact studies published during this period (discussed in the next section) drove donor disillusionment with microfinance. Hence a change in terminology was opportune, as well as an opening-up of the space to new providers and modes of provision.

POVERTY IMPACTS OF FINANCIAL INCLUSION The microfinance impact literature is large and complex; an early systematic review found more than 3000 studies on the topic (Duvendack et al. 2011). To summarize and condense what is known from the large literature about the impacts on poor people from access to financial services: there are few conclusive results, and instead, a complex picture of partial findings and large uncertainties emerges. The results from studies in one country often do not replicate in another; even the reverse impact is sometimes found. Moreover, studies reveal important heterogeneities among clients, such that impacts (where found) accrue only to particular subpopulations, such as top quantiles or highly regular users. It should be stressed that assessing the impact of microfinance raises many methodological challenges, and published results continue to be debated among scholars. The research on the most studied question to date, whether access to credit raises incomes, broadly does not support the hypothesis. A core focus has been on whether credit facilitates higher incomes in the form of profits from microenterprise. Although credit-taking households are generally found to invest more in small businesses and in buying productive assets, across studies it remains unclear whether those changes in behaviour actually lead to impacts in terms of businesses actually being

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profitable (or becoming more profitable) (Banerjee et al. 2015). The overwhelming majority of studies does not find strong evidence for either positive or negative effects from credit on incomes, although there is some evidence of internal heterogeneity, such that in particular the already best-off households do better (Duvendack et al. 2011; Stewart et al. 2012). While poor people often already save (in different forms, such as livestock, lending money to family and friends, buying gold, and so on), formal savings have been promoted only rather more recently as part of the financial inclusion agenda. As with credit, whether access to these services increases poor people’s incomes remains unclear. In terms of financial services enabling households to manage shocks, most of the literature indicates that all services – payments, credit, savings, transfers and insurance – do help; however, these findings come with important qualifiers, as the evidence is not always strong, and the ultimate pecuniary value of dealing with shocks (that is, whether managing shocks better brings financial gains) is not clearly established (Dupas and Robinson 2013). A majority of studies suggests that financial services allow poor people to consume more goods and services, but this is not found across all subgroups, all places, and not for all expenditure categories (Stewart et al. 2012). In terms of financial services helping with building assets, the literature is relatively more supportive on the savings side (not credit), but the effects are generally modest and not uniformly positive (Augsburg et al. 2015; Banerjee et al. 2015; Tarozzi et al. 2015). Finally, it is important to stress that, according to some scholars, savings promotion can have more to do with disciplining poor people – as savings can be withheld by financial institutions as collateral for loans – than with social protection (Guérin et al. 2015; Guérin 2015). In sum, among the results that are known, there are some positive ones, and somewhat fewer negative results. But the magnitudes (in either direction) are generally small, indicating no transformative impact from financial inclusion thus far; and there are far more unresolved questions than clear answers about how access to financial services impacts upon poor people. Moreover, many findings in more positive studies are reported in language signalling uncertainty, and highlighting the need for further research, using phrases such as ‘may’, ‘can’, ‘tends to’, ‘suggests that’. This also cautions against accepting or refuting the position that poor people do benefit financially from accessing and using formal financial services.

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Do Financial Services Empower Women? As already mentioned, microfinance emerged in a context of reconfiguration of development policy from macro development towards more grassroots-oriented development, and a direct focus on poverty alleviation and, above all, on women. Since their beginnings, MFIs have paid particular attention to women clients, and three-quarters of the clients are women. To donors, the microfinance sector has represented the promise of using financial services to empower women within their families and communities. But while opening up financial choices may lead to empowerment, there are also concerns that the modalities of financial service delivery, particularly in microfinance, reinforce structural asymmetries between men and women and reinforce patriarchal norms. In rural settings of Mexico, for instance, the MFI Compartamos Banco hires women as low-paid subcontractors to convince other women to take loans, regardless of need (Crucifix and Morvant-Roux 2019). In Morocco, observations show loan officers preferring to lend money to women not for reasons of empowerment, but because they are the more reliable borrowers. They have the (socially accepted) ability to ask brothers or sons to help them repay the loans, while men’s code of honour prevents them doing so (Morvant-Roux and Roesch 2015). In Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim (2011) alleges that MFIs’ economic successes are built upon an ‘economy of shame’ that sees lenders deploying chauvinist codes of honour and violence against women, using their structurally weak position against them to enforce repayments. In microfinance, loan agents are usually men, while borrowers are women. In line with these often ambivalent or very critical findings from anthropological and feminist scholarship (e.g. Karim 2011; Guérin et al. 2013), quantitative studies generally do not find access to financial services, particularly credit, to unambiguously or systematically empower women vis-à-vis men. Drawing from quantitative impact assessments, Duvendack et al.’s (2014) meta-analysis of 29 papers found no clear effect of microcredit on women – specifically, their control over household decisions – and concluded, ‘it is very unlikely that our evidence can be taken to mean microcredit has a meaningful and substantial impact on empowerment processes’ (while not ruling out exceptions in particular circumstances) (Duvendack et al. 2014, p. 98). Similarly, Vaessen et al.’s (2014) meta-analysis of 25 studies finds that the results of experimental studies examining the effect of microcredit on women’s control over household spending were not significant. These results are corroborated

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by more recent microcredit Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs), conducted both on programmes that explicitly targeted women and ones that did not, which also find no measurable effects on women’s decision making (Banerjee et al. 2015; Crépon et al. 2015; Tarozzi et al. 2015). However, heterogeneities matter: for instance, in a sample of women in Mexico, there was a small yet significant increase in decision making for the 2.5 per cent of women who were most extremely disempowered (Angelucci et al. 2015). On the savings side, while not reporting any directly empowermentrelated findings, Dupas and Robinson’s (2013) (non-random) study of access to savings accounts in Kenya found differential economic impacts on self-employed women versus men. Women on average used their savings accounts far more actively, and also saved more and increased their investments and private expenditures, suggesting that these accounts may allow women to ‘protect’ their income from the demands of friends and family. Here again it becomes clear that ‘the poor’ – and poor women – are not a homogeneous category, and potential gains from accessing microloans heavily depend on their situation inside and outside the household: power relationships, income generating activities, position in the job market, social protection, age, and so on.

FINANCIAL INCLUSION AND DEVELOPMENT The microfinance industry has always focused on credit. Interest on credit has been the main driver of profits. However, loans, particularly when disbursed under competitive pressure, are also a driver of overindebtedness, having led to repayment crises and widespread borrower distress. Even when overindebtedness is not considered, a focus on credit may be harmful if it is not the most appropriate or urgently needed financial product for most clients, particularly those who are not entrepreneurs. Consequently, since the 1990s, industry thought leaders (often from CGAP) have championed a broadening of microfinance beyond microcredit. ‘Financial inclusion’ further stresses the importance of other services, particularly money transfers (remittances, payments) and savings (see World Bank 2014, pp. 41–47). The advance of digital technologies is argued to have opened up new possibilities for cost reductions and revenue generation. However, to date the financial inclusion industry continues to depend on credit for profitability. Savings in particular are almost always a loss-making business for MFIs, and have accordingly been neglected. Among a global sample of 1263 MFIs, assessed in 2012,

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nearly half (579 MFIs) held no client savings at all, and only 172 had greater savings deposits than loans outstanding (Mader 2015, pp. 33–34). Many MFIs, moreover, only offer savings accounts to clients who simultaneously have a loan; and worse yet, some ‘savings’ are in fact parts of the loan withheld as collateral (10 or 20 per cent). This practice of ‘forced savings’ among MFIs has been condemned as a swindle, as clients pay interest on the full loan amount (see Sinclair 2012, pp. 35–36, 101–102). With its downside risks for both lenders and borrowers, credit is the Achilles heel of microfinance, and the shift to digital financial inclusion has not (yet) brought a fundamental departure from credit-driven microfinance practices. Digital accounts, however, may open up new profit frontiers in payments services; one study estimated the annual transaction revenues which could be earned from the payments of small businesses in developing countries at US$35 billion annually (Carlberg et al. 2016). While advocates generally put forward the low transaction costs as the main argument for digital monies, it is important to recall that these monies imply users paying a fee to the service provider each time they use their money. Cash in, cash out, money transfer, bill payment, and so on, are all chargeable points. Far from dissuading loans, digital technologies also favour lending, again. Where mobile payments have become widespread, mainly in Africa, digital credit, often disbursed by mobile phone operators working in tandem with financial institutions, is disbursed within minutes. Interest rates are generally higher than those on ‘traditional’ microcredit. Lenders have moreover seized upon big data generated by mobile users to calculate ‘alternative credit scores’ for potential clients, such as phone call return rates or movement patterns (Francis et al. 2017). As long as credit offers the highest profit potential for financial institutions, there is no reason to assume that ‘financial inclusion’ (as microfinance’s prospective successor) will overcome the industry’s credit fixation. Do Financial Services Actually Drive Economic Development? The belief that microfinance loans help poor people to set up successful small enterprises which, in turn, would contribute to economic development, was a crucial narrative at work in early donor enthusiasm for microfinance. But this ‘microenterprise’ theory of impact has suffered from a weight of evidence that shows most small enterprises fail within a few years, and even successful ones do not drive developmental economic transformations (Bateman and Chang 2012). Particularly salient problems are displacement, as one microenterprise often simply displaces

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another one; and saturation, as new small businesses overcrowd already full local markets (Bateman 2010). The microenterprise theory is now only rarely used to justify financial inclusion, and instead donors have focused their attention on a newer argument that financial development is crucial for macroeconomic development (see, e.g., World Bank 2014). Based on theories from neoclassical economics, financial systems are seen as drivers of inclusive growth and reducers of inequality, as they mobilize savings, facilitate investments, and reduce information, contracting and transaction costs across the economy (Banerjee and Newman 1993; Galor and Zeira 1993; King and Levine 1993). As economies grow, it is expected that the benefits of growth eventually ‘trickle down’ to poor people in the form of jobs and new economic opportunities. Some theorists also suggest that inclusive financial sector development would help to reduce economic inequality, as financial services enable lower income individuals to invest in human capital, or as growth macroeconomically leads to lower inequality (Jalilian and Kirkpatrick 2005; Beck et al. 2007). Although these theories have gained traction in recent years, particularly among international institutions (GPFI 2014), the evidence for them remains weak, and they may confound cause with effect. For instance, in its keystone report on financial inclusion, the World Bank (2014) highlights numerous correlations as evidence for financial inclusion driving growth and reductions in inequality (see, for an example, Figure 22.2). Specifically, it picks out Sweden and Haiti to show that ‘financial inequality and income inequality go hand in hand’ (World Bank 2014, p. 41). But such discussions of correlation assume financial inclusion to be the key factor in explaining differences between these countries (instead of other factors); they also ignore the likely reverse causation, where growth and reductions in inequality drive financial services usage, as more people can afford financial services. Historically, the opening of bank accounts has mainly been driven by a need to secure wages and to receive benefits from the welfare state (Gloukoviezoff 2010). Theoretically, too, the macroeconomic arguments for financial inclusion are weak, as they rely on trickle-down economic theories and outdated assumptions about financial efficiency driving growth, which even the International Monetary Fund no longer shares (Arcand et al. 2015). Financialization and the Deeper Marketization of Development The discourse and focus of development policy has changed since the early 2000s, with an increasing focus placed on individuals’ responsibility for development. The emergence and establishment of financial

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Haiti Income inequality (Gini coefficient)

60

50

Philippines

40

30

Sweden

20 0

5

10

15

Account penetration in the richest 20% as a multiple of that in the poorest 20%

Source:

World Bank (2014, p. 42).

Figure 22.2 Correlation of financial outcomes and social outcomes – but what proof for causation? services as a key element of ‘inclusive development’ has not proceeded in an ideological vacuum, and financial inclusion and microfinance arose from (and themselves have driven) a broader marketization and financialization of development. ‘Marketization’ refers to the rethinking of development as a market-led process, above all by transforming the state (Carroll 2012); ‘financialization’ refers to the expansion of the frontier of finance such that ever larger parts of the societal sphere and individual decision making are under the control of financial logics, markets and actors (see Roy 2010; Mader 2015, pp. 19–27). A poignant case of marketization and financialization through microfinance is the promotion of microloans for water and sanitation (or housing loans, analysed in Soederberg 2014). These business models suggest that poor people ought to use financial services to invest in upgrading their homes and health; often by taking out a microloan to pay for the construction and follow-on costs of a household water tap and filtration system. The underlying assumption is that poor people can

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afford the full market cost of water if they are given access to financial liquidity, in a buy now, pay later model (Mader 2015, pp. 133–136). However, these promises of inclusion in water come at two costs: regular payments of interest and fees, and political equity. Instead of addressing the many injustices and insufficiencies present in developing countries’ infrastructure, poor people are expected to embrace accept debt-based self-help as a ‘new’ solution. Water-microcredit arrangements are thus part of a broader challenge to public provision. Other examples include education loans for schoolchildren, microfinancing for off-grid solar home systems, and microcredit and micro-insurance for health care purposes. With this, microfinance models, which offer seemingly apolitical and pragmatic solutions to long-pressing development problems, in fact work to further marketize and financialize certain goods and services that historically were under public stewardship (Baron et al. 2019). By ignoring the contentious politics around resources such as water, microcredit may even in time reignite ‘water wars’ and conflicts over privatization (Shiva 2002; McDonald 2014). The issue of unequal payments and broader equity, finally, points to a fundamental problem hardwired into financial inclusion. Financial inclusion proposes a solution to (or at least, intervention in) global poverty that rests on the beneficiaries – the poor themselves – paying for the intervention through service charges, transaction fees and interest payments. The consequences are very evident in microcredit, where borrowers pay on average 35 per cent interest, which they need to earn through productive (or at least remunerated) labour. At the microfinance industry’s greatest extent thus far, in 2010, total payments from borrowers to the industry (interest and fees paid to MFIs) amounted to a minimum of US$21 billion per year (Mader 2015, pp. 115–117). Financial inclusion activities more broadly follow the same principle: low income people pay for a service they receive, which generates new profit opportunities for capital-owners as investors, in exchange for a hope that there may be a developmental impact. As Guérin et al. (2013a, p. 2) argue, the ‘debt burden [of microfinance] has to be placed into a broader context of stagnant or declining household income (agrarian crisis), inexistent or weak social protection and growing consumption needs not only among middle classes but also among the so-called “poor”’. While, as highlighted above, the benefits for clients from financial inclusion have not been clearly established, the benefits for capital-owners are evident. Being able to financially engage with millions of new entrants into the global financial system through MFIs has offered investors a new pool of investable assets. Actors in

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financial markets, including hedge funds, pension funds and private individuals, have taken a keen interest in microlending. Lastly, financial inclusion connects increasingly with a disturbing trend of individualization and victim blaming in the development space. The breakthrough of behavioural economics in the field of development (demarcated recently by the 2015 World Development Report, WDR, see World Bank 2015), has brought a polarized vision of ‘right’ versus ‘wrong’ individual behaviours, and a focus on instilling new, povertyovercoming, attitudes among the poor. With its explanation of persistent poverty as resulting from poor individuals’ misbehaviour, behavioural economics offers a convenient explanation for the failures of many past development interventions. In the WDR, the World Bank argues that poor people often suffer from particular cognitive abnormalities, which past interventions have insufficiently accounted for. It argues that their judgements and choices are conditioned by mental shortcuts, social biases, and norms or constraints which are imposed by poverty itself, leading them to make less than optimal choices. Moreover, this approach is highly individualistic, promoting a vision of society as constituted by atomized individual decisions, while ignoring structural causes, interdependencies and group identities as key factors for ‘individual’ decision making (Servet 2018). This discourse opens new avenues for development interventions to seek to overcome poverty via behavioural instruments that lead poor people to make the ostensibly ‘right’ choices (see Karlan and Appel 2011). Financial instruments – including savings, financial education and microloans – fit seamlessly into this new focus on creating the ‘right’ beneficiary behaviour. They offer a lens for studying low income people’s cognitive dispositions (via the intricate data that financial transactions generate), as well as prospective tools reshaping people’s ‘decision architectures’ with financial nudges and incentives.

THE VALUE OF FINANCIAL INCLUSION This chapter has critically and empirically examined financial inclusion, with a particular focus on understanding what remains its key component: microfinance. Microfinance, we saw, reached its zenith of popularity in the late 2000s, and has since been gradually displaced in development discourse by the more amorphous concept of financial inclusion. The focus in financial inclusion is increasingly on technological innovations, on fostering individualistic solutions to development problems, and using finance to elicit ‘correct’ developmental

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behaviours among poor people. We examined the evidence for and against poverty alleviation and women’s empowerment from financial services, and discussed the problem of microfinance’s tendency toward crises, the problem of mission drift, and the industry’s fixation on credit. We argued that recent suggestions of financial inclusion driving growth and development are based on poor evidence and logic, and we connected financial inclusion with the recent behavioural turn in development economics and the broader financialization and marketization of development. To conclude: what is the value of financial inclusion? Financial inclusion is neither inherently good, nor bad; ‘inclusion’ per se is neither a positive nor a negative thing. It depends on what it is that people are becoming included in, and on what (and whose) terms they will be included. We find that inclusion in the global financial system has proven, so far, to be an ambivalent experience for the poor, bringing them new potential freedoms and hopes for self-development, as well as debt traps and new channels of exploitation. Unless the rules and power relations of the financial system change, it stands to reason that new (digital) technologies will not significantly improve poverty outcomes.

REFERENCES Afonso, J.S., S. Morvant-Roux, I. Guérin and D. Forcella (2016), ‘Doing Good by Doing Well? Microfinance, Self-Regulation and Borrowers’ Over-indebtedness in the Dominican Republic: Overindebtedness and self-regulation’, Journal of International Development, 29(7), 919–935. Angelucci, M., D. Karlan and J. Zinman (2015), ‘Microcredit Impacts: Evidence from a Randomized Microcredit Program Placement Experiment by Compartamos Banco’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 7(1), 151–182. Arcand, J.L., E. Berkes and U. Panizza (2015), ‘Too Much Finance?’, Journal of Economic Growth, 20(2), 105–48. Augsburg, B., R. De Haas, H. Harmgart and C. Meghir (2015), ‘The Impacts of Microcredit: Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 7(1), 183–203. Banerjee, A., E. Duflo, R. Glennerster and C. Kinnan (2015), ‘The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 7(1), 22–53. Banerjee, A. and A. Newman (1993), ‘Occupational Choice and the Process of Development’, Journal of Political Economy, 101(2), 274–298. Baron, C., J. Greene, P. Mader and S. Morvant-Roux (2019), Water-Microcredit Models and Market Inclusion: Shifting Debts and Responsibility. IDS Working Paper 522, January. Bateman, M. (2010), Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism. London: Zed Books. Bateman, M. and H.-J. Chang (2012), ‘Microfinance and the Illusion of Development: From Hubris to Nemesis in Thirty Years’, World Social and Economic Review, 1, 13–36.

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428 Handbook of social policy and development Beck, T., A. Demirgüc-Kunt and R. Levine (2007), ‘Finance, Inequality and the Poor’, Journal of Economic Growth, 12(1), 27–49. Carlberg, T., Y. Lien, M. Gomez, A. Nayar, A.J. Dougherty, J.A. Gugelev and E. Boll (2016), ‘Small Merchants, Big Opportunity: The Forgotten Path to Financial Inclusion’, Dalberg Advisors and Global Development Incubator Report, November. Carroll, T. (2012), ‘Working On, Through and Around the State: The Deep Marketisation of Development in the Asia-Pacific’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 42, 378–404. Collins, D., J. Morduch, S. Rutherford and O. Ruthven (2009), Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crépon, B., F. Devoto, E. Duflo and W. Parienté (2015), ‘Estimating the Impact of Microcredit on Those Who Take It Up: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Morocco’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 7(1), 123–150. Crucifix, C. and S. Morvant-Roux (2019), ‘Fragmented Rural Communities: the Faenas of Prospera at the Interface of Community Cooperation and State Dependency’, in M.E. Balen and M. Fotta (eds), Money from the Government in Latin America: Conditional Cash Transfer Programs and Rural Lives. Abingdon, Oxon and New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 81–97. Cull, R., A. Demirgüç-Kunt and J. Morduch (2009), ‘Microfinance Meets the Market’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 23(1), 167–192. Cull, R. and J. Morduch (2017), ‘Microfinance and Economic Development’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, No 8252, 27 November. Demirgüç-Kunt, A., T. Beck and P. Honohan (2008),‘Finance for All ? Policies and Pitfalls in Expanding Access’, Policy Research Report. Washington, DC: World Bank. Dupas, P. and J. Robinson (2013), ‘Savings Constraints and Microenterprise Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 5(1), 163–192. Duvendack, M., R. Palmer-Jones, J.G. Copestake, L. Hooper, Y. Loke and N. Rao (2011), ‘What is the Evidence of the Impact of Microfinance on the Well-Being of Poor People?’, Technical Report, EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, University of London. Duvendack, M., R. Palmer-Jones and J. Vaessen (2014), ‘Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Microcredit on Women’s Control over Household Decisions: Methodological Issues and Substantive Findings’, Journal of Development Effectiveness, 6(2), 73–96. The Economist (2014), ‘Poor Service: Tiny Loans are Getting More Expensive’, The Economist, 1 February. Francis, E., J. Blumenstock and J. Robinson (2017), ‘Digital Credit: A Snapshot of the Current Landscape and Open Research Questions’, BREAD Working Paper No. 516. Galor, O. and J. Zeira (1993), ‘Income Distribution and Macroeconomics’, Review of Economic Studies, 60(1), 35–52. Gloukoviezoff, G. (2010), L’exclusion bancaire. Le lien social à l’épreuve de la rentabilité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (PUF). GPFI (2014), ‘2014 Financial Inclusion Action Plan’, Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion, 2 September, accessed 21 June 2016 at http://gpfi.org/sites/default/files/ documents/2014_g20_financial_ inclusion_action_plan.pdf. GSMA (2017), ‘State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money. Decade Edition: 2006 – 2016’. London: GSMA. Guérin, I. (2015), La microfinance et ses dérives: émanciper, discipliner ou exploiter. Paris: Demopolis. Guérin, I., S. Kumar and I. Agier (2013), ‘Women’s Empowerment: Power to Act or Power over Other Women? Lessons from Indian Microfinance’, Oxford Development Studies, 41, S76–S94. Guérin, I., M. Labie and J.-M. Servet (eds) (2015), The Crises of Microcredit. London: Zed Books.

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Financial inclusion and microfinance 429 Guérin, I., S. Morvant-Roux and M. Villarreal (eds) (2013a), Microfinance, Debt and Over-Indebtedness: Juggling with Money. London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge. Hoff, K. and G. Varun (2015), ‘World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior’, accessed 10 April 2018 at http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr 2015. Jalilian, J. and C. Kirkpatrick (2005), ‘Does Financial Development Contribute to Poverty Reduction?’, Journal of Development Studies, 41(4), 636–656. Karim, L. (2011), Microcredit and its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Karlan, D.S. and J. Appel (2011), More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty. New York: Dutton. King, R. and R. Levine (1993), ‘Finance and Growth: Schumpeter Might be Right’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108(3), 717–37. Mader, P. (2013), ‘Rise and Fall of Microfinance in India: The Andhra Pradesh Crisis in Perspective’, Strategic Change, 22, 47–66. Mader, P. (2015), The Political Economy of Microfinance: Financializing Poverty. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McDonald, D.A. (ed.) (2014), Rethinking Corporatization and Public Services in the Global South. London: Zed Books. MIX (2018), Financial Inclusion Data. Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX), Washington, DC, accessed 2 February 2018 at www.themix.org. Morvant-Roux, S. and J.-Y. Moisseron (2019), ‘Collective Resistances to Microcredit in Morocco’, in M. Bateman, S. Blakenburg and R. Kozul-Wright (eds), The Rise and Fall of Global Microcredit. Development, Debt and Disillusion. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 216–229. Morvant-Roux, S. and M. Roesch (2015), ‘The Social Credibility of Microcredit in Morocco after the Default Crisis’, in I. Guerin, J.-M. Servet and M. Labie (eds), The Crises of Microcredit. London: Zed Books. Reed, L. (2014), Resilience: The State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report, 2014. Washington, DC: Microcredit Summit Campaign. Roy, S. (2010), Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. New York: Routledge. Schicks, J. (2014), ‘Over-Indebtedness in Microfinance – An Empirical Analysis of Related Factors on the Borrower Level’, World Development, 54, 301–324. Schmidt, R.H., H.D. Seibel and P. Thomes (2016), From Microfinance to Inclusive Banking: Why Local Banking Works. Weinheim: Wiley, Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co, KGaA. Servet, J.-M. (2018), L’économie comportementale en question. Paris: Charles Léopold Mayer. Shiva, V. (2002), Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit. London: Pluto Press. Sinclair, H. (2012), Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: How Microlending Lost Its Way and Betrayed the Poor (1st edn). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Soederberg, S. (2014), Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population. London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Stewart, R., C. van Rooyen, M. Korth, A. Chereni, N. Rebelo Da Silva and T. de Wet (2012), ‘Do Micro-Credit, Micro-Savings and Micro-Leasing Serve as Effective Financial Inclusion Interventions Enabling Poor People, and Especially Women, to Engage in Meaningful Economic Opportunities in Low- and Middle-Income Countries? A Systematic Review of the Evidence’, Technical report, EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, University of London. Tarozzi, A., J. Desai and K. Johnson (2015), ‘The Impacts of Microcredit: Evidence from Ethiopia’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 7(1), 54–89.

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430 Handbook of social policy and development Turnell, S. (2005), ‘The Rise and Fall of Cooperative Credit in Colonial Burma’, Macquarie University, Department of Economics Research Papers 0509. Vaessen, J., A. Rivas, M. Duvendack, R. Palmer Jones, F. Leeuw, G. Van Gils, R. Lukach, N. Holvoet and J. Bastiaensen (2014), ‘The Effects of Microcredit on Women’s Control over Household Spending in Developing Countries’, Campbell Systematic Reviews, 2014: 8. Weber, H. (2002), ‘The Imposition of a Global Development Architecture: The Example of Microcredit’, Review of International Studies, 28, 537–555. World Bank (2014), ‘Global Financial Development Report 2014: Financial Inclusion’, Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (2015), ‘World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior’, Washington, DC: World Bank Group.

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23. Community development programmes Manohar Pawar

The importance of community development programmes (CDPs) for social policies and development can hardly be overemphasized. This chapter first discusses the meaning of ‘community’ and ‘community development’ in both historical and contemporary contexts, and traces the roots of community development in the colonial period and developed countries. It suggests to critically look at such history, rather than merely following what is stated in the literature. Second, it briefly discusses six core strategies of and for CDPs. These are: understanding community, awareness raising, leadership development, mobilizing people and forming groups, mobilizing resources, and bottom-up approaches. Third, for heuristic purposes, the chapter organizes and summarizes a wide range of CDPs under ten interconnected categories. Broadly, CDPs may be delineated under the agriculture sector, co-operatives, displacement and resettlement of people, economic development activities, education, health, infrastructure development, natural resource management, service delivery, and spiritual/cultural/recreation activities. Fourth, it identifies six types of organizations and institutions engaged in CDPs. Lastly, it points out some of the strengths of and critique on CDPs. In the conclusion, the chapter argues that CDPs have tremendous scope and potential, but implementing them according to community development values and principles is yet to be realized. However, successful and heartening community development examples, though isolated, make a sound case for scaling up CDPs at all levels.

ORIGIN AND CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES As community organization and development are both the means and the end of policy formulation, implementation and evaluation, and development, it is important to develop a conceptual clarity of these terms. Understanding community organization and development in contemporary contexts is complex, as the traditional understanding of the community may not be adequate and may not capture the types of communities we 431

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live in. By analysing 94 definitions of community, Hillery (1955) identified three most common elements of the concept of community, in terms of geographic area, common ties and social interaction. Other community development scholars (e.g., Stepney and Popple 2008; Ife 2013) have discussed the concept of community by identifying five core characteristics: size of the population, commonality among people, identity and belonging, primary relationship and attachment, and local culture. In the relatively fast urbanizing, digitally dominating world, community needs to be understood beyond these characteristics as some communities are operating beyond geographic area, comprehensive common ties and face-to-face interaction. Thus the new concept and reconstruction of the community must reflect the constantly changing nature of people and their communities. In the contemporary world, communities may be understood in terms of three overlapping types that may or may not be connected to each other. The first and most fundamental aspects of community are people and place in terms of geography or locality, close or distant; and mutual or otherwise interaction among people that creates a relative sense of belongingness and attachment both with people and the place. In the second type, there are communities of people without any specified geographic locality, but their sense of community is developed due to common backgrounds, interests or issues such as religion, ethnicity, place of origin, language, sports or hobbies, disability, child care, youth, ageing, and so on. The second type may be labelled as target and/or interest-based community. The third type is a virtual community that has spread the community net by drastically reducing time and space, where interactions occur and relationships develop with or without physical proximity, and beyond geographical locality (Pawar 2010). Development of such communities or community development is often understood from normative perspectives in terms of process and principles (see Midgley 1986; Pawar 2014a; Westoby 2014). For example, often community development practice emphasizes participatory and empowering processes, where the core focus is on people-centred development. Essential values and principles of community development are human rights, self-reliance, self-determination and participation (Pawar 2010, 2014a), though other scholars have listed several principles of community development (see Ife 2013; Kenny 2007; Schuler 1996). Normative community development practice requires community organization in terms of raising awareness, advocacy, mobilizing and organizing people and resources by skilful community workers and leaders. Thus community organization is the foundation for community development practice. Taking all these into consideration, community development may be

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ideally defined ‘as a participatory people-centred process that involves bringing together, mobilizing or organizing people (and resources), keeping them together and enabling them to work together to address their needs and issues so as to facilitate their own, their communities’ and society’s comprehensive development’ (Pawar 2010, p. 39). However, the phrase ‘community development’ is an inclusive and exhaustive concept, and people use it in a broad sense to refer to any micro to macro-level activity relating to economic development, politics, health, education, sports and recreation. For various reasons, there is often a tendency to focus on only a few activities of community development. Community development from a social development perspective calls for comprehensive development of people and their communities by focusing on all dimensions or facets of development (see Midgley 2014; Pawar 2014a). Community Development’s Roots in the Colonial Period and in (Western) Developed Countries Tracing the origin and history of community development depends upon which source one refers to. It appears that understanding the origin and history of community development is limited by authors’ (in)ability to comprehensively explore its roots. Some attribute the origin of community development programmes and activities to British colonies in Africa, in the Americas and in India. Midgley (1995, p. 55) notes that successful mass education programmes in West Africa were brought under the phrase ‘community development’, which also included women’s activities, youth services, infrastructure development projects, and health and sanitary services. At a conference of colonial welfare administrators in 1948, the term ‘community development’ was formally adopted to replace ‘mass education’. In the seventeenth century, several church-based organizations such as the Dutch Reformed Church of New Amsterdam (now New York) and the Scots Charitable Society in Boston initiated community-based social welfare programmes to aid the poor and needy in North America (Brueggemann 2013). To respond to the prevailing conditions and issues in the nineteenth century, unions, community-based social organizations, charitable societies and settlement houses emerged. Toynbee Hall, established in 1884, and development of settlements houses in London and elsewhere in Europe, and their spread, needs to be taken into account in tracing the history of community development. Although community development type activities such as Gandhian village work, Rabindranath Tagore’s rural reconstruction at Sriniketan, and similar efforts in a small number of

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villages can be traced in India during the pre- and post-war era (but ‘the colonial state did little to develop them’; Immerwahr 2015, p. 71), a pilot project in the villages of Etawah district in Uttar Pradesh established the foundation of community development work in the post-independent India (Immerwahr 2015). Through this project, ‘workers distributed seeds, rebuilt public spaces, vaccinated and inoculated villagers, ran hygiene campaigns, and provided superior livestock’ (Immerwahr 2015, pp. 72–73). Community development/rural development/tribal development as state policy/programme was implemented at the national level in India, and similarly many newly independent countries tried to emulate it in the 1950s and 1960s, often with the support of the United Nations and foreign aid. Irrespective of where it started, this type of literature seems to suggest that community development activities began in the British colonies and continued in newly independent countries. To understand the community development history in this way, three observations may be considered. First, the intention or the purpose of community development activities in the British colonies was not really to develop communities, but to spread the colonization process and to extract resources from the colonies (see Midgley 1995, p. 52). Second, understanding the origin of community development in British colonies excludes the other forms of community development activities which appear to have existed before the colonization. For example, in many Indian villages, community resources such as wells, ponds, lakes, common grazing lands, and meeting and resting places were created for the community’s use. Recognition and understanding of such historical community development roots calls for further systematic exploration. Finally, support to community development policies and programmes in newly independent countries had mixed motivations, including preventing the spread of communism during the Cold War era (Kumar 2014).

BASIC STRATEGIES OF AND FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES Depending upon the CDPs – whether developing CDPs, implementing CDPs, or both – in addition to the above-stated values and principles, certain basic strategies are useful and need to be employed; although not all community development programmes may follow them, and that has implications for the effectiveness of programmes. Of the many strategies employed, the following six strategies may be considered essential.

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First is understanding the community. Before developing and implementing CDPs, it is important to understand current community conditions and people’s needs. Such understanding is developed through various research methods such as observation, meetings and discussions, community walks, community mapping, surveys, rapid rural appraisal, cooperative inquiry and appreciative inquiry, and secondary sources such as census and study reports, if available. Second is awareness raising, which is a crucial precursor to any CDP. People need to be made aware of their current conditions and needs, why such conditions exist and what they can do about it. Some community development workers refers to this process as ‘conscientization’, and development of critical consciousness (Freire 1972). Depending upon different cultural contexts, a range of awareness raising methods such as electronic and print media, street plays, puppet plays, community meetings and discussions, public addresses, and spiritual and religious practices may be employed. Along with awareness raising, the third strategy is leadership development. It is vital to identify and develop functional leaders in communities, and they are often the main drivers of the CDPs. Many organizations identify functional leaders in communities relevant to the programmes and offer formal and informal training, including exposure to successful projects to build their capacities. Such leaders are also known as community catalysts or facilitators, who often play important roles in a fourth strategy: mobilizing people and forming groups. Depending upon the community development programme, through the awareness raising and leadership development process people need to be mobilized and operational groups needs to be formed where appropriate. Such groups are also often referred to as community-based organizations (CBOs), which are the main vehicles of CDPs. Any CDP requires both human and material resources, and often the latter depend upon the capacity of the former to mobilize resources, which is a fifth strategy. It is important to explore communities’ own resources before looking outside. Sometimes government approved funds go unutilized due to a lack of awareness of their availability or of capacity to access them. Human, financial and material resources are needed for CDPs and it is vital to mobilize them in a methodical manner from the private and public sector, civil society organizations and communities. Finally, as most of the CDPs have a top-down strategy, it is important to consciously open avenues for bottom-up, participatory strategies. CDPs need not employ only bottom-up or only top-down strategy, as it

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may be practical to see how both strategies can complement each other and coexist.

TYPES OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES As there are a large number of community development programmes and it is not feasible to discuss all of them in this chapter, they are discussed under the following ten broad categories, which are not mutually exclusive and exhaustive. Some of them may overlap, as they are interconnected. They are listed in alphabetical order, suggesting that all categories are equally important. Often CDPs have a particular target or area of focus due to the disadvantages experienced by people or communities, or an obvious need for their development and/or wellbeing. For example, rural development, tribal and indigenous development, slum rehabilitation in urban areas, disaster affected areas, including conflict and war and children/women/elderly. Although such programmes exist in most of the developing and developed countries, a few examples are cited, where relevant, from familiar countries. Agriculture CDPs are extremely relevant in the field of agriculture. In many developing countries, agriculture accounts for 40 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) and 80 per cent of employment. In addition, about 70 per cent of poor live in rural areas, and most of them depend upon agriculture for their livelihoods (World Bank 2007b). A number of community development programmes are linked to increasing agricultural production by understanding and adopting new agriculture systems relating to the use of new plant varieties, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, organic farming, water management and sharing, and land and soil management (see also the section on Natural Resource Management below). A number of government subsidies are provided to enhance access and adoption of the programmes and/or the new agriculture systems. Often agriculture extension workers are employed to work with farmers to help them adopt such new agriculture systems. Irrespective of their designation (as they are not often called community development workers), a number of officials from governmental organizations (GOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) work with farmers to improve their agriculture practices. Community development practices often include information sharing, education, awareness raising, forming

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farmers’ groups for various purposes such as the adoption of new technologies and agriculture practices, water use, watershed development and sustainable agriculture. For example, in Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia, a multi-partnered project has been focusing on markets that are important to the poor, especially land and labour markets; the participation of the poor in global value chains (for example, tea); and developing innovative public–private partnerships to improve the delivery of infrastructure services to the poor (IDS 2007). For examples of supporting and developing small farmers through sustainable agriculture CDPs in Kenya, see SACDEP (2018). In regard to watershed projects, Kerr et al.’s (2002) evaluation showed that projects involving the villagers in planning and decision making performed better than their technocratic, top-down counterparts; but projects that combined participation with sound technical input performed best of all. All projects faced difficulties in ensuring that poor people shared the benefits of watershed development. This is a critical issue for the whole of the agriculture sector, as often the poor are left out. Co-operatives Developing and sustaining co-operatives is a strong and effective CDP, if it operates according to its values and principles. The International Co-operative Alliance (ICA 2007) states that a co-operative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise. The main values of co-operatives are: self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. In the tradition of their founders, co-operative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others. These values are put into practice by following seven principles: voluntary and open membership; democratic member control; members’ economic participation; autonomy and independence; education, training and information; cooperation among cooperatives; and concern for community. Since the 1960s, the co-operative concept and strategy has been applied in several sectors ranging from agriculture and primary industries to manufacturing and services industries in developing and developed countries. More than half of the co-operative members are in the Asia-Pacific region (China, 180 million; India, 236 million; Malaysia 5.4 million; and Singapore, 1.4 million). The effective and successful operation of co-operatives differs greatly (see Attwood and Baviskar 1993).

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As many elements and aspects of co-operatives and community development appear similar, except where economic outcomes become the major concern, co-operative approaches have been employed to bring together the most disadvantaged people, engage them in socially and economically productive activities, eliminate or significantly reduce exploitation suffered by the poor, and enhance social and economic outcomes. For example, in the Philippines, India and Indonesia, to help the most disadvantaged children, young people and urban migrants, scavenger co-operatives have been formed. Medina (2000) argues that scavenger co-operatives can promote grassroots development in an economically viable, socially desirable and environmentally sound manner. The Korean Federation of Community Credit Cooperatives (2005) offers welfare facilities and services such as babysitting, orphanages, nursing homes, wedding halls, and so on for profit, and other welfare supports for free. In India, the Warana Group of Cooperatives is a successful example showing how co-operatives can contribute to rural community development in terms of economy, polity, health, education and culture. Displacement and Resettlement The phenomenon of displacement and settlement provides opportunities for developing and implementing a range of CDPs, including the nine categories listed here. This field is specifically identified due to its significance and the necessity of CDPs. People are displaced due to a range of natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and cyclones; and human-led disasters such as development projects, conflicts and wars, refugee movements and camps, and major accidents. In all these disasterled displacements, CDPs are needed during the relief operations and post-disaster situations. It is also important to attend to the needs of vulnerable groups, including children, women and the elderly. Depending upon the nature of disasters and their consequences, CDPs may be devised to deal with mass grief and trauma, developing mass resilience, health issues and needs, mobilizing and managing volunteers and civil society organizations, extending relief services to vulnerable groups, and creating and managing temporary shelters. When displacement occurs due to development projects such as building big dams, bridges or roads, or mining, CDPs need to focus on people’s participation in decision making in relation to their choice of settlement and related infrastructure development, including rehabilitation programmes. It is important to ensure that people’s human rights are not violated in the name of development. In many development projects, there are several instances of inadequate rehabilitation of people affected by them, or

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rehabilitation measures that do not meet the felt needs of people. Where large development projects are environmentally and socially unsustainable and detrimental to the livelihood of people, particularly the poor, people have organized themselves, from grassroots levels to international levels, mobilized communities and developed coalitions to halt or significantly modify some proposed development projects (for example, the Narmada Dam Project and environmental activism in India). In the conflict and war-torn communities, it is important to initiate CDPs to build peace and to promote community social integration, including by creating safe conditions for returning refugees. The World Bank’s (2006) community-driven development (CDD) projects have been implemented in post-conflict situations in Nepal, Timor-Leste, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iraq, the Philippines and Tajikistan, with varying degrees of success (see also Mercy Corps 2010). Economic Development Activities A number of economic development projects are initiated under CDPs. Other CDPs such as agriculture, co-operatives, infrastructure development are closely connected to economic development activities. Often economic development projects dominate or gain priority to the neglect of other community development programmes, due to the importance of raising the economic standards of individuals and communities. Usually community development programmes are geared towards vocational training and knowledge and skills development (for example, electrical and mechanical courses, tailoring, local arts, crafts and trade, micro-level manufacturing), and employment generation projects in local contexts. Although self-help groups (SHGs) are formed, developed and employed in wide-ranging community development programmes, they have been extensively used in microcredit and microfinance schemes, which mainly include small economic enterprises that directly benefit individual members of the SHGs by lifting their income levels, which in turn positively (though gradually) impact on other aspects of life such as health, education and housing, thereby often lifting these people out of poverty and generally improving their standard of living. The Grameen Bank’s work in Bangladesh is an exemplar in this area. The Grameen Trust of Bangladesh has supported 138 organizations in 37 countries, including China, Viet Nam, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Nepal and Pakistan. In addition, microfinance schemes, village savings and loan associations (VSLA) in the Chars project in Bangladesh, and the community development fund (CDF) in China are being trialled. Through the CDF, poor and female-headed households can obtain small loans to pursue income

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generation activities, with the community deciding on the norms for making loans (see World Bank 2007a). For example, at the individual and family level, small loans and subsidies are provided to purchase a goat, cow, buffalo, hens or machinery to increase their income levels. At the group level, social and community enterprises are also developed to enhance employment and economic activities in communities. Social enterprise often involves organizing disadvantaged people to develop their skills and capacities, and to run an ethical enterprise to earn their livelihood and meet some needs of the community. At a relatively macro level, economic development activities include creating employment opportunities by attracting industries at the local level and creating public infrastructure projects. Educational Activities Here, the term ‘education’ is used in a broad sense to cover both formal and informal education, and adult education, including awareness raising activities. In many community development programmes, educational activities form the foundation of the programme. Without educating and raising awareness, people cannot be mobilized and organized. As stated earlier, historically, CDPs originated from educational activities in colonies. Educational activities mainly include providing access to communities for preschool, primary, secondary and tertiary education, and adult education for those who have missed opportunities of formal education. At each level of education significant resources need to be mobilized by engaging communities, GOs, NGOs and the private sector. The real challenge lies in providing access to education in rural and remote, and indigenous communities, and increasing the take-up by those communities and preventing drop-outs. At the national level, a popular preschool education programme was the Integrated Child Development Scheme in India, where local community members were engaged to some extent in offering this service. Although GOs are lead providers of educational programmes, many civil society organizations and missionaries are actively engaged in creating educational opportunities in rural and remote areas. Some civil society organizations periodically distribute free educational materials to disadvantaged families and communities. Friere’s (1972) ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ is a good example of an educational programme for community development.

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Health-Related Activities Like education, health is another major area of community development programmes. Both preventive and promotive work is carried out through such projects. Traditionally, programmes have focused on child and maternal health with a view to reducing the mortality of both, timely immunization, nutritious food (awareness and or supply), pre- and postnatal care, family planning, and similar. In relation to these, many educational and awareness programmes are implemented. In regard to meeting the health needs of specific groups such as the disabled, the aged and the mentally ill, advocacy and activism are also initiated under CDPs. Depending upon the need and opportunities, different health camps are conducted in communities and free medical services are offered. At a larger level, it is not uncommon to engage in public health issues such as cleanliness drives, malaria and HIV/AIDS prevention activities, and reducing environmental pollution. In relation to these, new CDPs have emerged under water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) policies, particularly focusing on deprived, disadvantaged, rural and urban slum communities. A number of local and international organizations have engaged with communities to provide access to safe and clean drinking water. The Right to Water (2007) website states that the right to water is being used by communities worldwide to make a difference to people’s lives, in the context of many and varied issues, such as equitable access, the building of dams, environmental rights, indigenous rights, pollution, poverty reduction, privatization, and watershed disputes. Many of the most sustainable and effective projects around the right to water are those undertaken by individuals and communities at the grassroots level (see the story of the Arvari River Parliament, India, at the Right to Water website), largely because such projects provide a sense of ownership by these communities over their own rights. Community managed water systems, for example, have not only proven to be successful in safeguarding and rejuvenating existing water resources, but also to be cost-effective and sustainable. To prevent public defecation, government and non-governmental organizations are working together to provide appropriate sanitation in both rural and urban areas. The initiative of the Clean India Movement (Swacha Bharat Mission) and the involvement of a large number of communities and organizations in this movement is an apt example. Globally, a number of sanitation projects are implemented by developing partnerships among GOs, NGOs and international NGOs (INGOs), and aid agencies, for example, the United Nations International Children’s

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Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID), Care International, Concern Worldwide, PLAN International, and the World Bank. For example, in South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan) and East Asia (Cambodia, China and Indonesia), innovative community-led total sanitation (CLTS) projects have been implemented on a pilot basis and replicated elsewhere. Infrastructure Development Activities Physical and social infrastructure development are crucial aspects of community development programmes and often they are one of the means or motivating factors to bring people of a community together. Basic infrastructure development projects may include building community centres, schools or additional school rooms, playgrounds, wells, health centres, places of worship, and the like. Sometimes, such infrastructure is created by the community’s people themselves as they mobilize both material and human resources in a self-reliant manner. Sometimes, they contribute labour and materials are supplied by GOs or NGOs. Or sometimes, they simply supervise. In such projects it is important to engage people and communities so that such infrastructure is effectively used for the purpose it is meant for. Rebuilding such infrastructure in disaster-affected areas is also undertaken. There are also state-initiated relatively large infrastructure projects such as building roads and bridges at the local levels. The Gram Panchayat (elected village body) in India is responsible for planning and implementing social and economic development programmes for the village, and these bodies have undertaken village-level infrastructure development projects (building roads, sanitation, wells, repair and maintenance work) as determined by the village assembly. The Indonesian government’s Kecamatan Development Program (KDP), with the support of donor agencies and the World Bank, improved access to markets, town centres, education and health facilities, and clean water supply (Guggenheim et al. 2004). In the Philippines, the Department of Social Welfare and Development implemented similar projects, which aimed to cover 25 per cent of the poorest municipalities in the poorest 42 (out of 79) provinces. The World Bank (2007a) under the community-driven development (CDD) programme has implemented a small-scale infrastructure and services improvement programme in China. In most of the rural and remote areas, a lack of basic infrastructure leads to greater challenges in accessing various services such as health, education and markets. Community-led infrastructure has helped to overcome such challenges.

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Natural Resource Management As natural resource management (NRM) is a vast area for community development practice, CDPs are employed in social forestry, water management, land management and similar related areas (Pawar 2010). Generally, poor and indigenous people’s lives are at stake when access to their forests, water and land is denied due to developmental projects, natural resource protection laws, or their overuse or pollution by outsiders (for example, tourists). There are efforts to organize affected people and stakeholders to ensure sustainable NRM and livelihoods for the poor and indigenous peoples, though a lot more needs to be accomplished. There are also efforts to protect people from punitive or unfair law enforcement. Community forestry essentially involves raising awareness among various stakeholders (community members, groups, local bodies and NGOs) and developing necessary policies and procedures and decision making by organizing and involving community people so as to sustain forests and livelihoods, particularly for poor people. For example, in Nepal, a community forestry project facilitates people’s participation and access to resources to strengthen linkages between service deliverers and communities by recruiting and training local people as facilitators who work with community forestry user groups (CFUGs) (IDS 2007; Race et al. 2017). The World Bank (2007a) through its CDD programme has implemented an NRM project by involving local communities in China, where communities were free to choose needsbased NRM projects such as measures to reduce fuelwood consumption through promotion of alternative fuel sources (for example, biogas), or through increased use of high-efficiency stoves, and support for local reforestation or erosion control. CDPs are effectively used to support the movement of water commons, which emphasizes that water belongs to all humanity and it is no one’s property (Urs and Whittell 2009). In Australia, Land Care, a community-based approach, is based on the concept and practice of community members providing their time and energy to identify, plan and implement on-ground works, and it has 4250 groups (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry 2008). These and similar examples show the increasing relevance of CDPs in NRM. Service Delivery In some CDPs, delivering basic services such as food, water and clothing, medicine and similar materials, is necessary, at least initially, due to the recipients’ circumstances, particularly certain vulnerable groups such as children, women, HIV/AIDS related orphans and the

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elderly, and the extremely poor (Hall and Midgley 2004). Without such initial service delivery, it is difficult to ask for their participation. Disaster situations, droughts, refugee circumstances and the like call for the service delivery approach as part of the CDP. Different issue-based and/or needs-based groups can be formed at different levels to share experiences and seek support, raise issues, exert pressure and introduce necessary policy and programme changes to meet the needs of various groups. Sometimes, community development practice is restricted to organizing welfare services for such vulnerable groups. Comprehensive community development requires addressing many other socio-economic and political issues and needs, along with the specific rights and needs of vulnerable groups. Globally, in many local communities vulnerable groups have been neglected, particularly in rural areas. Perhaps, depending upon the community, addressing their issues through needed service delivery without increasing dependency could be a good entry point to communities, and such entry may be steered to facilitate participation of people in the overall development of communities. Such service delivery may also be needed across a range of CDPs such as education and health, discussed here. Many governments have means-tested public distribution systems, including ‘food for work’ programmes, yet many are left out from such systems. For the homeless, refugees, migrants and the poor, such services are also provided in developed countries. Spiritual, Cultural and Recreational, and Youth Development Spiritual, faith-based, cultural and recreational activities constitute significant aspects of CDPs, though many community development texts do not explicitly acknowledge the role they play in communities and people’s lives. Depending upon each community context, it is often useful and effective to draw on people’s spiritual and faith-based dimensions. It is an important method to mobilize people and communities, where it works, for community development tasks. In many local communities people assemble in such places and are willing to contribute to creating such places by mobilizing their own resources (see Hazare 2003). Similarly, CDPs are needed to promote community cultural activities such as music, drama and festivals, which also facilitate some people’s participation in community development. Further, age-appropriate sports and recreational activities can also be conducted to engage people in CDPs. Towards this end, it is also important to make use of existing policies and programmes. Spiritual, cultural and recreational activities and/or sports clubs are important platforms for engaging and developing youth groups, for their own development and the development of their communities. Many civil

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society organizations try to engage youth in this way, and they can provide good bases for developing youth groups, organizations and leadership, which can be engaged in a range of CDPs according to their interests. Youth development is a priority area for most governments, and each country has relatively well developed policies and programmes for youth health, education and employment, and for the overall social development of youth. Such policies and programmes, and their effective operation, is particularly important in countries such as Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the United States, where youth population is of a significant proportion. A lot more focus and effort are needed to develop youth leadership locally and globally (see Foundation for Leadership Initiatives 2018).

INSTITUTIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS ENGAGED IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES Having discussed these ten categories of CDPs, it is important to look at the institutions and organizations engaged in implementing them. Institutions and organizations engaged in CDPs and activities may be delineated into six types. First, without any external organization’s involvement, communities themselves come together, form formal or informal groups and associations, and initiate any of the above-discussed community development programmes. Generally, they are interest-based or needs-focused, have higher commitment and participation, and strong volunteerism. Often they are effective, whether they are conformative or confrontative and change-oriented. For example, people engage in sports, recreational or cultural or spiritual activities, building community resources such as temples or centres. Second are a range of charitable organizations such as faith-based organizations, Rotary Clubs and Lions Clubs. Generally, they are motivated by their own faith, compassion and sympathy, follow a giving approach that may or may not address the need, issue or cause. It may also cause dependency and stigma, and may or may not contribute to sustainable community development. Third are NGOs and international NGOs (INGOs). Some of them are highly professional, try to enhance the participation of people and communities, and reach out to communities where other organizations have failed. But not all NGOs or INGOs engage in CDPs; their activity often depends upon their external funding and is driven by funders’ requirements and agendas, though there are recent efforts to change this culture. Fourth is the private sector,

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including philanthropists, trusts and foundations, often linked to corporations and industry, small or big. They tend to operate under the corporate social responsibility banner. Some directly engage in CDPs, some provide funding, and some do both. They are also driven by their own agendas, with wide-ranging effectiveness, though there are some attempts to take into consideration community needs and issues. Fifth are GOs, including the United Nations, which are the major players of community development. They set the national-level macro community development policies and programmes, and supply the necessary personnel support to implement them. Often they follow a top-down, targetoriented approach, though with good intentions, but the effectiveness and efficiency varies and so does the participation of people and communities in the programmes. The sixth type of organizations engaged in CDPs are not entirely new, but they are often known as private–public partnerships, which may theoretically include any combination of GOs, NGOs, INGOs, corporates, philanthropists, charities and communities, but the partnership is often between the government and the private sector. These are important initiatives, and while it may be too early to draw conclusions about their functioning and effectiveness, generally there are heartening indications of good work and outcomes when there is a genuine and respectful partnership.

MAJOR STRENGTHS OF AND CRITIQUE OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES CDPs, if designed and implemented appropriately, can empower both the individuals and communities engaged in them, and others more generally. Their core strength lies in the participatory, human rights and democratic values and principles they follow. CDPs were developed in response to social needs and to inadequacies of other approaches such as case work, work with individuals and clinical work, though such approaches have their own place in the overall community development. CDPs are an effective and efficient way of delivering social policies and programmes as they often lead to better outreach and outcomes. They focus on the whole community, not on one individual, and particularly on the disadvantaged and marginalized groups, thereby trying to reduce poverty and inequality, and imbalances in power dynamics. Through CDPs it is feasible to raise mass awareness, mobilize and organize people and systematically employ this organized force to resolve issues and to meet felt needs of the community. CDPs increase community capacity and ownership, and a sense of pride and relationship between people.

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Through CDPs such as mass awareness and education, it is possible to introduce social change and transformation by contributing to policy formulation, implementation and evaluation, and development. Building communities, in terms of both social and physical infrastructure, benefits all. CDPs are also flexible, including a wide range of approaches and programmes from local to global, rural to urban, and from relatively stable to radical. They can be accountable for their resources and sustainability. Against the threat of growing urbanization, modernization and digitalization, conscious CDP efforts give hope for retaining some vital elements of community life. Although there are several strengths of properly conceptualized and implemented CDPs, they have often been subjected to some common critiques: 1.

CDPs may fail due to a top-down approach and a lack of community participation, engagement and consultation. Without community participation and consultation, many CDPs do not meet the felt needs of the community, and that in turn leads to underutilization, misuse or abuse of the service provided. A lack of sustainability is an important issue in CDPs. In some communities it is challenging to initiate and enhance community participation due to various factors, including extreme poverty and prevailing power dynamics, and unfavourable power structures. Closely related to this, is that CDPs meant for the poor, marginalized and disadvantaged groups are often captured by local elites. In the implementation of CDPs, there was also a lack of coordination among bureaucratic departments and the other sectors (Korten 1980; Pawar 2014b). How to reach-out to the most poor and neglected, and to rural and remote areas, is a critical challenge. Sometimes CDP efforts feed into exploitative hands. As stated earlier, historically CDPs appear to have had mixed motivations behind them. Similarly, liberal government regimes appear to have embraced community development policies and programmes, but their motivation is unclear as communities are asked to take more responsibility for themselves.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

The discussion in this chapter has clearly demonstrated that CDPs are directly relevant to policy formulation, implementation and evaluation,

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and overall development. Irrespective of the dynamic meaning of ‘community’ and the changing nature of communities, and the evolution of CDPs, it is necessary to have a wide range of CDPs: to improve agriculture and extension work, co-operative movements, the resettlement of people who have been displaced due to various reasons, and economic development with a focus on reducing poverty and inequality, on education, health, infrastructure, natural resource management, and service delivery without leading to dependency. It is also crucial to use CDPs for spiritual and cultural development, particularly development of youth, focusing on moral and ethical development as well as leadership. This chapter has collected a wide range of CDPs into ten categories and presented them in alphabetical order, suggesting that all are equally important for social policy and development. Others may look at CDPs in different ways and organize them differently. Similarly, the six core strategies of and for CDPs presented here may be perceived and devised differently by different readers. These strategies stem from the basic values and principles of CDPs such as human rights, self-reliance, self-determination and participation. One of the main challenges for community development is in implementing CDPs according to these values and principles. Although there are some encouraging community development examples according to these values and principles, many CDPs do not follow them, and that is a great challenge for contemporary and future policy makers and community development practitioners. Many of the strengths and critiques related to community development may be linked to following or not following these values and principles. Unlike in previous decades, when the state was the only main player in CDPs, today, as discussed, many organizations and institutions, CBOs, GOs, NGOs, charities, corporates and public–private partnerships, are engaged in CDPs. The growing economy and digital technology have significantly reduced the distance between places and have enabled fast communications between people. By investing significantly in training and development, devising innovative needs-based social policies and programmes, and bringing together all partners and stakeholders, it is possible to practice values or principles-based community development now and in the future at both local and global levels.

REFERENCES Attwood, D.W. and Baviskar, B.S. (eds) (1993), Who Shares? Co-operatives and Rural Development, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Community development programmes 449 Brueggemann, W.G. (2013), ‘History and context for community practice in North America’, in Marie Weil, Michael Reisch and Mary L. Ohmer (eds), The Handbook of Community Practice, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (2008), ‘Fact sheets, natural resource management, Australia’, accessed 2 February 2009 at http://www.daffa.gov.au/naturalresources/about_natural_resource_management/factsheets. Foundation for Leadership Initiatives (2018), ‘Foundation for leadership initiatives’, accessed 26 March 2018 at www.f4leadershipinitiatives.org. Freire, Paulo (1972), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Sheed & Ward. Guggenheim, S., Wiranto, T., Prasta, Y. and Wong, S. (2004), ‘Indonesia’s Kecamatan development program: a large-scale use of community development to reduce poverty’, accessed 29 May 2007 at http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContent Server/WDSP/IB/2004/12/03/000090341_20041203153406/Rendered/PDF/307790IND 0KDP0cty0devt01see0also0307591.pdf. Hall, A. and Midgley, J. (2004), Social Policy for Development, London: SAGE. Hazare, A. (2003), My Village- My Sacred Land, Ralegan Siddhi: Ralegan Siddhi Pariwar. Hillery, George, A. (1955), ‘Definitions of community: areas of agreement’, Rural Sociology, 20 June: 111–123. IDS (2007), ‘Lessons, case studies’, accessed 30 May 2007 at http://www.livelihoods.org/ lessons/lessons2.html#2. Ife, J. (2013), Community Development in an Uncertain World, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Immerwahr, D. (2015), Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) (2007), ‘Statement on the cooperative identity’, accessed 2 January 2009 at http://www.ica.coop/coop/principles.html. Kenny, Susan (2007), Developing Communities for the Future (3rd edn), Melbourne: Thomson. Kerr, J., Pangare, G. and Pangare, V. (2002), Watershed Development Projects in India: An Evaluation, Research Report 127, Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. Korean Federation of Community Credit Cooperatives (2005), ‘Social contribution’, accessed 10 January 2009 at http://www.kfcc.co.kr/english/index.html. Korten, D.C. (1980), ‘Community organisation and rural development: a learning process approach’, Public Administration Review, September–October: 480–511. Kumar, A. (2014), ‘A colonial “borrowing” from Africa’, Economic and Political Weekly, 49 (21), 87–88. Medina, M. (2000), ‘Scavenger cooperatives in Asia and Latin America’, accessed 1 January 2009 at http://www.wiego.org/occupational_groups/waste_collectors/Medina %20Scavenger%20Cooperatives%20in%20Asia%20and%20LAC.pdf. Mercy Corps (2010), ‘The benefits of community-led development programming in insecure environments: findings from Iraq and Afghanistan’, accessed 26 March 2018 at https://www.mercycorps.org/sites/default/files/Final_LEAPP_Briefing_Paper.pdf. Midgley, James (1986), Community Participation, Social Development and the State, London: Methuen. Midgley, James (1995), Social Development: The Development Perspective in Social Work, London: SAGE. Midgley, James (2014), Social Development: Theory and Practice, London: SAGE. Pawar, M. (2010), Community development in Asia and the Pacific, Abingdon: Routledge. Pawar, M. (2014a), Social and Community Development Practice, New Delhi: SAGE. Pawar, M. (2014b), ‘Social work practice with local communities in developing countries: imperatives for political engagement’, SAGE Open, 4 (2). DOI: 10.1177/215824401 4538640; http://sgo.sagepub.com/content/spsgo/4/2/2158244014538640.full.pdf.

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450 Handbook of social policy and development Race, D., Thwaites, R. and Devkota, B. (2017), ‘Community forestry and community development in Nepal’, in R. Thwaites, R. Fisher and M. Poudel (eds), Community Forestry in Nepal: Adapting to a Changing World, London: Routledge. Right to Water (2007), ‘Community action’, accessed 31 May 2007 at http://www.right towater.org.uk/code/Community.asp. Schuler, D. (1996), New Community Networks: Wired for Change, New York: CAN Press. Stepney, Paul and Popple, Keith (2008), Social Work and the Community: A Critical Context for Practice, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sustainable Agricultural Community Development Programme (SACDEP) (2018), ‘SACDEP’, accessed 21 March 2018 at https://www.sacdepkenya.org/. Urs, K. and Whittell, R. (2009), Resisting Reform? Water Profits and Democracy, New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Westoby, P. (2014), Theorising the Practice of Community Development: A South African Perspective, Farnham: Ashgate. World Bank (2006), ‘Community-driven development in the context of conflict-affected countries: challenges and opportunities’, Report No. 36425 – GLB, accessed 12 March 2009 at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTCDD/Resources/CDD_and_Conflict.pdf. World Bank (2007a), ‘China leading group on poverty alleviation and development CDD project’, accessed 29 May 2007 at http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/ COUNTRIES/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/EXTEAPREGTOPSOCDEV/0,,contentMDK:2 0955689~menuPK:746774~pagePK:34004173~piPK:34003707~theSitePK:502940,00. html. World Bank (2007b), The World Development Report 2008, Agriculture for Development, Washington, DC: World Bank.

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24. NGOs and their role in the welfare mix Roosa Jolkkonen

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are central actors in implementing and advocating for welfare policies in countries of the Global North and Global South, as well as transnationally. Occasionally, these spheres are united by a single organisation; NGOs such as Oxfam or Save the Children run poverty reduction programmes across the Global South and in certain industrialised countries, including the United Kingdom (UK). In addition, they promote policy directions in supranational platforms, such as the United Nations. Some of the key policy areas in which NGOs campaign and provide services, independently or in supplement to the public and private sectors, comprise education, health care, housing and environment. NGOs thus represent a fundamental building block of the welfare mix, known as the division of welfare provision task between the state, market, family and the third sector in which they are typically included. Beside the welfare provision function, NGOs are recognised as prominent policy advocates shaping social and development policy agendas both in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Despite the congruent roles NGOs hold in the two spaces that are rather arbitrarily distinguished as the Global North and the Global South, the academic study of NGOs has taken two divergent paths. Since the upsurge of NGOs in the 1980s, spurred by the influential neoliberal policy trends favouring non-state welfare provision at a global scale, NGOs operating in the Global South have been mainly studied as ‘development NGOs’ in the field of development studies, while NGOs operating in the Global North have been investigated as ‘charities’ and ‘nonprofits’ belonging to the third sector in the field of social policy. This stems from the dichotomic – and fundamentally ideological – understanding of the world as distinguishable between the industrialised and the developing countries, and the consequent academic silos perpetuating such an understanding in scientific enquiry (Lewis 2015). Moreover, whilst increasingly recognised, the study of NGOs requires further expansion in both fields of social policy and development. The third sector remains a marginal topic in social policy analysis which has evolved largely around the welfare state: its emergence, change and 451

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different regimes in industrialised countries. Helpfully, the subfield of global social policy has built bridges between the Northern and Southern spheres by prompting academic attention to transnational processes and actors. However, this literature emerged as study of policy making by supranational institutions and has most extensively explored their role as drivers and governors of global rights, regulations and redistribution; known as the ‘three Rs’ of global social policy making, first introduced in the seminal works by Bob Deacon (e.g., Deacon et al. 1997). NGOs have enjoyed greater attention in the field of development studies, but the diverse empirical studies have largely remained within normative debates without leading to substantial theory building. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of existing knowledge scattered across the different academic fields, which can, when brought together, inform us about the mechanisms and processes through which NGOs shape social welfare globally. This chapter explores the role of NGOs in the welfare mix as deliverers of and advocates for social and development policies. This is done from a perspective highlighting the existing interface between social policy and development theory and practice. These interdependencies also direct attention to the importance of dominating policy paradigms in influencing NGOs as hegemonic actors within the global political economy, contributing to the North–South power relations. The chapter starts by presenting the different conceptualisations of NGOs and relating them to other actors in the ‘third sector’ or civil society as well as the broader welfare mix. This is followed by a brief historical account of the evolution of NGOs into an organised and prominent group of social policy actors in various corners of the world. Drawing from the existing literature, the following section takes a closer look at the key arguments and concerns related to the two core roles of welfare provision and policy advocacy attributed to NGOs. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the key caveats which the discussed debates leave in the study and analysis of NGOs, and suggests primary points of focus for future research.

CONCEPTUALISING NGOs: CONTEXTUAL VARIATIONS AND RELATED TERMS ‘NGO’ is an elusive concept with loaded context-dependent meanings and uses that vary according to both locality (North, South, transnational) and field of study and practice (development, social policy). It was first officially recognised in the 1945 United Nations (UN) Charter due to the need to distinguish between intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations, and spread into general use in the 1970s. Despite the

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widespread use of the term today, NGOs continue to ‘defy generalisation’ (Lewis 2010, p. 1057). This is due to their differing missions (for example, religious, policy advocacy, service provision), member-bases (for example, voluntary workers, professionals, community members), structures (for example, co-operatives, hierarchical) and finance systems (for example, donor funds, profit making, mass solicitations, membership fees) existing in the diverse non-governmental sector. To these distinguishing factors may equally be added differing ideologies and judicial statuses, as well as relations to public and private actors. In order to stress the interdependencies with states, political parties and businesses, terms such as GONGO (government-organised NGO), PONGO (partyorganised or political NGO) and BONGO (business-organised NGO) have emerged. Moreover, NGOs have been referred to through a variety of interchangeably utilised terms reflecting the differing backgrounds and functions NGOs are associated with. NGOs providing diverse welfare services in the Global North without a transnational development mission are commonly called ‘nonprofits’ (particularly in the United States), ‘charities’ or ‘voluntary organisations’ (particularly in the UK). Local Southern NGOs representing indigenous roots and traditional forms of voluntary association are often referred to by such terms as ‘grassroots organisations’ or ‘community-based organisations’ (CBOs) (e.g., Fowler 2014, p. 420; Lariba Atibil 2014; Obadare 2014). In addition, NGOs focusing specifically on advocacy in areas considered to be of pressing legal and moral concern, such as human rights or environmental policy, are widely known as ‘watchdog organisations’. The term ‘NGO’ itself remains largely associated with professionalised, non-governmental organisations of Western origin operating in international development. These can be distinguished in three different categories: religious, Dunantist (named after the Red Cross founder Henry Dunant) and Wilsonian (referring to the United States President Woodrow Wilson). Religious organisations, such as Catholic Relief Services, have evolved from missionary work and represent the oldest form of transnational development NGOs with social and religious goals. Dunantist NGOs, on the other hand, emerged (although not exclusively) during the First and Second World Wars from humanitarian action within the Global North, and comprise actors such as Oxfam, Save the Children and Médecins Sans Frontières. Typically, Dunantist NGOs engage in long term approaches and operate predominantly outside of the state both financially and hegemonically. As such, they function as welfare providers whilst also offering adversarial views and solutions for development. Contrarily to this, NGOs of the Wilsonian tradition project national

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hegemonies of the sending countries, with staff and financial resources connected to governments. Such NGOs are rather technical than political, often carrying out short term projects in line with funder priorities (see, e.g., Hasmath et al. 2016, pp. 6–7). Due to the ‘NGO-isation’ of development through donor sponsoring, a large body of professionalised, Southern NGOs that have emerged as subcontracted or otherwise externally (financially) dependent project implementers (e.g., Hearn 1998) can be added under the umbrella term of ‘development NGOs’. The extensively utilised terms ‘third sector’ and ‘civil society’ have gathered the diverse organisations distinguishable from public and private sector actors under singular concepts. Whilst being equally slippery and overlapping categories, these provide a lens to examine NGOs in relation to other welfare providers and policy entrepreneurs. Within the field social policy, the term ‘third sector’ is commonly utilised and understood as part of the ‘welfare mix’. Also known as welfare pluralism, this refers to the arrangement of welfare service and benefit provision – funding and co-production – between the public, private and third sectors as well as the family. While most interpretations of welfare mix arrangements focus on the ways in which this functional social policy delivery role is shared between the aforementioned actors, such arrangements equally embed the distribution of political power. As acknowledged by the pioneering authors of welfare pluralism (e.g., Ascoli and Ranci 2002; Evers 1995; Johnson 1987), third sector actors hold a pivotal political role beside the one of welfare provision. The conceptualisations of ‘civil society’, more commonly utilised in the fields of politics and development, offer insights into the hegemonic positions NGOs may take as political actors; either reinforcing or challenging the existing economic, social and political structures at domestic and global levels. Some of the earliest interpretations by John Locke, Adam Ferguson and Alexis de Tocqueville posited civil society as a space occupied by independent movements, networks and associations, therefore providing a democracy promoting counter-force to the oppressive state power. The Marxist views which emerged later offer an opposing perspective, asserting civil society as a group of organisations spreading the hegemonic culture imposed by the state and the elite in the wider society. The more nuanced contemporary positions inspired by Antonio Gramsci have drawn these opposing understandings together, highlighting the hegemonic diversity existing within civil society. According to these visions, civil society organisations can either be co-opted by the dominating elites (whether their power lies within the public or private sector) and thus contribute towards the existing dominating structures, or oppose them as a counter-hegemonic force by striving

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for alternatives (see Fioramonti and Kononykhina 2015, p. 471; Bukenya and Hickey 2014, pp. 313–314). As discussed further in this chapter, this diversity of views is strongly present in the current debates on NGOs: furthered as grassroots drivers of social justice on the one hand, and as henchmen of the dominating global and local actors contributing to unequal political, economic and social systems on the other.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: FROM LOCAL TO GLOBAL TRENDS The extent to which NGOs have been engaged in service provision and policy advocacy has varied across time and space, following the development of domestic welfare institutions as well as global policy trends. Within the so-called Global North, NGOs constituted key providers of poor relief and redistributors of wealth beside the family and kinship networks before the emergence of the welfare state. In Catholic countries, religious charities provided for the needy and marginalised, while the Elizabethan Poor Law institutionalised charities as welfare providers for the ‘deserving poor’ in the UK in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; a model that was also influential in the United States (US). The Progressive Era (1890–1920) saw the rise of charitable organisations established with private sector wealth and inspired by the emerging concerns over social and political needs. This time, NGOs shifted from mere poor relief to devoted policy advocacy, as exemplified by various women’s associations such as the National Association of Coloured Women in the US (see, e.g., Carlton-LaNey 2008). Thus, NGOs were not merely gap filling family-based welfare provision, but also advocating for state’s fulfilment of political rights. During the post-Second World War period in Europe, NGOs adopted yet another objective, as they became key advocates of social rights for the working class. As highlighted by the proponents of the power resource theory (e.g., Korpi 1983), industrial workers’ associations therefore took a primary role in pressuring for the establishment of the contemporary welfare state. The development of the NGO sector followed a different path in countries of the Global South, particularly within the colonised regions. Whilst colonialism triggered a surge of anti-colonial civil society movements, these were suppressed by imperial powers. Consequently, instead of experiencing an expanding indigenous associational life, these regions saw colonialist charities flourishing. Such organisations held pivotal political objectives, aiming to tackle civil unrest and maintain the status

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quo of the ethnical hierarchies by minimalist welfare redistribution to indigenous populations (Bond 2014, p. 267). Nonetheless, in various parts of the Global South, local NGOs succeeded in overturning the existing political, economic and social structures. For instance, in Latin America, traditional peasant associations triggered land reforms critical for reducing poverty, and in South Africa organisations campaigned incessantly against apartheid, acting as key drivers for its abolition. Societies across the Global South equally have long roots of traditional forms of association for self-help and self-reliance, such as the wellknown harambee movement in Kenya and organisations inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings on voluntary action in India (e.g., Lariba Atibil 2014; Pearce 1993). These continue to represent important actors of welfare provision today. Self-organised rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAS) represent informal community-level social security systems, known as susu in Western Africa. Other grassroots-born associations, such as the Indian Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), have expanded and become formal social security organisations providing for those beyond the reach of government schemes, covering large populations in informal labour, for instance. Furthermore, while NGOs played a crucial part in promoting the early state welfare in the Global North. These states have later promoted third sector-provided welfare, in both the Northern and the Southern spheres. The shift towards an instrumental use of NGOs as welfare providers took place in the late 1970s and 1980s when the neoliberal thought, furthered particularly by the US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gained global momentum. The neoliberal approach to social policy and international development was founded upon the idea of achieving economic growth through public austerity and market freedom. This policy model, named the Washington Consensus, was promoted particularly by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury, and instigated a series of standardised reforms privatising public institutions and deregulating the private sector. By shifting both the financing and the provision of welfare to the private sector, the reforms legitimised and created a new space for NGOs seen to offer innovative solutions to development and social policy delivery (Bebbington et al. 2008). It is against this background that the number and size of (development) NGOs exploded globally during the 1980s, which Lester Salamon (1994) has referred to as the ‘global associational revolution’. In the Global South, the role of external NGOs soon shifted from emergency aid to a permanent foothold in areas such as education, health, housing, agriculture and environment. Thus, whilst welfare pluralism is an inherent characteristic of any society at any time, the concept of

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welfare mix is associated with a historical dimension making reference to this particular transition from predominantly state welfare provision to diversification of welfare funding, delivery and governance (see Andreotti et al. 2012, p. 1932). In the mid- to late 1990s, the Third Way or Big Society paradigm emerged in the Global North to challenge the neoliberal approach, whilst seeking to offer an alternative to the old system of state-led welfare provision. The previously prevailing narrow focus on economic goals was rejected, and social goals were reintroduced through a model positioning the state not as the provider but as the guarantor and enabler of welfare provision, of which third sector actors were at the forefront. Third Way politics equally promoted liberal democracy through new public governance (NPG). This placed citizens not only as co-producers of social services to complement the public and private provision, but also as active participants in their governance in the name of stronger social cohesion and democracy (Anheier 2004; Greve 2015, p. 130; Pestoff 2012). Such policy ideas diffused into global social policy making; the ‘Post-Washington Consensus’ redirected focus to social development goals whilst adopting a new ‘good governance’ agenda echoing the NPG approach. In this context, NGOs were consolidated as key welfare actors; their appeal as putatively efficient service providers and representatives of citizen-driven democratisation resonating across the political spectrum (Lewis 2010). Today, various policy agendas promoting rights-based public welfare provision, such as the social protection floors, universal health coverage and universal basic income initiatives, have gained significant global support. Whilst this may suggest a renewed interest in state-led universalist welfare provision, hybrid forms of welfare mix comprising NGOs partnering with governments and private sector actors are becoming increasingly enrooted in the domestic and global welfare systems. In the Global North, particularly the US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands, visions highlighting the added value of the NGOs have been boosted by the economic benefit they bring in a context of state budgets challenged by ageing societies, global economic crises, and other internal and external fiscal pressures (Pestoff 2012). Simultaneously, development aid delivery is increasingly organised through global public–private partnerships (PPPs) in which development NGOs act as primary implementers of programmes funded by private philanthropic foundations beside the public donors; a direction that has been reinforced by calls for a ‘new global partnership’ in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2013, p. 13). Consequently, the participation of NGOs in social

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policy and development delivery and policy processes is not showing signs of decline, but rather amplified and new forms of engagement.

NGOs: WELFARE PROVIDERS AND DRIVERS OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION The social policy roles that NGOs have, in both the Global North and South, have been categorised by David Lewis (2007) into three clusters: implementing (providing services in a substituting, gap filling or complementing manner to state services), catalysing (advocating for new policy agendas or implementation approaches at local, national or international level) and partnering (collaborating with governments, donors and the private sector in multi-agency projects). This section explores NGOs in these different roles through the key arguments for and concerns over their participation in the expansion of social welfare locally and globally. Cost-Effective, Innovative and Democratic Service Providers? Diverse arguments across the political spectrum have pointed to the advantages of NGOs as providers of welfare services, either independently or in cooperation with other actors. Classic liberal propositions have posited NGOs as alternative providers to abusive private and public sector actors. Their comparative advantage, in this line of thought, is their social justice motivation, differing from the profit making businesses, and governments that are ultimately seeking electoral support. These issues have been otherwise expressed through the theories of market and government failure. ‘Market failure’ refers to profit extraction by private sector welfare providers due to asymmetrical access to information between the service provider and user. ‘Government failure’, on the other hand, asserts state welfare policy making to be biased, responding to the needs of a median voter and therefore neglecting minorities. Third sector actors are thus seen as trustworthy and affordable alternative providers to private businesses, and important deliverers for minority groups neglected by government services (e.g., Ott 2001; Weisbrod 1994). For the proponents of neoliberal policy visions focusing on economic benefits of privatised welfare provision, NGOs represent cost-effective service providers in both the Global North and South. This has particularly been the case in the context of development, where the pertinent issues of limited institutional democracy and state resources and capacities have been utilised as key arguments in favour of NGOs. In fact, the upsurge of NGOs in development is closely connected to concerns over

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the perceived failure of the old state-to-state development collaboration and the consequent increase in corruption and bureaucracy with little impact on poverty reduction. Conveniently, holding a long history in humanitarian work, NGOs offered evidence for their ability to operate in critical conditions, which further reinforced the views highlighting their efficiency as development actors and vanguards of social and political order (Lewis 2007, pp. 30–32). In addition, over the past decade, philanthropic foundations have emerged as a unique subgroup of NGOs, able to make risky, results-oriented investments in new development solutions through private wealth. As such, the participation of NGOs in development has equally been justified through the ‘discovery argument’ (Reich 2016, p. 12): their comparative advantage as reactive and innovative global social policy funders and deliverers. Furthermore, many promoting state-led development have recognised the potential of NGOs in filling capacity gaps in the public sector as a short term solution in welfare provision, particularly in the Global South (Barrientos and Hulme 2008, p. 17; Cammett and MacLean 2011, p. 7). NGOs have indeed become important providers of diverse forms of social assistance from cash transfers to welfare services in various regions, and particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (Devereux and Cipryk 2009, p. 10; Nino-Zarazua et al. 2012, p. 165). Lately, NGOs have equally contributed to the extension of social protection in partnership with state agencies and private sector actors. An example can be drawn from Rwanda, where the successful expansion of the Community-Based Health Insurance (CBHI) involved strong state leadership combined with close engagement with community-based organisations and faith-based health care centres (see Hujo and Braumann 2016, p. 67). Yet, NGOs have increasingly shifted from being ‘gap-fillers’ to permanent service providers often assuming responsibilities under public sector outsourcing. This is particularly problematic, as NGOs cannot engage in nationwide service provision like the state, nor are they able to provide guarantees for long term commitment in welfare provision. From this arise pertinent issues of scale and sustainability, termed by Salamon (1987) as ‘philanthropic insufficiency’. Proponents of a robust public welfare provision have equally stressed the threats NGOs represent to state welfare expansion on different fronts. Financially, growing NGO welfare provision harms the public sector due to tax exemptions in both the Global North and South, as well as diverting development assistance away from government agencies in the Global South. The proliferation of NGOs has equally contributed towards fragmentation of service delivery systems, which generate an additional coordination and management burden for the state. Another critical issue related to NGOs as service

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providers is that of capacities. Particularly in the Global South, the better-funded NGO sector has caused brain drain from the public sector; contributing, for instance, towards the health workforce crisis in subSaharan Africa. Moreover, in his seminal theory of ‘voluntary failure’, Lester Salamon (1987) directed attention to the potentially harmful effects of NGO-based welfare provision on service users. As the issues addressed represent NGOs’ specific concerns as opposed to those requiring the greatest attention (‘philanthropic paternalism’) and the selection of beneficiaries is based on the interests of the NGOs (‘philanthropic particularism’), such social policy making and delivery inevitably appear to be discriminatory in nature. This is a particularly critical point in the context of transnational work, when NGOs become the ambassadors of external views and approaches in the Global South, as discussed further below. In addition, Salamon (1987) points to the risks endured by welfare service users arising from potential ‘philanthropic amateurism’, as NGOs may rely upon volunteers or low-skilled employees lacking the required expertise to deliver a professional service. Shifting welfare provision roles and responsibilities to the third sector also has broader societal consequences, in both the domestic and the transnational context. As NGOs’ role increases and that of the state weakens, welfare provision is no longer dependent on tax collection and the social contract between the population and its democratically elected government. This diminishes both the legitimacy of the state and its incentives for equal and neutral welfare provision. NGOs, on their behalf, are not democratically elected welfare providers and yet can choose those benefiting from their services; a situation which may also be seen as a threat to equal access and democratic policy making. Here, criticism has been directed to large philanthropic organisations in particular; these have emerged as important agenda setters, able to shape policy directions and fund their implementation through vast resources without democratic decision making processes (e.g., Edwards 2011; Horvath and Powell 2016; Reich 2016). In addition to these poignant questions of democracy, the aid dependency theory has raised the issue of NGO welfare fostering dependency on external resources and implementing organisations in aid-receiving countries, potentially hampering state-led development efforts (Lewis 2013; Lewis and Kanji 2009). Such political economy perspectives offer alternative visions for the long term consequences of NGO-led social policy and development efforts, and are expanded upon in the following section.

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Vanguards of Social Transformation? Diverse NGOs, and particularly watchdog organisations such as Amnesty International or Global Justice Now, engage in policy research, media campaigns, lobbying and direct policy making at various roundtables to shape domestic and global policy agendas and outputs. This advocacy role – or ‘catalysing’ action, in Lewis’s (2007) words – of NGOs is most commonly put forth as counter-hegemonic, highlighting some of the most critical policy issues neglected by the dominating social policy and development actors, such as environmental protection or social justice abuses. The policy advocacy of NGOs has equally been associated with, and legitimised by, a strong connection to the grassroots, seen to further inclusive growth and welfare expansion in a bottom-up manner (Banks et al. 2015, p. 709). Indeed, in the twenty-first century, NGOs have been deliberately promoted as drivers of bottom-up ‘social transformation’: a process consisting of changes in the existing unequal economic and social structures, as well as the environmentally harmful consumption and production patterns, ultimately tackling the root causes of inequality and poverty (see Hujo and Braumann 2016, p. 4). In the Global North, where the traditional non-state advocates of social policy directions such as trade unions have declined, NGOs have been claimed to have emerged as new representatives of ‘people’s true interests’ (Kamat 2004, p. 159). In the development context, the aid industry has supported development NGOs as a primary channel for the empowerment of marginalised groups such as women, ethnic minorities or the extremely poor, as well as a counter-force to authoritarian governments and a means to tackle transparency issues. However, the policy voice NGOs are equipped with does not automatically translate into counter-hegemonic advocacy for social transformation. The early literature on welfare pluralism in the Northern sphere (e.g., Evers 1995; Johnson 1987) already acknowledged that the hybridisation of welfare production has incorporated third sector actors into formal policy making processes, stripping NGOs of their alternative views and approaches. The ability of NGOs to advocate for new, controversial policy visions and social justice may equally be directly constrained by legal restrictions regulating the political action of nonstate actors. Indeed, in various countries across the globe – the US, Ethiopia and China being only some of the most obvious examples – NGOs under the legal status of a charity are not allowed to engage in policy advocacy, or their right to do so is strictly defined.

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Beside the political limitations discussed above, NGOs are equally subject to pressures for conformity arising from their funders. Critical accounts concerning the role of NGOs as vanguards of social transformation have predominantly focused on development NGOs dependent on and accountable to their donors: governmental development agencies, multilateral organisations, global PPPs or other NGOs. The financial dependency has been associated with fierce competition for limited funds, in turn allowing the professionalised NGOs to flourish at the expense of more voluntary and indigenous organisations that are inexperienced in fundraising and marketing. It has equally been widely argued that donor interest in aid effectiveness has triggered adoption of business-style NGO management, favouring quantifiable, short term goals over holistic approaches aiming at social change in the long term (e.g., Burger and Seabe 2014; Edwards 2011; Fioramonti and Kononykhina 2015). Keck (2015) has explained such dynamics through principal–agent theory, positing aid donors as principles transferring their authority to NGOs – the agents – to deliver services. As this transfer is based on conditions set by the principle, the agents are ultimately under the control of the principles limiting their autonomy. Drawing an example from US-funded NGO aid, he depicts the various ways in which the donor power has incited the local NGO sector to adopt market-based behaviours, including distorted ‘development results’, to attract further funding (see Keck 2015). Nonetheless, in the context of a growing professionalised NGO sector, private sector approaches have become usual and largely accepted, whether they are induced by funders or not. Various NGOs engage in profit making to sustain, professionalise and expand their activities, and private philanthropic organisations have been at the forefront of various profitable social investment models, such as social impact bonds (e.g., Edmiston and Nicholls 2018; Salamon 2014). These observations suggest self-serving motivations alongside a desire to contribute towards the common good, potentially undermining the role of NGOs as social transformers. In fact, many have argued that wealthy, private philanthropic organisations focus on providing social goods rather than on creating social change (e.g., Edwards 2011; Roelofs 2003), and development NGOs have been broadly criticised for detachment from the grassroots. It is against this background that traditional and voluntary associations, in turn, have become valued for their potential in furthering social transformation (see Chapter 3 in this publication). This is seen to stem from their maintained relationships to various marginalised groups, such as women and minorities living in rural areas, which are overlooked by professionalised, urban NGOs with leadership often consisting of

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middle-aged men (Bukenya and Hickey 2014, p. 323; Fowler 2014, p. 425). Finally, donor–NGO relations are a reflection of the existing North– South power struggles and the global political economy. During the Post-Washington Consensus, international development actors adopted an agenda of democratic development and ‘good governance’ in the Global South. Also, new principles for aid delivery were introduced by the 2005 Paris Agreement on Aid Effectiveness, including harmonisation of development interventions and domestic policy ownership. In a contradictory manner, these policy initiatives highlighted both the untrustworthiness of domestic governments and the necessity of respecting state leadership and policy visions in development efforts. It is against this background that NGOs were furthered as drivers of democratic development through donor funding, which several authors criticised as a strategy to legitimise donor-driven policies by masking them as advocated by the locals (e.g., Kamat 2004; Wright 2012).

TOWARDS A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA This chapter has sought to highlight the synergies between the roles and responsibilities of NGOs in the Global North and the Global South as social policy and development actors. Crudely divided, these consist of the welfare provision and social transformation roles: the first responding to the existing social needs, and the latter addressing their underlying causes. The predominance of these roles has altered over time, depending on the existing need at the grassroots as well as policy making at domestic and global levels. In Europe, for instance, NGOs were primarily service providers supplementing the informal sector in the early nineteenth century; after which they adopted an additional advocacy role promoting political rights in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s, NGOs turned into key drivers of social rights, contributing to the emergence of the welfare state. Soon after, from the 1980s onwards, through the increasingly pluralist welfare provision arrangements domestically as well as globally, NGOs’ relationships with the dominating public and private actors transformed into synergic co-option and financial dependency, largely compromising their counterhegemonic policy advocacy role. This chapter has also examined the debates related to global political economy and NGOs. These highlighted further the interconnectedness of the different actors of the welfare mix, namely in the form of financial and political dependency of NGOs on states and donors, as well as the

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critical power configurations between the Global North and South in which NGOs have been instrumentalised. Whilst these discussions explored some of the key themes and issues related to NGOs’ role as social policy and development actors, they equally point to diverse areas where further evolution of NGO study is imperative. First, NGOs ought to be better incorporated into social policy analysis of the welfare mix. Whilst this constitutes the centre of gravity of welfare regimes, the third sector is often overlooked in research on industrialised countries, typically focusing on the state–market nexus (Powell and Barrientos 2004). Also, the study of the third sector as part of the welfare mix is in itself too narrowly focused on the service provision role. In agency-based social policy theory of welfare state expansion and reform, and notably the power-resource theory, worker’s associations and other labour movements have been recognised as key advocates of social rights (e.g., Korpi 1983). Yet, the contemporary role, successes and failures of NGOs as drivers of social transformation, under Third Way politics, for instance, has received little analytical attention. Second, examining the diverse roles – attributed and concretely adopted ones – of different NGOs as well as their relationships with the public and private sectors would enrich the description and theory development concerning contemporary welfare arrangements in all corners of the world. One of the most pressing developments at domestic and global levels of welfare service production and governance is organisational hybridity (e.g., Billis 2010; Hustinx et al. 2014); a shift that the concepts of ‘welfare mix’ and ‘welfare pluralism’ sought to capture in the first place. Whilst the recent literature has redirected focus to hybridity, the focus has been largely attributed to state outsourcing or collaborative action between the private and third sectors in the context of PPPs. Such accounts overlook the proactive participation of NGOs, and analyses of the third sector actors’ ability to provide policy inputs in different types of constrained policy systems (e.g. PPPs) at local, domestic and global levels remain limited. Third, the study of NGOs would benefit of an increasing number of empirical studies and theory development concerning the global political economy in which NGOs are embedded. The ways in which aid agencies have instrumentalised development NGOs for different motivations is a powerful reminder of the imbalanced power relationships within the systems of global social and development policy making and practice. Hence, critical scrutiny in terms of what NGOs do and why, instead of their reputed functions and motivations, is necessary. Moreover, the role of NGOs is the outcome of policy processes shaped by entwined internal and external demands: conditionalities and pressures from global social

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policy actors (such as international financial institutions) on one hand; and domestic efforts to balance fiscal needs, development ideology and political pressures from within and outside of the states, on the other. Thus, a two-level political economy approach to NGO study could bring about new insights concerning the domestic and global policy processes as well as their synergies shaping the welfare mix in various parts of the word. As highlighted by David Lewis, studying NGOs can ‘help better understand the interface between local and international politics’ (Lewis 2013, p. 77). Finally, the ‘NGO’ concept itself requires further development to better serve their analysis in contemporary contexts described above. For instance, the various hegemonic positionalities NGOs represent challenge the normative and hegemonic definitions of ‘civil society’ and the ‘third sector’, pointing to a need to gain a better grasp of the existing diversity within the broader sectors and the subcategories of NGOs. Typologies should equally incorporate an analysis of the types of NGOs successfully bringing about change and most effectively contributing towards the overall, long term development of welfare systems, be it in the Global North or the Global South (Banks et al. 2015). Reassessing the conceptual frameworks could offer new analytical tools not only to capture the hegemonic relations with other actors and the effectiveness of different types of NGOs, but also to make sense of the internal power relations within the sector. Stubbs (2005), for instance, has referred to philanthropic foundations as ‘meta-NGOs’ due to their ability to mould and govern subcontracted, implementing NGOs through their independent financial resources. Such insights are crucial for a greater understanding of the roles, dependencies and internal diversity that NGOs represent as part of the welfare mix at domestic and global levels.

REFERENCES Andreotti, A., Mingione, E. and Polizzi, E. (2012), ‘Local Welfare Systems: A Challenge for Social Cohesion’, Urban Studies, 49, 1925–1940. Anheier, H.K. (2004), ‘Third Sector-Third Way: Comparative Perspectives and Policy Reflections’, in Jane Lewis and Rebecca Surender (eds), Welfare State Change: Towards a Third Way?, Oxford, UK and New York, USA: Oxford University Press. Ascoli, U. and Ranci, C. (2002), Dilemmas of the Welfare Mix: The New Structure of Welfare in an Era of Privatization, Boston, MA: Springer. Banks, N., Hulme, D. and Edwards, M. (2015), ‘NGOs, States, and Donors Revisited: Still Too Close for Comfort?’, World Development, 66, 707–718. Barrientos, A. and Hulme, D. (2008), ‘Social Protection for the Poor and Poorest in Developing Countries: Reflections on a Quiet Revolution’, Manchester: Brooks World Poverty Institute.

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466 Handbook of social policy and development Bebbington, A.J., Hickey, S. and Mitlin, D.C. (2008), Can NGOs Make a Difference? The Challenge of Development Alternatives, London: Zed Books. Billis, D. (2010), Hybrid Organizations and the Third Sector, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bond, P. (2014), ‘Africa Rising? Afro-Optimism and Uncivil Society in an Era of Economic Volatility’, in Ebenezer Obadare (ed.), The Handbook of Civil Society in Africa, New York: Springer, pp. 233–251. Bukenya, B. and Hickey, S. (2014), ‘NGOs, Civil Society, and Development’, in Ebenezer Obadare (ed.), The Handbook of Civil Society in Africa, New York: Springer, pp. 311–335. Burger, R. and Seabe, D. (2014), ‘NGO Accountability in Africa’, in Ebenezer Obadare (ed.), The Handbook of Civil Society in Africa, New York: Springer, pp. 77–91. Cammett, M.C. and MacLean, L.M. (2011), ‘Introduction: The Political Consequences of Non-state Social Welfare in the Global South’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 46, 1–21. Carlton-LaNey, I. (2008), ‘Social Policy: History (1900–1950)’, in Terry Mizrahi and Larry E. Davis (eds), Encyclopedia of Social Work, Abingdon: National Association of Social Workers and Oxford University Press. Deacon, B., Hulse, M. and Stubbs, P. (1997), Global Social Policy: International Organizations and the Future of Welfare, London, UK and Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: SAGE. Devereux, S. and Cipryk, R. (2009), ‘Social Protection in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Regional Review’, paper prepared as part of a Social Protection Scoping Study funded by the Ford Foundation, Institute of Development Studies. Edmiston, D. and Nicholls, A. (2018), ‘Social Impact Bonds: The Role of Private Capital in Outcome-Based Commissioning’, Journal of Social Policy, 47, 57–76. Edwards, M. (2011), ‘The Role and Limitations of Philanthropy’, paper commissioned for The Bellagio Initiative: The Future of Philanthropy and Development in the Pursuit of Human Wellbeing. Published by IDS, the Resource Alliance and the Rockefeller Foundation. https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/123456789/3717/ Bellagio-Edwards.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Evers, A. (1995), ‘Part of the Welfare Mix: The Third Sector as an Intermediate Area’, Voluntas, 6, 159–182. Fioramonti, L. and Kononykhina, O. (2015), ‘Measuring the Enabling Environment of Civil Society: A Global Capability Index’, VOLUNTAS, 26, 466–487. Fowler, A. (2014), ‘Civil Society and Aid in Africa: a Case of Mistaken Identity?’, in Ebenezer Obadare (ed.), The Handbook of Civil Society in Africa, New York: Springer, pp. 417–438. Greve, B. (2015), Welfare and the Welfare State: Present and Future, London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. Hasmath, R., Hsu, J.Y.J. and Hilderbrandt, T. (2016), ‘Conceptualizing GovernmentOrganized Non-Governmental Organizations Across Contexts’, 17–19 November, Washington, DC: Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action. Hearn, J. (1998), ‘The “NGO{isation” of Kenyan Society: USAID and the Restructuring of Health Care’, Review of African Political Economy, 25, 89–100. Horvath, A. and Powell, W. (2016), ‘Contributory or Disruptive: Do New Forms of Philanthropy Erode Democracy?’, in Rob Reich, Chiara Cordelli and Lucy Bernholz (eds), Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 87–122. Hujo, K. and Braumann, H. (2016), Policy Innovations for Transformative Change: Implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.

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NGOs and their role in the welfare mix 467 Hustinx, L., Verschuere, B. and De Corte, J. (2014), ‘Organisational Hybridity in a Post-Corporatist Welfare Mix: The Case of the Third Sector in Belgium’, Journal of Social Policy, 43, 391–411. Johnson, N. (1987), The Welfare State in Transition: The Theory and Practice of Welfare Pluralism, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Kamat, S. (2004), ‘The Privatization of Public Interest: Theorizing NGO Discourse in a Neoliberal Era’, Revue of International Political Economy, 11, 155–176. Keck, M. (2015), ‘Comparing the Determinants of US-Funded NGO Aid Versus US Official Development Aid’, VOLUNTAS, 26, 1314–1336. Korpi, W. (1983), The Democratic Class Struggle, London, UK and Boston, MA, USA: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Lariba Atibil, C. (2014), ‘Philantrophic Foundations and Civil Society in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Ebenezer Obadare (ed.), The Handbook of Civil Society in Africa, New York: Springer, pp. 457–474. Lewis, D. (2007), The Management of Non-Governmental Development Organizations: An Introduction (2nd edn), London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge. Lewis, D. (2010), ‘Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History’, in Helmut K. Anheier and Stefan Toepler (eds), International Encyclopedia of Civil Society, New York: Springer, pp. 1056–1062. Lewis, D. (2013), ‘Building the Welfare Mix or Sidelining the State? Nongovernmental Organizations in Developing Countries as Social Policy Actors’, in Robert Walker and Rebecca Surender (eds), Social Policy in a Developing World, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 58–80. Lewis, D. (2015), ‘Contesting Parallel Worlds: Time to Abandon the Distinction Between the “International” and “Domestic” Contexts of Third Sector Scholarship?’, VOLUNTAS, 26, 2084–2103. Lewis, D. and Kanji, N. (2009), Non-Governmental Organizations and Development, London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge. Nino-Zarazua, M., Barrientos, A., Hickey, S. and Hulme, D. (2012), ‘Social Protection in Sub-Saharan Africa: Getting the Politics Right’, World Development, 40, 163–176. Obadare, E. (2014), ‘Volunteering, Civic Agency and Citizenship in Africa’, in Ebenezer Obadare (ed.), The Handbook of Civil Society in Africa, New York: Springer, pp. 475–482. Ott, J.S. (2001), The Nature of the Nonprofit Sector, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Pearce, J. (1993), ‘NGOs and Social Change: Agents or Facilitators?’, Development in Practice, 3, 222–227. Pestoff, V. (2012), ‘Co-Production and Third Sector Social Services in Europe. Some Crucial Conceptual Issues’, in Victor Pestoff, Taco Brandsen and Bram Verschuere (eds), New Public Governance, the Third Sector, and Co-Production, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 13–34. Powell, M. and Barrientos, A. (2004), ‘Welfare Regimes and the Welfare Mix’, European Journal of Political Research, 43, 83–105. Reich, R. (2016), ‘On the Role of Foundations in Democracies’, in Rob Reich, Chiara Cordelli and Lucy Bernholz (eds), Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 64–86. Roelofs, J. (2003), Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism, SUNY Series in Radical Social and Political Theory, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Salamon, L.M. (1987), ‘Of Market Failure, Voluntary Failure, and Third-Party Government: Toward a Theory of Government-Nonprofit Relations in the Modern Welfare State’, Journal of Voluntary Action Research, 16, 29–49. Salamon, L.M. (1994), ‘The Rise of the Nonprofit Sector’, Foreign Affaires, 73, 109.

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468 Handbook of social policy and development Salamon, L.M. (ed.) (2014), New Frontiers of Philanthropy: A Guide to the New Tools and Actors Reshaping Global Philanthropy and Social Investing, New York: Oxford University Press. Stubbs, P. (2005), ‘Stretching Concepts Too Far? Multi-level Governance, Policy Transfer and the Politics of Scale in South East Europe’, Southeast European Politics, 6, 66–87. UN (2013), A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development, Report of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Weisbrod, B.A. (1994), The Nonprofit Economy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wright, G.W. (2012), ‘NGOs and Western Hegemony: Causes for Concern and Ideas for Change’, Development Practice, 22, 123–134.

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Index

academic collaboration 15, 26, 31–2, 124–5, 126–7, 316 actors global 90, 93 regional social policy and regionalization 228–9, 238–9 rural development 177–8 social policy 42–3, 269 sustainable development goals (SDGs) 121–2, 123–4, 125, 126 advocacy role, NGOs 461 agency, and vulnerability 216 agriculture 171–2, 175, 179–83, 193, 203, 254, 348, 367, 436–7 aid see official development assistance (ODA) aid dependency theory 460 Ajendal, J. 210 Alfers, L. 260, 276 almsgiving 353 Amaya, A. 236–7 Anria, S. 64 Argentina pension reforms 273 social movements 64 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) 227, 234, 236 Attlee, Clement 16 Australia, community development programmes (CDPs) 443 Baird, S. 380, 381–2 Ban Ki-Moon 104 Bangladesh conditional income transfers (CITs) 385–6 microfinance 420, 439 Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) 415

banking 414 basic needs approach 23–4, 27–8, 97–8 Bates, Robert 153 behavioural economics 426 Beveridge, William 267 Beveridge Report 267 Big Society 457 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 43, 229, 287 biodiversity 192–3, 200 Bolivia microfinance 417 social movements 64 Bolsa Escola/Família (Brazil) 373, 376, 377, 378, 383, 389 Börzel, T.A. 228 Boserup, E. 77 Botswana, family and social services 400 Brandt Commission 190 Brazil 49, 50, 199 conditional income transfers (CITs) 373, 376, 377, 378, 383, 389 health inequality 285 healthcare system 291 social insurance 270 social movements 164 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) 49–50, 81, 111, 228 Brundtland Commission 24, 190 Busemeyer, M.R. 303 Callinicos, A. 142 Cambodia community development programmes (CDPs) 437 conditional income transfers (CITs) 386

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470 Handbook of social policy and development Campbell, Tom 141–2 capability 154–5 capital 326, 327 formation 317 human 114, 138, 303, 304–5 capitalism 22, 131–2 care work 122, 256–7, 260–61, 402 cash transfers 30, 103, 252, 261, 272–3, 274, 367 conditional cash transfers (CCTs) 80, 103–4, 240, 274, 352, 356, 360–61, 385 and empowerment of women 79–84 unconditional 80, 82, 352, 361–2, 380–82 see also conditional income transfers (CITs) Chambers, R. 176–7 Chang, Y. 401 charitable giving 353 Charity Organization Societies (COS) 395 child and maternal health 285, 441 child protection and welfare 76–7, 396–7, 400 child refugees 219 Chile conditional income transfers (CITs) 386 healthcare system 291 social assistance 386 social insurance 339, 340 social movements 64 China 49–50 community development fund (CDF) 439–40 environmental issues 197–8, 199 health and healthcare 288, 294 housing 323 natural resource management 443 poverty reduction 104–5 social assistance 360 social insurance 270, 338–9 social rights 135 urbanization 150, 151 cities 150–53, 156–7, 158–9, 160 housing 161–2, 164, 319, 320, 326 insecurity and violence 163–4

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New Urban Agenda 164–6 services 162 citizenship global 141 rights 133 social 131, 266–7 social rights as rights of 17, 45–6, 130, 131–2 CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa) 228 civil society 454–5 class 57 climate change 192, 193–4, 200 Climate Change Convention 192 Cloward, R.A. 63 co-operatives 437–8 co-production 65–6 Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ECOSOC) 140 Common Crisis 190 community activism 22 community development programmes (CDPs) 21–2, 174, 431 institutions and organizations engaged in 445–6 origin and concept of 431–4 strategies of and for 434–6 strengths and critique of 446–8 types of 436–45 community perspective, social work 399–400, 404, 408 conditional cash transfers (CCTs) 80, 103–4, 240, 274, 352, 356, 360–61, 385 conditional income transfers (CITs) 373–4 attribution and valuation 380–84 conditions 375–7 design features 375–8 diverse practices 384–6 entry and exit 377–8 future 390 outcomes 378–84 public attitudes to 389 rationale 374–5 sustainability 386–9 construction sector 318, 325

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Index 471 Conway, G. 176–7 Copenhagen Social Summit (1995) 139, 140 Corbridge, S. 153 corporatism 40 corporatist welfare regimes 268 corruption 343, 364, 366 cosmopolitan citizenship 141 Costa Rica, welfare regime 271, 275 costs, incurred by informal workers 260 critical development studies 179 critical social theory 399 crops 180, 193, 348 ‘cross-class alliances’ 274–5 cultural activities 444 cultural appropriateness, social work 406 cultural chauvinism 59 Das, J. 288–9 Deacon, B. 90, 92, 237 ‘decent work’ 275–6 Declaration on the Right to Development (DRtD) 136–7 Demirgüç-Kunt, A. 412 democracy 137, 141, 460 dependency theory 22, 29, 174 developing world, heterogeneity within 48–50 development, concept and meaning of 35, 134 development assistance see official development assistance (ODA) development NGOs 454, 461, 462 development projects 438–9, 442 ‘development state’ approach 44–5, 271 development studies 20–26 see also social policy and development studies developmental social work 404–5 digitalization 201 diseases 284, 287, 288, 295, 296 displacement and resettlement 215–16, 438–9

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distributive justice, and housing 326–8 documentation, refugees 219 domestic work 122, 258, 406 Dominelli, L. 396, 408 Douzinas, C. 214 Duffield, M. 211–12 Dunantist NGOs 453 East Asian ‘tiger’ economies 29, 44 Eckert, A. 60, 61 economic approach to development 36–7 economic growth and development 20, 21, 22–3, 96–7 and cities 160 and community development programmes (CDPs) 439–40 and education 301, 304–5 and environment 24 and financial services 422–3 Harrod–Domar Model 317 and housing 317–20, 324–6 and inequality 157 measurement of 194–5 and neoliberalism 24–5 and quality of life 36 regional 229–32 role of agriculture 171–2, 175 and social assistance 364, 367 and social insurance 349 and social policy 113–14, 116 and social welfare 27, 29–30 and sustainable development goals (SDGs) 117–19 and urbanization 152 see also environment, development and poverty economic planning 20, 27 economics 246, 426 Keynesian economics and policies 20, 21, 113, 114, 132 Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity 194–5 Economics of Environment and Biodiversity, The (TEEB) 200 ecosystems 200

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472 Handbook of social policy and development Ecuador conditional income transfers (CITs) 380–81, 387 social movements 57, 64 education 300 community development programmes (CDPs) 440 in development 304–5 discussion and debates in 308–13 fee waivers 360 formal and non-formal 306–8, 309 and gender 73 and globalization 305–6, 312 impact of global governance 309–10 and poverty 73, 309 school attendance, and conditional income transfers (CITs) 376, 379, 380–83, 384, 385–6 school feeding programmes 359–60 and social assistance 367 as social policy 302–8 social policy and perspectives on 300–302 spending on 311–12 standardization 306 and sustainable development goals (SDGs) 119–20 and welfare systems 311 Education for All (EFA) 301 emergency relief 357, 360–61 Emission Trading System (ETS) 194 employment ‘decent work’ 275–6 homeworkers 250, 257, 258, 319, 347 and sustainable development goals (SDGs) 118 urban 157–60 women 74–5, 77, 82, 122–3 see also informal economy and informal employment employment-based social protection 265–6 case against 271–3 cash transfers and productivism 273–7

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employment and welfare typologies in Global South 269–71 future of 277–8 social policy and employment in development context 268–77 social policy and employment linkages 266–8 social protection in time of crisis 268–9 see also social insurance empowerment of women 78–84, 420–21 endangered species 193 energy 203 environment 24 and agriculture 182, 193 and social work 408 environment, development and poverty 188–9 international response 190–95 national experiences 195–8 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 198–204 epistemic communities 92, 94 equity, social insurance 342–3, 348–9 Escobar, A. 55, 58, 59 Esping-Andersen, G. 253, 267 Ethiopia, social assistance 362 ethnocentric approach 31 European Union (EU) 227, 236–7, 238 export-led growth 199–200 externalities 194 faith-based activities 444 family services see social work and family services fee waivers (social assistance) 360 feminist approaches, human security 209 feminist movement 60 feminist scholarship 24, 77–9 financial inclusion and microfinance 411, 426–7 community development programmes (CDPs) 439–40

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Index 473 definition and description of 411–14 and development 421–6 and empowerment of women 420–21 history of microfinance 414–18 microfinance institutions (MFIs) 412, 413–14, 415–18, 420, 421–2, 425–6 poverty impacts 418–19 financialization of development 423–6 First World 134 Food and Agriculture Organization 95 food waste 203 footprinting 195, 196 forests and forestry 193, 443 France, social insurance in former colonies 337 free-rider problem 193–4 Free Trade Association of the Americas (FTAA) 242 freedom 137 friendly societies 335 Gasper, D. 207, 208, 209, 210–11 Gates Foundation 43, 229, 287 Gaud, William 181 gender and development (GAD) approach 78, 79 Gender and Development Index (GDI) 75, 76 gender and gender equality 24, 60, 71–2, 84–5 and agriculture 182–3 Arab states 217, 218–19 burdens of women 74, 83, 261 and cash transfers 79–84 and human development 73–6 and human security 209 and informal economy 159–60, 247, 251–2 social assistance 76–7, 368 social insurance 342, 348 social policy and development perspectives 76–9 social protection 276–7 and social work 407

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and sustainable development goals (SDGs) 122–3 vulnerability, security and migration 213–16 see also women gender-based violence (GBV) 74, 81, 218 Gender Inequality Index (GII) 75, 76 geopolitics 181 Germany, social insurance 335 Ghana social assistance 362 social insurance 270 Glassman, A. 385 Glewwe, P. 383 Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development 403 global citizenship 141 Global Fund to Fight AIDS 287 global governance 91–2, 309–10 global humanitarian levy 142 global political economy, and NGOs 464–5 global resources dividend 141 global social policy 30, 89, 106–8, 452 and effective outcomes 89–94 elements of 91, 93 global development goals as 99–106 ideas from international organizations 94–8 and structural adjustment 98–9, 138 see also Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Global South convergence and divergence in welfare and policy nexus (between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries) 41–8 employment and welfare typologies in 269–71 future of social policy 48–50 participation in international development agenda 111, 116 and regionally-based social policy 232–3 study of social welfare in development context 26–32

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474 Handbook of social policy and development utility of social policy in 2–3, 35–6, 38–40, 112 globalization 37–8, 99–100, 152, 277, 305–6, 312, 393, 396, 401–2, 405 Gomez, O.A. 208, 209 Gough, I. 38–9, 40, 61 governance global 91–2, 309–10 new public governance (NPG) 457 see also regionalization and world-regional social governance, policy and development government failure 458 integration of levels 255 local 255 national 90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 100, 103 see also state Gray, M. 404 Green Revolution 179–83 greenhouse gas emissions 192, 194, 195 growth and development see economic growth and development Guha, R. 58 Hall, A. 309 Hammer, J. 288–9 Hardiman, M. 28 Harrison, J. 398, 399, 405 Harriss, John 170, 179 Harrod–Domar Model 317 health 253, 254, 255, 283, 284–5 community development programmes (CDPs) 441–2 determinants of 294 and development 293–7 and food 203 insurance 289–90, 291–2, 293 and pollution 194 and poverty 162, 293–4 regional action on 231, 235, 236–7 healthcare systems 283–4, 285–9

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funding of 289–90, 291–2 and informal workers 255–6, 261–2, 293 and regional trade agreements 231 role of international organizations 287–9 spending on 287–8, 296, 297 universal healthcare reforms 289–93 utilization, and conditional income transfers (CITs) 375, 376, 379–80, 385 Healy, L.M. 395 Heintz, James 265 home ownership 320, 321, 322–3 and asset building 319, 321, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328–9 mortgage securitization 324 Homenet 257, 258 homeworkers 250, 257, 258, 319, 347 households 25 housing 156, 160–62, 164, 316–17 asset and wealth effect of 324–6, 327–8 and development 317–20, 323–8 and distributive justice 326–8 key issues and problems 320–23 towards transformative policy 328–9 Housing and Community Agency (HCA, UK) 319–20 Hsueh, C. 401 human capital 114, 138, 303, 304–5 human development 206–7, 304–5 Arab states 217 and conditional income transfers (CITs) 374–5, 383, 390 and gender 73–6 and human security 210–11, 212 and sustainable development goals (SDGs) 120–21 Human Development Index (HDI) 75, 76 human rights 301, 395, 402 refugees 214, 215–16 and sustainable development goals (SDGs) 122 see also social and human rights human security 206, 208–9, 220

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Index 475 Arab states 217 case study (refugees) 216–19 and development 210–13 vulnerability 213–16 humanitarian approaches, social and human rights 139–43, 214–15 humanitarian assistance 211 hunger 182 hybridity, organizational 464 in-kind social assistance 359–60 income inadequacy as well-being measure 36 and informal economy 249–52 universal basic income 369 see also cash transfers; conditional income transfers (CITs) India community development programmes (CDPs) 433–4, 438, 440, 441, 442 conditional income transfers (CITs) 385 economic growth and inequality 157 environmental issues 198 healthcare system 286, 288–9, 291 informal workers 347 microfinance 417, 418 and Pakistan 234 Self-Employed Women’s Association 257, 415 social assistance 359–60, 361, 362, 363, 366 social insurance 270, 337–8, 347, 348 social movements 57, 58, 59–60, 164 urbanization 150, 151 indigenous peoples 188, 191, 193, 307, 400, 408, 443, 455–6 individualism 25 individualization 426 Indonesia infrastructure 442 local insurance funds 348

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industrialization 20, 22–3, 24, 29, 39, 96–7, 171–2, 199, 307, 415 inequality 73–4, 195–6, 326–7 and cities 157 and economic development 22–3, 199–200 and education 302–3, 307 and employment-based social protection 271–2 and financial inclusion 423, 424 global 22 and globalization 100 and Green Revolution 182 health and healthcare 285, 289, 291, 293–4 between nation states 122, 190 and social assistance 368–9 and sustainable development goals (SDGs) 121, 122 see also gender and gender equality informal economy and informal employment 158–60, 204, 246–8 care work 256–7 current issues 254–9 definitions and data 248–9 formal–informal boundaries and linkages 249–50 further research 259–62 and healthcare systems 255–6, 261–2, 293 informal economy in social policy and development studies 252–4 infrastructural provision 254–6 social insurance 346–7, 348, 406 social protection 269–71, 272–3, 277, 278 status in employment: income, risks and gender 250–52 understanding informal economy 248–52 women 77, 159–60, 251–2, 256–7, 260, 261 worker organizations and representation 60–61, 248, 257–9 informal security regime 40 infrastructure 118–19, 162, 254–6, 362, 425, 438, 442

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476 Handbook of social policy and development Ingreso Etico Familiar (Chile) 386 institutionalist approach/school and social movements 62, 63 and social rights 140–41 and sustainable development goals (SDGs) 126 institutionalization conditional income transfers (CITs) 387 regional social policy 238 institutions, social policy 43–5 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) 239–40 intergenerational equity 342–3 International Conference of Labour Statisticians 248 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) 133, 301 International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) 258 International Labour Organization (ILO) 23, 95, 96, 97–8, 103, 142, 249, 258, 336–7, 340, 346–7, 358 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 24, 101, 138 Islam 216 Isotalo, R. 212, 213 Japan, welfare regime 268 Jaquette, J.S. 79 Jones, G. 153 Justice as Fairness: A Restatement 327 Kaldor, M. 208 Kassouf, A.L. 383 Kenya community development programmes (CDPs) 437 microfinance 421 Keynesian economics and policies 20, 21, 113, 114, 132 Kiselica, M.S. 398 knowledge sharing 120–21 Kumar, Pushpam 194–5

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Kuznets curve 189 Kyoto Protocol 192, 195 labour insurance funds 338 labour market 39, 74, 132, 265, 277 labour movement 55–6, 60–61, 62–3, 132, 259 leaders, community 435 Lebanon 217–19 Lee, J. 324 legal enforcement of rights 47–8, 134 Lennartz, C. 324 Leung, J.C.B. 360 Lewis, W.A. 171–2, 173 Li, T.M. 61 liberal market and development 178 and social assistance 364 social costs of 99 and social services and social work 395–6 see also neoliberalism liberal welfare regimes 267–8 liberalism 211 liberalization 58 life cycle analysis 259–60 Limits to Growth 190 Lipton, Michael 153 livelihoods approach 25, 172, 176–7 living conditions 148 Livingstone, A. 28, 29 local government 255 London School of Economics, Department of Social Science and Administration 16 low and middle income countries (LMICs), health and healthcare systems 283–9, 290–93, 295–6, 297 Lowe, S. 324–5 Lund, Francie 265, 276 Maalki, L. 213 MacPherson, S. 28–9 Mair, L. 26–7 malaria 97

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Index 477 male breadwinner model 76–7, 272, 342 market failure 458 marketization of development 423–6 Marshall, T.H. 17, 45–6, 131, 132, 303 Marxist perspective 18, 54, 55–6, 57–9, 60, 62 maternal and child health 285, 441 McCormack, T. 212 McKinnon, R. 253 McNamara, Robert S. 175 means test 352, 353, 361–2, 377 member-based organizations (MBOs) 257 MERCOSUR (Southern Cone Common Market) 227, 228 Mexico conditional income transfers (CITs) 373, 375–6, 377, 378, 379, 381, 382–3, 384 microfinance 420, 421 micro-insurance schemes 347–8 microenterprises 422–3 microfinance see financial inclusion and microfinance Midgley, James 28, 29, 30–31, 37, 115, 170, 309, 394, 400, 402, 403, 406 migration 74–5, 212, 213 rural–urban 148–50, 184, 197 vulnerability 213–16, 220 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 100–106, 107–8, 138, 139, 141, 155, 302, 387 evolution to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 117–23 Millennium Development Project 102 Mishra, R. 41 Mitlin, D. 164, 249, 254, 255 Mkandawire, T. 40–41 modernism 66 modernization theory and approach 21–3, 24, 173–4 Molina-Millan, T. 384 Morocco, microfinance 417, 418, 420 Morris, K. 400, 401

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mortgage securitization 324 multi-level governance 92 mutual aid societies 347–8 Mwansa, L.-K. 395, 405 national governments and global social policy 90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 103 and globalization 100 natural resources exploitation of 188, 189, 191, 199 management of 443 reduction in demand 196 ‘natural’ rights 132 nature 194–5 neoliberalism 17–18, 24–5, 28, 44, 113, 114, 178, 339, 396 India 417 and NGOs 456, 458–9 and social movements 58, 60 and social rights 132 and structural adjustment 98–9, 138 Nepal community forestry project 443 conditional income transfers (CITs) 385 new public governance (NPG) 457 new public management (NPM) 287 ‘new social movements’ 56–8, 60–61, 63, 64 New Urban Agenda 164–6, 321–2 New Zealand, child welfare 400 NGOs (non-governmental organizations) 451–2 and community development programmes (CDPs) 445 conceptualizing 452–5, 465 and gender-based violence (GBV) 218 historical perspectives 455–8 and microfinance 414–15 towards a new research agenda 463–5 as welfare providers and drivers of social transformation 458–63 Nicaragua, microfinance 417 Niedzwiecki, S. 64

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478 Handbook of social policy and development Nigeria, urbanization 150 night lights 156–7 Nikolai, R. 303 non-formal welfare 393, 394, 406 non-state actors, regionalization and regional social policy 228–9, 239 North–South 190 nutritional supplements 359, 367 occupational health and safety (OHS) 261 OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) 101, 102, 123–4 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) 138–9 official development assistance (ODA) 37, 102, 141, 239 philanthropic 42, 43, 228–9 and regional groupings 234 security element of 212 and social assistance/protection 365, 366 South–South cooperation 115, 123–4 organizational hybridity 464 Osei-Hwedie, K. 400, 406 Our Common Future 190 outsourcing 459 Pakistan 234 Palestinian refugees 216, 217–18 Paris Agreement 192 Parnell, S. 165 participatory development 58, 176, 177–8, 432–3 Pawar, M. 433 Payne, M. 399 Pearson, R. 276 pensions Argentina 273 evolution of 335–6, 337–9, 355–6 fiscal viability 344, 345–6 intergenerational equity 342–3 notional pension accounts 344 privatization of 339–40 social assistance 361

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philanthropists 42–3, 228–9, 287, 459, 460, 462 Philippines, infrastructure 442 Picketty, Thomas 326 Piven, F.F. 63 Pogge, Thomas 140–41 pollution 194, 195, 197, 198 Poor Law Act (1601) 354–5 Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) 355 poor relief 353–5, 395, 455 Poor Relief Act (1576) 354 post-colonial critique of development 58–9 post-development 58–61, 67 post-structuralism 57 Post-Washington Consensus 44, 457, 463 poverty causes of 374 definition of 374 and education 73, 309 extreme 73, 285, 374 and financial inclusion 418–19 and gender 73–5, 84–5 and health 162, 285, 293–4 and human rights 138–42 and informal economy 158 measurement and understanding of 154–5 rural 148–9, 153–4, 175–7 urban 147, 148–9, 153–7, 164–6 victim blaming 426 Voices of the Poor 178 see also environment, development and poverty poverty reduction 23, 30, 79–80, 81, 300–301 and economic growth 157 mechanisms 142 and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 103, 104–5 as priority 188–9 see also cash transfers; conditional income transfers (CITs); social assistance, poverty and development Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers 153–4

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Index 479 power resources theory 62–3, 455 Principles and Guidelines for a Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies 139 private sector and community development programmes (CDPs) 445–6 and healthcare 296, 297 public–private partnerships (PPPs) 43, 446, 457, 464 and sustainable development goals (SDGs) 118 privatization of housing 321 of pensions 339–40 productivism 117–18, 266–7, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276, 278 productivity, and housing 317–18 Progresa (Mexico) 373, 375–6, 377, 378, 379, 381, 382–3, 384 property owning democracy 327–8, 329 provident funds 338, 347 public goods 230 public policy, definitions of 90–91 public–private partnerships (PPPs) 43, 446, 457, 464 public sector, and NGOs 459–60 public works 362, 375 Rankopo, M.J. 400, 406 Rawls, John 326–8, 329 Razavi, S. 276 recreational activities 444 redistribution 121, 122, 368–9 refugees 213 case study 207, 216–19 children 219 vulnerability 213–16, 220 regional organizations 226–8, 235–7, 239–40 regional trade agreements (RTAs) 227, 231–2, 242 regionalization and world-regional social governance, policy and development 224–5

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examples of regional social policy and practice 235–40 lexicons of regions, regionalism and regionalization 225–9 prospects and avenues for regional social policy and development 240–43 region-building 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 233, 235, 239–40 regional development 229–32 regional social policy 232–43 Reisch, M. 393, 397–8, 399, 401–2, 404, 406–7 relative poverty 154–5 religious NGOs 453 renewable energy 203 resettlement and displacement 215–16, 438–9 residual social policy approach, sustainable development goals (SDGs) 126 Resource Centre for Gender Equality (ABAAD) 218 revolutionary movements 22 Right to Water 441 rights-based approach 136–43, 301, 367–8, 457 risks, and informal employment 250–52 Risse, T. 228 Robinson, M. 398 robotization 201 Ronald, R. 324 rural development 20–22 actor-oriented approaches 177–8 agriculture 171–2, 175 critical development studies 179 Green Revolution 179–83 key concepts 169–71 modernization, dependency and world systems theories 173–4 multiple disciplines and dimensions 172–3 and rural poverty 175–7 small farm paradigm 175 social policy and development studies, convergence and divergence 183–4

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480 Handbook of social policy and development from state-led to market-led 178 theories and practice 173–9 rural poverty 148–9, 153–4, 175–7 SADC (Southern African Development Community) 236, 237 Salamon, L. 460 sanitation 441–2 Satterthwaite, D. 164, 249, 254, 255 savings 419, 421–2 school attendance, and conditional income transfers (CITs) 376, 379, 380–83, 384, 385–6 school feeding programmes 359–60 Second World 134 securitization 213, 324 security and development 206–7, 219–21 case study (refugees) 216–19 discourses of security 207–9, 210 relationship between human security and development 210–13 vulnerability 213–16 self-determination 136–7 Self-Employed Women’s Association (India) 257, 415 self-help groups (SHGs) 439, 456 self-help housing 318 self-reliance 211–12 Sen, Amartya 35, 36, 137, 138, 154–5, 211 service delivery, community development programmes (CDPs) 443–4 services, urban 162 settlement houses 395, 433 Sewpaul, V. 398–9, 402–3, 405 sexuality 215–16 shelter lending 154 Sherman, P. 393, 402, 405, 407 Silva, G.E. 63–4, 65, 67 Singapore, home ownership 328 slums 160, 161–2, 164, 318, 320 small farm paradigm 175 Smart, A. 324

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social and human rights concepts of social rights 130–36 conclusion 143 humanitarian approaches 139–43, 214–15 right to self-determination 136–7 rights-based approaches to social development 136–43 social rights as human rights 133–4 social rights as rights of citizenship 17, 45–6, 130, 131–2 social rights in global context 134–6 technocratic approaches 138–9 social assistance Chile 386 evolution of 336–7 and gender 76–7, 368 and NGOs 459 Taiwan 400–401 see also cash transfers; conditional income transfers (CITs) social assistance, poverty and development 352–3 administration of social assistance 363–4, 365–6 challenges and opportunities 363–9 historical context 353–8 terminology 352 varieties of social assistance 358–63 social change, and social movements 54–6, 59, 60 social citizenship 131, 266–7 social costs, of market-oriented policy 99 social democratic welfare regimes 268, 271 social development 27, 28, 37, 97–8, 113–16, 120, 123–5, 136–43 social exclusion 36 social forces 54 social funds 356 social housing 318, 319, 320 social insurance 311, 333–4 administrative issues 343, 346 appropriateness 341, 348 corruption and state capacity 343 coverage 340–41, 342, 346–8

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Index 481 and economic growth 349 equity 342–3, 348–9 evolution and key features of 334–40 fiscal viability 344 future directions in 345–9 issues 340–45 see also employment-based social protection social investment 29–30, 118, 120, 304 social justice and social assistance 367–9 and social work 398–9, 402, 403–4, 405 social movements 54–5, 66–7, 164 and social policy, in development context 61–5 and theories of development 55–61 social planning 27 social policy convergence and divergence between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries 3, 41–8 definitions of 90–91, 265 and development 36–8 development of, as academic discipline 15–20 future, in developing world 48–50 goals of 300–301 importance of 1 main debates in 253 role of 37, 113 utility in Global South 2–3, 35–6, 38–40, 112 Western chauvinism 40–41 social policy and development studies 2, 14–15, 26–32, 112–13, 124–5, 126–7 housing 316 informal economy 246, 247–8, 252–4, 262 and NGOs 451–2 rural development 170, 172–84 world-regional cooperation and integration 232–3 social progress 20 social protection 30–31, 358

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definition of 265 development of 39, 132, 337 and empowerment of women 79–84 funding for 366 and globalization 100 informal 40 and NGOs 459 non-Western measures 41 social development approach 114 as social right 45–8 and sustainable development goals (SDGs) 121 in time of crisis 268–9 universal basic income 369 see also employment-based social protection; social assistance Social Protection Floor 103, 104, 142, 261, 346–7, 358, 366 social reproduction, and sustainable development goals (SDGs) 121, 122–3 social security 30–31, 253 global implementation 95, 96, 97 international system 142 South Africa 47 Social Security Convention (102) 95, 96 social services 28, 29–30, 395–6 development of 26–7 provision, issues in 396–403 see also social work and family services social transformation, and NGOs 461–3 social welfare early study of 16, 17 and economic development 29–30 and neoliberalism 17–18 pluralist interpretation 19–20 study of, in development context 26–32 universality 115, 121 social work and family services 16, 393–4 and decline of traditional values 402 developmental social work 404–5 family forms 396, 399, 403

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482 Handbook of social policy and development family group conferences 400 family welfare services 396–7, 399 features and development of 394–6 future directions 405–8 issues in social service provision 396–403 micro–macro approach to practice 397–9, 404, 405, 406–7, 408 relevance to development 403–5 soft law 241 South Africa 49, 50 cash transfers 82 conditional cash transfers (CCTs) 80 employment-based social protection 270 gender inequalities in workforce 276 informal workers 260 social assistance 361, 366, 368 social insurance 338 social movements 164 social protection and social rights 47 South Korea 196–7, 199–200 community development programmes (CDPs) 438 gender inequalities in workforce 276 South–South cooperation 112, 115–16, 117–18, 119, 120–21, 123–4, 125 ‘Southern donors’ 112 sovereignty 119 Soviet model of agriculture 181 Soviet Union, social insurance 338 spiritual activities 444 Spolander, G. 407–8 state 43–5 development of 39–40 and education 309, 312 failure 458–9 and housing 160–61, 322, 323, 326, 328–9 legitimacy of 460 and regionalism 226 role of 19–20, 114, 121–2, 178

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and rural development 170, 172–3, 179 and social change 55 and social insurance 343, 345 welfare, growth of 18–19 Stern, M. 210 Stewart, F. 212 stigma, social assistance 364–5 structural adjustment 98–9, 138, 153, 178, 307, 356 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, US) 359, 367 Surender, R. 116 sustainable development 24 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 105–6, 108, 111–13, 155–6, 201 challenges and opportunities 123–7 economic growth, employment and investment 117–19 education and human development 119–21 environment and poverty 198–201 evolution from MDGs 117–23 gender equality 71–2, 122–3 healthcare 289 human security 208–9 implementation of 85, 202–4 process leading to (social development approach) 113–16 regional cooperation and integration 240–41 rural development 184 social justice 403–4 social protection, redistribution and reproduction 121–3 social rights 139 urban issues 165–6 sustainable livelihood framework 176–7 Syrian refugees 207, 216, 218–19 Taiwan social assistance 400–401 social insurance 270 Tanzania, social insurance 270

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Index 483 Targeted Public Distribution Scheme (TPDS, India) 359 tax base 274 technocratic approaches, social and human rights 138–9 technology 156–7, 180, 181, 182, 201 Teichman, J. 239–40 Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF, US) 357 Thailand, social movements 64–5 Theories of Peasant Economy and Agrarian Change 179 third sector 42, 454, 464 Third Way 457 Third World 134 time use surveys 260–61 tithes 354 Titmuss, Richard 16, 17, 27, 272 Tobin Tax 141, 142 Townsend, Peter 142 trade unions 62, 259 Turner, John 317–18 UN-Habitat 165, 320–22 UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) 236, 237, 239 unemployment benefits/insurance 336, 344 UNESCO 95 UNHCR 215 UNICEF 98, 99 United Kingdom (UK) colonies, community development 434 former colonies, social insurance 337–8 housing and housing policy 319–20, 322, 323–4 social assistance 354–5, 357, 362–3, 369 social insurance 335–6 United Nations 23, 24, 27, 94–6, 97–8, 310 Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ECOSOC) 140

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and community development 446 Conference on Environment and Development (1992) 191 Copenhagen Social Summit (1995) 139, 140 Development Programme (UNDP) 138 Millennium Declaration 301–2 and regional governance 241 regional structure 226–7, 241 Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) 275–6 Rio+20 Conference 198 and social development 115 UN-Habitat 165, 320–22 UNESCO 95 UNHCR 215 UNICEF 98, 99 Vienna Declaration 139–40 see also Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) United States (US) and Green Revolution 181 health spending 288 housing and home ownership 322, 325 intergenerational equity 343 liberal welfare regime 267–8 NGOs 455 social assistance 357, 359, 367 social insurance 345–6, 347, 349 social movements 63 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 95, 130, 133, 135, 140–41 universal social protection 272–3, 274–5, 277–8 universality social welfare 115, 121 sustainable development goals (SDGs) 124–5 universalizing health coverage (UHC) 287, 289–93, 294–5, 296, 297 unpaid work 122, 251, 256–7, 260–61, 272, 402

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484 Handbook of social policy and development urban development and social policy 147 growing urban poverty 148–9 housing and urban services 160–62, 164 infrastructural provision 254–6 New Urban Agenda 164–6 recognizing and responding to urban poverty 153–7 urban livelihoods and informality 157–60 urban safety and security 162–4 urbanization and urban growth 149–53, 156, 395 Urbina-Ferretjans, M. 116 user fees 99, 425 USSR 181, 229, 338 value chain analysis 260 Van Der Vleuten, A. 237 victim blaming 426 Vienna Declaration 139–40 violence 162–4, 343 gender-based violence (GBV) 74, 81, 218 Voices of the Poor 178 ‘voluntary failure’ 460 voluntary workers 256 vulnerability 213–16, 220 vulnerable groups, service delivery 443–4 Walker, S. 397, 399, 400 warfare 163–4 Washington Consensus 44, 58, 100, 178, 456 water costs 424–5 right to 441 welfare mix/welfare pluralism 454, 456–7, 461, 464 welfare regimes 62, 237, 253, 267–8, 271, 311 welfare state, emergence of 16 ‘welfare to work’ 357, 362–3 welfarism 17, 18 Western chauvinism 40–41

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Wilensky, H.L. 302, 303 Wilsonian NGOs 453–4 women employment 74–5, 77, 82, 122–3 empowerment of 78–84, 420–21 and financial services 420–21 informal economy and informal employment 77, 159–60, 251–2, 256–7, 260, 261 as primary carers, assumption of 76–7, 82, 407 rights of 71–2 women in development (WID) approach 77–8 see also gender and gender equality Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) 61, 159–60 Wood, G. 38–9, 40, 61 work see employment; employment-based social protection; informal economy and informal employment; unpaid work World Bank 23, 24, 46, 101, 102–3, 138, 153, 155, 239–41, 339 community-driven development (CDD) projects 439, 442, 443 financial inclusion and microfinance 415–16, 421, 423 and healthcare 287, 290, 293 and housing 318, 320–21 and poverty 178 and poverty reduction 300–301 and rural development 175 shelter lending 154 and social assistance 356, 358–60, 361, 362, 363, 365 and social insurance 346 and social protection 358, 366 victim blaming 426 World Development Report 2000 155 World Development Report 2002 178 World Development Report 2015 426 World Education Forum 301 World Health Organization (WHO) 95, 97, 98, 285–6, 288, 290, 294

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Index 485 world-regional social governance, policy and development see regionalization and world-regional social governance, policy and development world systems theories 174

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Xu, Y. 360 Yeates, N. 90 youth development 444–5 Zambia, social assistance 362 Zucco, C. 389

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