transformations in global and regional social policies

Transformations in Global and Regional Social Policies

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Transformations in Globaland Regional SocialPoliciesEdited by

Alexandra KaaschUniversity of Bremen, Germany

Paul StubbsThe Institute of Economics, Croatia

Selection and editorial matter © Alexandra Kaasch and Paul Stubbs 2014Individual chapters © Respective authors 2014

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of thispublication may be made without written permission.

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First published 2014 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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ISBN 978-1-349-44964-4 ISBN 978-1-137-28731-1 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/9781137287311

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ForBob Deacon

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables ix

Acknowledgments x

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms xii

Notes on Contributors xvi

1 Global and Regional Social Policy Transformations:Contextualizing the Contribution of Bob Deacon 1Paul Stubbs and Alexandra Kaasch

2 The Socialization of Regionalism and the Regionalizationof Social Policy: Contexts, Imperatives, and Challenges 17Nicola Yeates

3 Global Economic Downturn and Social Protection in EastAsia: Pathways of Global and Local Interactions 44Huck-ju Kwon

4 Common Health Policy Interests and the Politics ofRights, Regulation, and Redistribution 65Meri Koivusalo

5 Global Social Justice, Ethics, and the Crisis of Care 85Fiona Williams

6 Climate Change, Social Policy, and Global Governance 108Ian Gough

7 Poverty and Climate Change: The Three Tasks ofTransformative Global Social Policy 134Asunción Lera St. Clair and Victoria Lawson

8 Antagonism and Accommodation: The Labor–IMF/WorldBank Relationship 153Robert O’Brien

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viii Contents

9 Grasping the Social Impact of Global Social Policy: HowNeo-liberal Policies Have Influenced Social Actionin Morocco 175Shana Cohen

10 Toward a Transformative Global Social Policy? 201Bob Deacon

Index 218

Figures and Tables

Figures

3.1 Spending on social protection in Korea 596.1 International climate change negotiations: Key dates 116

Tables

2.1 Regional social policies in practice in four continents 316.1 Summary of key governance institutions in the

two domains 121

ix

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of a collaboration to honor the work of ourcolleague and friend Professor Bob Deacon, Emeritus Professor of Inter-national Social Policy at the University of Sheffield, UK. Apart from Bob’sown chapter, the book was presented to him as a Festschrift on the occa-sion of his retirement from full-time academia at an event in Sheffieldin July 2013. All authors have closely worked with Bob in the past andhave engaged extensively with his work.

We wish to thank all those who helped and supported us in writingand editing this book, particularly as we managed to keep the existenceof the book a secret from Bob until the retirement event. We are grate-ful to all the contributors to the book for their dedication to the causeand for their willingness to persevere in the face of our comments onnumerous drafts. We are immensely grateful to Bob himself for agree-ing, at short notice, to contribute the final chapter reflecting on bothhis work and the contributions to this book.

Thanks also to Stephan Leibfried and Ian Gough for early advice onhow to publish this as a book; and many thanks to Philippa Grand andher colleagues from Palgrave Macmillan for their support and patience.

Bob Deacon’s 70th birthday is on 28 May 2014. We wish, through thisbook, to pay a birthday tribute to a scholar who has inspired us and hasgiven so much to establish Global Social Policy studies over the last twodecades. More than this, we want the book to be a critical engagementwith key aspects of global and regional social policy, useful to currentand future generations of scholars, activists, and policy-makers. This is,perhaps, the true test of the value of the book and one upon which Bobhas always insisted for his own work.

Table 2.1 of Chapter 2 is reproduced from World-Regional SocialPolicy and Global Governance (Table 10.1, p. 219), edited by Deacon,B., M. Macovei, L. Van Langenhove, and N. Yeates, Copyright 2010Routledge. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK.

Figure 6.1 of Chapter 6 is reproduced from The Global Developmentof Policy Regimes to Combat Climate Change (Chapter by Samuela Bassiand James Rydge), edited by Nicholas Stern, Alex Bowen and JohnWalley. Copyright 2014 World Scientific Publications. Reproduced bypermission of World Scientific Publications.

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Acknowledgments xi

Parts of Chapter 7 are reproduced from Changing Environment forHuman Security: Transformative Approaches to Research, Policy and Action(Chapter 18 ‘From Poverty to Prosperity’ by Asunción Lera St. Clair andVictoria Lawson) edited by Linda Sygna, Karen O’Brien and JohannaWolf, Copyright 2013 Routledge. Reproduced by permission of Taylor &Francis Books UK.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

ACTA Anti-counterfeiting agreementADB Asian Development BankALBA Bolivarian Alternative for the AmericasANZCERTA Australia and New Zealand Closer Economic

Relations Trade AgreementASEAN Association of South East Asian NationsAU African UnionCAN Andean CommunityCARD Council of Agricultural and Rural Development

(Cambodia)CARICOM Caribbean CommunityCBI Confederation of British IndustriesCCT Conditional Cash TransferCDCF Cambodian Development Cooperation ForumCDD Community-Driven DevelopmentCDF Comprehensive Development FrameworkCDM Clean Development MechanismCLS Core Labor StandardsCOPs Conferences of PartiesCSME Caribbean Community Single Market and

EconomyDPK Dominant Poverty KnowledgeEAC East African CommunityEC European CommissionECB European Central BankECOWAS Economic Union of West African StatesEDPL Education Development Policy LoanEEP Emergency Education PlanESRC Economic and Social Research CouncilETS Emissions Trading SystemEU European UnionEWI Employing Workers IndicatorFCTC Framework Convention on Tobacco ControlFTA Free Trade AgreementGASPP Globalism and Social Policy Program

xii

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms xiii

GDP Gross Domestic ProductGHG Greenhouse GasGSP Global Social PolicyHDI Human Development IndexHIPC Heavily Indebted Poor CountriesICESCR International Covenant on Economic, Social and

Cultural RightsICFTU International Confederation of Free Trade UnionsICJ International Court of JusticeIDP Inpres Desa Terttingal (Indonesia)IEA International Energy AgencyIFC International Finance CorporationIFIs International Financial InstitutionsIGO International Governmental OrganizationILO International Labor OrganizationIMF International Monetary FundINGO International Non-Governmental OrganizationIO International OrganizationIOM International Organization on MigrationIPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ChangeIPR Intellectual Property RightsITUC International Trade Union ConfederationIWG-SSN Interim Working Group for the Social Safety Net

(Cambodia)JESP Journal of European Social PolicyJPS Program Jaring Pengaman Social (Indonesia)MDG Millennium Development GoalMERCOSUR Common Market of the SouthNAFTA North American Free Trade AssociationNBLS National Basic Livelihood SecurityNEF New Economics FoundationNEPAD New Partnership for Africa’s DevelopmentNHS National Health ServiceNPM New Public ManagementNREGA National Rural Employment Guarantee ActNSPS National Social Protection Strategy (Cambodia)OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and

DevelopmentPAAR People’s Agenda for Alternative RegionalismsPAYG pay as you goppm parts per million

xiv List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

PRSP Poverty Reduction Strategy PaperR&D Research and DevelopmentREDD Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest

DegradationSAARC South Asian Association for Regional CooperationSACU Southern African Customs UnionSADC South African Development CommunitySAL Structural Adjustment LoanSAPA Solidarity for Asian People’s AdvocacySAPRI Structural Adjustment Participatory Review

InitiativeSAPSN Southern African People’s Solidarity NetworkSBDW Standard Bidding Document for Procurement

of WorksSECAL Sectoral Adjustment LoanSPF Social Protection FloorSPIAC-B Social Protection Inter-Agency Co-operation BoardSPU Social Protection UnitSTAKES National Research Centre for Welfare and Health

(Finland)TNI Transnational InstituteTRIPS Trade-Related Intellectual Property RightsUEMOA Economic and Monetary Union West AfricaUN United NationsUNASUR Union of South American NationsUNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and

DevelopmentUNDESA UN Department of Economic and Social AffairsUNDP UN Development ProgramUNEP UN Environment ProgramUNESCAP Economic and Social Commission for Asia and

the PacificUNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

OrganizationUNFCCC UN Framework Convention on Climate ChangeUNICEF UN Children’s FundUNRISD UN Research Institute for Social DevelopmentUNU United Nations UniversityWCSDG World Commission on the Social Dimension of

Globalization

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms xv

WFP World Food ProgramWHO World Health OrganizationWIPO World Intellectual Property OrganizationWMO World Meteorological OrganizationWTO World Trade Organization

Contributors

Shana Cohen is Deputy Director at the Woolf Institute, UK, and anassociate researcher with the Department of Sociology at the Universityof Cambridge, UK. Her research focuses on social change and interna-tional development; economic inequality, social relations, and religiousdiversity; and social action.

Bob Deacon is Emeritus Professor of International Social Policy at theUniversity of Sheffield, UK, and currently holds the UNESCO-UNUChair in Regional Integration, Migration, and the Free Movement ofPeople at UNUCRIS in Bruges. His most recent book is Global Social Policyin the Making: The Foundations of the Social Protection Floor. He is Found-ing Editor of the journals Critical Social Policy (CSP) and Global SocialPolicy (GSP). He has acted as Consultant or Advisor to the ILO, UNICEF,UNDP, UNDESA, UNRISD, World Bank, European Commission, Coun-cil of Europe, ICSW, CROP, and the Social Security Ministries of severalcountries. He now lives in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, UK.

Ian Gough is Emeritus Professor at the University of Bath, Visiting Pro-fessor at the London School of Economics (LSE), and a member of theAcademy of Social Sciences, UK. He was, with Bob Deacon and others, afounding member of Critical Social Policy, first published in 1980. Someof his publications are The Political Economy of the Welfare State; A Theoryof Human Need; Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and LatinAmerica; and Wellbeing in Developing Countries: From Theory to Research.Some of his essays are published in Global Capital, Human Needs andSocial Policies. He is currently researching into climate change and socialpolicy at the LSE.

Alexandra Kaasch is Senior Researcher at the University of Bremen,Germany. Previously she was Lecturer at the University of Sheffield. Sheis Editor of the Global Social Policy Digest and has recently published‘Contesting Contestation in Global Social Policy’ (Global Social Policy13.1) and co-authored The Welfare State as Crisis Manager (with PeterStarke and Franca van Hooren).

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Notes on Contributors xvii

Meri Koivusalo is a senior researcher at the National Institute forHealth and Welfare, Helsinki, Finland, and was a senior researcher inthe Globalism and Social Policy Program (GASPP). Her current researchinterests include common interests in global health policies, trade andhealth policies, interest group lobbying, European policies, and thecommercialization of health-care systems.

Huck-ju Kwon is Professor at the Graduate School of Public Admin-istration, Seoul National University, and Deputy Director of the AsiaDevelopment Institute at the School. He is also Director of the GlobalResearch Network on Social Protection in East Asia, funded by the KoreaResearch Council. He has worked at the United Nations Research Insti-tute for Social Development. He has been an active member of theeditorial board of Global Social Policy, which Bob Deacon founded in2000, and he is now its Regional Editor for East Asia. Some of hispublications are The Korean State and Social Policy (2011), Transformingthe Developmental Welfare State in East Asia (2005), and The East AsianWelfare Model: The State and Welfare Orientalism (1998).

Victoria Lawson is Professor of Geography at the University ofWashington, Seattle. She is the co-founder of the Relational Poverty Net-work and Middle-Class Poverty Politics project. Her work is concernedwith the social and economic effects of global economic restructuringin the Americas and with articulating critical alternative conceptions ofprocesses of impoverishment. Some of her recent publications are FromPoverty to Prosperity: Addressing Growth, Equity and Ethics in a ChangingEnvironment, with A.L. St. Clair, in O’Brien, K. Sygna, L. Wolf, J. (eds);A Changing Environment for Human Security: New Agendas for Research,Policy and Action, London (2011); Victoria Lawson with the Middle ClassPoverty Politics Research Group. De-centering poverty studies: middleclass alliances and the social construction of poverty, Singapore Journal ofTropical Geography (2010).

Robert O’Brien is LIUNA-Mancinelli Professor of Global Labor Issuesin the Department of Political Science at McMaster University, Canada.He met Bob Deacon and became interested in global social policy whileconducting research on the relationship between social movements andinternational economic institutions in the mid-1990s (Contesting GlobalGovernance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements(2000)). After participating in a series of social policy seminars spon-sored by the Globalism and Social Policy Program, he became North

xviii Notes on Contributors

American editor of the journal Global Social Policy (2000–4) and one ofits co-editors (2005–10).

Asunción Lera St. Clair, philosopher and sociologist, is Research Direc-tor at the International Centre for Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo (CICERO), former Professor of Sociology at the University ofBergen, Norway, and Scientific Director of CROP. She is Lead Author ofthe Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange (IPCC) Working Group II Report, member of the Joint Program-ming Initiative Connecting Climate Knowledge for Europe (JPI Climate)Working Group VI on Decision Making, and member of the editorialboards of various international journals, including Global EnvironmentalChange and Global Social Policy. Some of her recent books are ClimateChange, Ethics and Human Security, with K. O’Brien, B. Kristoffersen (eds)(2010); Development Ethics: A Reader, with D. Gasper (eds) (2009); GlobalPoverty, Ethics, and Human Rights: The Role of Multilateral Organisations(with Desmond McNeill).

Paul Stubbs, a UK-born sociologist, works in the Institute of Economics,Zagreb, Croatia. Previously, he was a senior researcher on the Globalismand Social Policy Programme. He is co-editor (with Bob Deacon) ofSocial Policy and International Interventions in South East Europe (2007)and is co-author (with Bob Deacon) of the text ‘Global social policystudies: Conceptual and analytical reflections’ (Global Social Policy 13,2013).

Fiona Williams is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the Universityof Leeds, UK. Until recently she was Co-Director of the Centre for Interna-tional Research on Care, Labour and Equalities. She is also a senior researchassociate at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at the Universityof Oxford, UK. She was a member of the Editorial Collective of Criti-cal Social Policy, which Bob Deacon founded, from 1985 to 2004, andworked with Bob during the period 1985–8 on an ESRC-funded study ofthe welfare states in Britain and Hungary. Her current research focuseson care in a transnational world and on developing a critical socialpolicy.

Nicola Yeates is Professor of Social Policy in the Department of SocialPolicy and Criminology at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.She has published extensively in the areas of globalization, regionalism,migration, social protection, and social policy (see Open Research

Notes on Contributors xix

Online www.oro.open.ac.uk for a full list of her research publications)and has acted as Advisor or Consultant to the World Bank, UNICEF,UNRISD, and UNESCO. She was Co-editor of Global Social Policy: Journalof Public Policy and Social Development till 2010, and Vice-Chair of theUK Social Policy Association till 2013. From 2014 she is Chair of theEditorial Board of Social Policy and Society.

1Global and Regional Social PolicyTransformations: Contextualizingthe Contribution of Bob DeaconPaul Stubbs and Alexandra Kaasch

1. Introduction

A literature on global and regional social policy has expanded exponen-tially in the last decade and a half, enriching the discipline of socialpolicy and facilitating new and fruitful collaborations across disciplines.This book explores some of the key concepts and approaches at the fore-front of global and regional social policy scholarship. The book engages,in particular, with the work of Bob Deacon, responsible for introducingthe term ‘global social policy’. He has not only advanced the study ofglobal social policy but has also considered a focus on both global andregional social policy as an important ‘political commitment’. Contribu-tions to this book come from some of Bob Deacon’s closest collaborators,themselves leading scholars in the fields of global and regional socialpolicy, and all engage critically with key aspects of global and regionalglobal social policy.

2. Bob Deacon’s path to global and regional social policy

Bob Deacon’s academic career in social policy began as a young researchassistant at the London School of Economics in 1966. In 1969, he movedto become a lecturer in social policy at what was then North LondonPolytechnic. Between 1974 and 1987, Bob worked as a senior lecturer insocial policy at the then Plymouth Polytechnic. A committed Marxistand activist, he was among those who founded, and edited, the maga-zine Case Con in 1970, helping to define a whole generation, in the UKand beyond, of ‘radical social workers’,

1

2 Global and Regional Social Policy Transformations

attempting to give an answer to the contradictions that we face.Case Con offers no magic solutions, no way in which you can goto work tomorrow and practice some miraculous new form of socialwork which does meet the needs of your ‘clients’. It would be niceif there were such an easy answer, but we believe that the problemsand frustrations we face daily are inextricably linked to the society welive in, and that we can only understand what needs to be done if weunderstand how the welfare state, of which social services are a part,has developed, and what pressures it is subject to. It is the purpose ofthis manifesto to trace briefly this development, to see how it affectsus and our relationships to the rest of society, and above all to startworking out what we can do about it.

(Case Con Manifesto, quoted in Okitipiand Aymer, 2009: 56)

In 1980, Bob, together with Gordon Peters, founded the journal CriticalSocial Policy. Its first issue was published in June 1981 just as ‘the newright’, associated particularly with the then UK Prime Minister MargaretThatcher, began to assert its hegemony through the reworking of indi-vidualist and marketized conceptions of welfare. The journal, and itsannual conferences, cemented a more radical stance on social policywithin UK higher education and internationally, foregrounding femi-nist and, later, anti-racist critiques alongside socialist understandings ofwelfare. His text in the first issue, entitled ‘Social Administration, SocialPolicy and Socialism’ (Deacon, 1981), sought to explore the possibilitiesof socialist social policy, in part at least via a critical reading of ‘real exist-ing socialism’ in Cuba and Russia. The argument was expanded upon inhis book Social Policy and Socialism: The Struggle for Socialist Relations ofWelfare (Deacon, 1983), based on a deeper reflection of the challenges toprogressive social welfare in both capitalist and state socialist settings.

Bob Deacon’s move to Leeds Metropolitan University, where, between1987 and 1997, he was Head of Department, Reader, and, later, Profes-sor of Social Policy, saw him working much more centrally on issuesof international and, later, global social policy. He was one of the rarescholars from Western Europe to explore social welfare in state socialistCentral and Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall, workingclosely with progressive social policy scholars in a number of countries.His insights proved crucial in widening comparative social policy analy-sis after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as reflected in his book, co-edited withJulia Szalai, Social Policy in the New Eastern Europe: What Future for Social-ist Social Welfare? (Deacon and Szalai, 1990), and other publications in

Paul Stubbs and Alexandra Kaasch 3

the Ashgate series – Studies in the Social Policies of Central Europe and theSoviet Union – which Deacon edited. Again, he helped to found a jour-nal, the Journal of European Social Policy (JESP), whose first issue appearedin January 1991, and which remains the key journal for comparativeEuropean welfare analysis to this day. Looking back on these times, Dea-con interpreted the collapse of the Eastern bloc thus: ‘For all practicalpolitical purposes any further talk of a post capitalist society built inthe image of a socialist utopia was dead. All that remained for now wasto struggle for a social democratic form of capitalism.’1 His argumentwas, essentially, that ‘the collapse of the East-West political systems pos-turing [ . . . ] liberates the potential for a global social reformist politics’(Deacon, 1992).

While never abandoning his interest in Eastern Europe, indeed incollaborations with Paul Stubbs, expanding this to include South EastEurope and the post-Yugoslav space (cf. Deacon and Stubbs, 1998, 2007),this interest was increasingly framed within an emphasis on the impor-tance of international organizations in shaping national social policychoices. Indeed, the editorial in the first issue of JESP stated one ofthe aims of the journal as concerned with ‘the redistribution of socialpolicy decision-making between national and supranational authoritieswithin Europe and the efforts of these supranational authorities to estab-lish common national standards’ (p. 1). From the mid-1990s onwards,his work helped to define a new field of research, that of Global SocialPolicy. This moved the focus beyond Europe, to a wider concern withsocial welfare and social justice around the world. His trilogy of bookson this theme – Global Social Policy: International Organizations and theFuture of Welfare (Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997); Global SocialPolicy and Governance (Deacon, 2007), and, most recently, Global SocialPolicy in the Making: The Foundations of the Social Protection Floor (Dea-con, 2013) – established and maintained his position as the leadingscholar in the field. Moving to Sheffield University in 1997 to becomeProfessor of International Social Policy, he established the Globalismand Social Policy Program (GASPP) at the same time, initially a col-laboration with STAKES, the National Research Centre for Welfare andHealth in Helsinki, Finland. Later, GASPP expanded into a wider, andmore global, network. Again, Deacon founded an influential journal,Global Social Policy, first published in 2001 and continuing to definethe contours of a rapidly growing field. He also developed some of thefirst postgraduate programs on global social policy, including an MA atthe University of Sheffield and a master’s-level course within the WorldUniversity Network.


His work on global social policy has been complemented, for at leasta decade, by path-breaking work on the social dimensions of worldregionalism, collaborating closely with the United Nations University(UNU) Centre for Regional Integration in Bruges, where, in 2011, hebecame the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organi-zation (UNESCO) Chair in Regional Integration, Migration and the FreeMovement of Peoples. The co-edited book World Regional Social Policyand Global Governance (Deacon et al., 2010) explores the developmentof world-regional social policies and argues that they have the potentialto emerge as key elements of a more pluralistic and equitable systemof global social governance. This work addresses the ways in whichregional groupings of countries sharing similar traditions, legacies, anddevelopmental paths can develop a degree of cooperation, and moreprogressive connections between the social and the economic (cf. alsoDeacon et al., 2007). Indeed, this and later work show Deacon’s will-ingness to respond to, and integrate, the demands of ‘the Global South’regarding the problems of a ‘one-size-fits all’ global social policy frame,reflecting particularistic Northern and Western understandings (Deacon,2000, 2001).

Having so far mainly studied and advised international organiza-tions, in 2011 Bob spent some time inside an international organization,namely the International Labor Organization (ILO). He had received aresearch fellowship and was able to observe global social processes frominside, while still asserting that ‘[r]esearchers are impossibly outside theloops’. Luckily he was able to publish his book, arguing that ‘global pol-icy synergy is now at the top of the agenda’ and ‘what is now requiredis a reverse mission creep of the social agencies into the territory of theeconomic’ and a better appreciation of the significant role of individualsin developing and maintaining (desirable) global social policy (Deacon,2013).

3. Framing global and regional social policies

Clearly, this chapter and, indeed, the book as a whole cannot do jus-tice to the enormous, lifelong contribution Bob Deacon has made tothe broad field of social policy. Instead, we discuss Bob’s major con-tributions to the creation and development of the interlinked fields ofglobal and regional social policy. Global and regional social policies areconcerned with the complex and changing relations between global-ization, regionalism, and new modes of governance, constellations ofcitizenship, and practices of redistribution. As such, the work represents


a significant challenge to the ‘methodological nationalism’ underpin-ning dominant understandings of social policy and moves beyondcomparative analysis of welfare arrangements between nation-states.

The framing contribution of Deacon’s work here has been to exploreforms of global and regional ‘regulation’, ‘rights’ (termed ‘provision’ inDeacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 2), and ‘redistribution’ (the 3Rs).It is not surprising that virtually all of the texts which follow utilize thisframework to a greater or lesser degree, with authors addressing diverseaspects of the supranationalization of these aspects or, in shorthandterms, their re-scaling across folded sub-national, national, cross-border,transnational, and supranational scales. For Deacon:

Redistribution mechanisms alter, usually in a way which makesmore equal, the distributive outcomes of economic activity. Regu-latory activity frames and limits the activities of business and otherprivate actors, normally so that they take more account of the socialconsequences of their actions. The articulation and legislation ofrights leads to some more or less effective mechanisms to ensure thatcitizens might access their rights

(Deacon, 2007: 4, original emphasis)

All of Deacon’s writings on the topic link explicitly the globalizationof social policy with what he terms ‘the socialization of global politics’(Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 1), arguing:

With the collapse of the cold war, the rise of international migra-tory pressures, and the human suffering arising from social instabilityin many parts of the world, the security that faces world leadersis, in effect, social security. Cancellation of debts deriving from theill-informed period of structural adjustment, transnational human-itarian aid to create global political security, and the threat toeconomic competitiveness posed by the ‘social protectionism’ ofEuropean welfare states are today’s top agenda items.

(Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 3)

This framing serves to link the study of social policy firmly with disci-plines of international political economy and development studies, notnormally associated with rather insular social policy scholarship, com-bining their insights with what was termed ‘the central question posedby the present turn of world events’, namely


can the benefits of a socially regulated capitalism be extended glob-ally given environmental constraints and the political problemsposed by global inequity?

(Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 7)

Despite the quote, there has been a notable lack of attention, in Dea-con’s work thus far, to issues of global environmental justice and theproblems of climate change. In this book, Ian Gough (Chapter 6) andAsunción Lera St. Clair and Victoria Lawson (Chapter 7) precisely utilizethe 3Rs framework in innovative ways to explore these issues.

The importance of the social dimensions of globalization, then, wascentral to Deacon’s work on global social policy from the start, movingbeyond national and comparative analyses (although these remainedimportant in terms of the influence of international actors at thesescales) to explore the global scale itself. In this, he has always recognizedthat ‘the global social’ is in a complex, and often subordinate, relation-ship to the global political and, particularly, the global economic, whilerejecting a one-dimensional understanding that ‘neo-liberal globaliza-tion’ inevitably means a global ‘race to the bottom’. His concern with‘the political strategies available to global actors shaping global socialpolicy’ (Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 13, original emphasis)and with ‘political agency’ whether in terms of globalized ‘epistemiccommunities’ (Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997) or, most recently,‘agencies’, ‘actors’, and even ‘biographies’ of those within ‘global policyadvocacy coalitions’ (Deacon, 2013: 151–153) prefigured wider theo-retical concerns to both complement and amend forms of structuraland institutional analysis which tended to deny or edit out bothhuman agency and, indeed, ‘contingency, accident and luck’ (Deacon,2013: 152).

In short, Deacon’s work has opened a theoretical, empirical, and advo-cacy space for exploring both the ways in which global markets andglobal actors influence national social policy and the emerging supra-national global social policies of global redistribution (including globalfunds), global social regulation (including labor standards), and globalsocial rights and provision (including demands for global basic income,international conventions, and so on).

As suggested above, then, global social policy as developed by Dea-con essentially consists of two interlinked dimensions. One is the extentto which global structures and actors shape the development of socialpolicies within countries, never autonomously, of course, but always interms of their connectedness with actors operating at different scales.


Within this broader canvas, one focus has been on the specific socialpolicy recommendations certain key global actors make to countriesconcerning their national social policies. Here, it is important to remem-ber that, from his earliest publications, Deacon has been keen to stressthe importance of addressing the battle of ideas both ‘between’ and‘within’ international and supranational organizations. The truth ofthe statement that ‘policy consensus within international organizationsmay be the exception, not the rule’ (Béland and Orenstein, 2013) is verymuch an open empirical question. Here, we would argue that ‘ideas’,‘interests’, and ‘ideology’ all matter, as Deacon recognized, and that thebalance between the three depends very much on what is being stud-ied, when and where. Hence, Béland and Orenstein’s view that, over along period of time, advocacy think tanks tend to be more ideologicalon pension reform than the World Bank does not necessarily call intoquestion the ideologically rooted nature of World Bank–driven pensionreform in the early transition years in Central and Eastern Europe. At thesame time, it remains questionable whether generalizations from thepensions discourse to social policy more broadly are either possible ordesirable (Kaasch, 2013).

The other strand in Deacon’s work regarding global social policy con-cerns the emergence and functioning of mechanisms of global socialgovernance that address, at a supranational level, the dimensions ofsocial policy which, in the past, tended to operate, at least primarily, at anational level. The concern is with modes and mechanisms of redistribu-tion, regulation, and rights across borders, transnationally and globally,as well as the articulation, advocacy, and advancement of global socialrights and provisions. It is here that the sometimes voiced concernof Deacon’s work that ‘an urgent desire to “mend the world” has ledperhaps to a failure to pause long enough to “understand the world” ’(Deacon and Stubbs, 2013: 7) does become relevant. In his work, Dea-con is at pains to point out that technical re-orderings of global socialgovernance, though necessary, are far from sufficient without ‘longer-term global political alliances’ (Deacon, 2007: 158), although the natureof this is sometimes, we would argue, left vague. The limitations, then,of a global social reformist stance lie, perhaps, in a tendency to focusrather more on some global institutions, forces, and movements, ratherthan others, and in particular, the relative lack of attention to socialmovements (cf. Yeates, 2001). Deacon’s institutionalist focus, albeit con-cerned with the ‘multi-actor, multi-sited and multi-leveled’ nature ofpolicy, sometimes dismisses more radical analyses, finding critics of capi-talism such as Hardt and Negri (2005), wanting and asserting that ‘whilst


“waiting” for the pose to get its act together, we should seek to reformexisting neo-liberal capitalism in a global reformist direction’ (Deacon,2007: 158). It can be argued that what is to count as ‘neo-liberal cap-italism’ and ‘global reformism’ can be interpreted differently and that,moreover, the latter is not the only alternative to the former. Neverthe-less, although Deacon is cautiously optimistic about the real differencewhich the Global Social Protection Floor initiative might make to thelives of the poor, he also recognizes the dangers ahead and the possibili-ties of commitments being watered down by key agencies and capturedby self-interested implementers.

Indeed, his focus on the importance of the social dimension of worldregionalism appears to have grown, in part at least, from a view that ageneral global social reformism may not, in the short- or even medium-term, be attainable. The basic idea is that

the development of a broader and deeper form of regionalism [ . . . ]can act as a driver towards regional social policies [ . . . ] regional inte-gration can act both as a building block and as a stumbling stonetowards a regional social policy that makes globalization more ‘fair’.

(Van Langenhove and Macovei, 2010)

Deacon himself not only has analyzed regional social policy (Deaconet al., 2007, 2010) but also holds a UNESCO–UNU Chair aiming ‘to helpformulate and advocate policies that facilitate the free movement ofpeople across borders’, with a particular focus on South Africa. NicolaYeates (Chapter 2, this volume) discusses most of the key argumentsconcerning regional social policy. However, it remains a critical ques-tion as to whether the ‘turn to the regional’ is a stepping stone to, or aretreat from, ‘the global’ scale.

4. This book

As noted above, all of the contributions to this book take Bob Deacon’swork as a starting point for an exploration of key issues in regional andglobal social policies.

The chapter by Nicola Yeates revisits her own work, often in collabo-ration with Deacon, on the social policies of world-regional formations,offering a comprehensive overview of the political underpinnings, insti-tutional forms, and future prospects for regional social policy. Whilethe proliferation of regionalisms in the 1980s reflected neo-liberal ideasof trade-based integration, later patterns, in part as a result of social


mobilizations from below, have included a greater emphasis on socialpolicies, including a rising of regional social standards, increased oppor-tunities for lesson learning, and a greater pooling of risks and resources.Seeing the making of regional social policy as a struggle between aminimalist concern with labor mobility and a maximalist emphasis oncommon standards and access for all, she also traces increasing supportfor a regional social policy scale within key global governance actors,including the UN system. While the Social Protection Floor initiativemay seem like a retreat from regional social policy, Yeates argues thatit creates a space for regional organizations, in the future, to scale upnational social minima to ensure they are implemented and resourcedregionally. Her discussion of the role of ALBA (the Bolivarian Alterna-tive for Latin America) as, potentially, a radically different model ofregional social policy, offering a transformative kind of transnationalwelfare based on principles of solidarity and redistribution, is partic-ularly noteworthy. She notes that Deacon’s only reference to ALBA,in 2007, failed to recognize the fact that, as a model, it ‘goes beyondthe discursive range of social democratic, social liberal and neo-liberalvisions dominating debates about the future of welfare that are pro-mulgated in multilateral spheres of cross-border policy-making’ (Yeates,this volume). She extends Deacon’s concerns with political contestationthrough an examination of the diverse forms of regional social redis-tribution, regulation, and rights, foregrounding the role of citizens’movements in calling for inclusive, democratic, and developmentalistregional social policies.

Huck-ju Kwon explores the different pathways of social policy andsocial protection reform in three East Asian countries, exploring theimpact of diverse global and regional crises and the interactions betweenkey supranational and domestic actors in each case. He shares Bob Dea-con’s argument that a renewed global social policy advocacy coalition,offering an alternative to a neo-liberal paradigm, is both increasinglyvocal and influential. At the same time, his text shows clearly thatthese paradigm shifts impact differently in different national contextsand conjunctures. Pathways vary as a result of a number of factors,including levels of development and the power of different actors.At the same time, domestic policymakers are active in adopting dif-ferent global social policy ideas for their strategic political advantage.Cambodia, a low-income country, is seen as having responded to theimpacts of global crises from 2007 onwards, with a focus on devel-oping a Social Protection Strategy, influenced significantly by donoragencies but, to an extent, also owned by key Cambodian officials.


The Strategy has elements of both a targeted safety net and humancapabilities approach. Indonesia, a lower middle-income country, hasa longer history of social protection programs, begun in response to the1997–8 Asian economic crisis. Later, after the tsunami and the fuel crisis,Indonesia introduced, very much under World Bank tutelage, a condi-tional cash transfer program in 2007, strongly supported by a newlyelected president and also used as a vehicle to help to both build capac-ity and reform public finance. The third case, Korea, has a long-standingdevelopmental welfare state which has been reformed, somewhat para-doxically, in crisis conditions, through diverse policy learning pathways.Given the relative wealth of the country, and the degree of democraticconsolidation, Korea appears now to have a political consensus on theneed to build a new kind of welfare state on the path to universal-ist entitlements. The chapter suggests that international organizationshave had no direct influence during the recent reforms but that thechanging paradigm of global social policy was relevant, with Korea’sbenchmark being other Organization for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment (OECD) member states in terms of levels of social spend-ing. The East Asian cases are persuasive in terms of what Kwon calls‘the changing topography of global ideas’ and the increased salience ofhuman development and social rights, even in crisis conditions.

The chapter by Meri Koivusalo revisits her long-standing concernwith global health policies which, together with the social impacts oftrade, economic, and industrial policies, she helped to make a centralfocus of the GASPP, headed by Bob Deacon. Countering some of theoptimism regarding the Global Social Floor initiative, and utilizing the3Rs framework, Koivusalo’s chapter focuses on ‘the dark side’ of globalsocial policy addressing intellectual property rights and protection forinvestors as a threat to access for all to medicines; trade agreements asan obstacle to global health governance; and new austerity measuresskewing the redistribution of resources away from national health sys-tems. She brings in the role of the corporate sector as a global socialpolicy actor (tracing policy capture, in particular, in relation to the roleof the pharmaceutical industry). Of particular note is her critique of the‘smart’ regulation agenda which has gained ground in both the OECDand the European Union (EU), creating a new ‘common-sense’ in favorof deregulation or so-called self-regulation, suggesting that even theemphasis, in recent years, on ‘impact assessments’ tends to prioritizebusiness over health and social impacts. In her words, ‘a focus on mak-ing regulatory processes more accountable to environmental, social, andhealth impacts has become transformed into a kind of meta-regulation


of government policies in other fields’ (Koivusalo, this volume). Gains interms of a discursive commitment to universal access to health servicesare being undermined by the financial crisis, with austerity measureseroding an emerging consensus and reintroducing user charges as part ofa wider international financial institutions (IFIs)–driven financializationof health-care systems which both privatizes and individualizes risk andcreates opportunities for corporate financial interests. Opposition tothese processes must focus on common global interests and analyze andcounter the power of multinational corporations, a task made ever-moreurgent in the current crisis.

The chapter by Fiona Williams begins by outlining her personal,political, and intellectual connections to Bob Deacon and his work,before addressing her current concerns with global social policy in termsof female migrant care workers in the context of global geo-politicalinequalities. She outlines the relationship between a transnationalpolitical economy of care and the global care crisis and suggests thepossibilities for a new liberatory ethics of care in the future. UtilizingNancy Fraser’s critique of the gender-blind nature of most analyses ofthe current crisis, the chapter explores ways in which care is becom-ing a ‘fictitious commodity’ increasingly exposed to the logics of theglobal market. In this framing, care as a part of social reproduction iscentral to understanding the current conjuncture and, hence, is alsocentral to global strategies for change. Williams relates the increasedsalience of global gendered care chains to a global increase in women’slabor market participation, the rise of an ‘adult worker’ model in devel-oped societies, and the expectation in developing societies that womenwill both earn and care with little or no infrastructural support, togetherwith changing patterns of post-colonial migration. Suggesting that therehave been both convergences across developed welfare states and vari-ations in different countries opens up a more nuanced analysis of bothwho migrates, where and why, and the importance of particular constel-lations of care in different countries. Her argument that marketization ofcare needs is now ubiquitous and that the mechanisms are increasinglydiverse is a crucial corrective to the sweeping generalizations of someglobal social policy analyses. This variegated approach goes beyondcomparative analyses and traces the emergence of a transnational polit-ical economy of care in which developed welfare states reduce socialexpenditures in different ways, but all of which involve migrant healthand care labor. As in some other chapters, Williams also traces carefullythe discourses and practices of both international organizations andtransnational social movements. Distinguishing between shorter- and


longer-term strategies, the chapter ends with a plea for everyday rela-tions of care to be embedded in conceptions of global social justice,thus raising the social, economic, and political value of care. Counteringrecent ‘social investment’ paradigms, Williams returns to fundamentalmoral and ethical dimensions of care as a part of citizenship, a collectivesocial good, in which the values of individualism and self-sufficiency arereplaced by those of ‘interdependence, mutuality, and human frailty’(Williams, this volume).

Ian Gough explicitly utilizes Bob Deacon’s insights into global gov-ernance by setting side by side global social policies and global climatechange policies, and surveying the governance of each. Summarizingglobal social policy by means of a key distinction between the dis-courses, policies, and practices pursued in the global arena and thestructures of global governance actors, Gough then extends this modelin a comprehensive overview of both policies to mitigate climate changeand the global governance of this process. In the process, he scales upand reworks analyses which explore the interrelationship of welfarestates and environmental states, arguing that the global and inter-generational nature of climate change renders state-based solutionsincomplete. The institutionalization of the discourse of ‘sustainabledevelopment’ in the international system, while limited, did open thespace for an analytical and practical understanding of the inter-linkagebetween economic, social, and environmental concerns. Gough argues,however, that nothing short of a transformative paradigm is needed,moving beyond compensation and ‘win-win’ solutions toward an ‘eco-social policy’ capable of achieving ecologically beneficial and sociallyjust impacts ‘by promoting new patterns of production, consump-tion and investment, changing producer and consumer behavior whileimproving wellbeing, and ensuring a fairer distribution of power andresources’ (Gough, this volume), through variegated responses in theGlobal North and the Global South.

Addressing similar themes, the chapter by Asunción Lera St. Clairand Victoria Lawson extends Bob Deacon’s concern with transformativeglobal social policies to the question of climate change, one of the mostpressing human security challenges in the world today. Climate changeis likely to bring increased poverty, on the one hand, and decreasedcapacity for social protection, on the other hand, impacting most onthose with the least resources. The authors expand on Deacon’s workto address the problems of what they term ‘dominant poverty knowl-edge’, in which poverty reduction is tied inexorably to economic growthand increased consumption, and/or rendered outside of social and


political relations. Such an approach has not only generated inequal-ity but is the main cause of the degradation of the eco-system andthe loss of bio-diversity. Drawing from authors who argue for ‘a newconception of prosperity and progress that takes social and environ-mental consequences as an internal part of their definition’, the authorsaddress the social dimensions of climate change and call for a moreintegrated and equitable approach to both poverty and the environ-ment, as a challenge to neo-liberal, marketized, approaches and theirincreasingly co-produced technocratic and bureaucratic institutionalorders.

Robert O’Brien foregrounds the relationship between the key IFIs,the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and orga-nized labor since the early 1980s. Although aspects of this have becomeless antagonistic over time, the real effects of a continued adherence toneo-liberal models remain, with IFIs still preferring targeted and mini-malist social protection in support of ‘flexibilized’ labor markets. In thissense, conflicts over both ideas and interests are waged simultaneouslyand, as Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs (1997) already noted, occur bothwithin and between agencies. IFIs use both conditionality and ‘soft’knowledge to influence national policy reforms. As a result, in the 1980sand 1990s, they tended to erode labor rights and to exclude organizedlabor from decision-making processes. Neither the IMF nor the WorldBank were immune, however, from mounting criticism, originally inrelation to their ‘Structural Adjustment Programs’ in the developingworld in the late 1990s, as well as accusations of mismanaging boththe 1997 Asian financial crisis and post-communist countries’, particu-larly Russia’s, transitions to capitalism. In response, IFIs have become,to an extent, more transparent, as well as, at least discursively, empha-sizing their role in poverty reduction. In some ways, this ‘mission creep’has extended the IFIs’ areas of interest and, indeed, possible sites ofconditionality. At the same time, the Bank’s belated conversion to theidea of core labor standards is important, even if it continues to pro-pound, notably through rankings in its publication Doing Business, theidea that labor market regulation over and above these minimal stan-dards is a cause of poverty. Even after criticisms from trade unions, the2013 Doing Business report continues to praise those countries whichreduced worker protection, through reducing periods of dismissal noticeand/or severance pay, for example. The IMF, returning to Europe in thecontext of austerity politics, both stresses the importance of targetedmeasures to reduce unemployment, particularly youth unemployment,and recommends, often, reductions in minimum wages, lower labor


taxes, and the reduction of rights to collective bargaining. Echoing BobDeacon’s recent work, O’Brien sees the role of the ILO, particularly asa leading proponent of the Social Protection Floor, as offering a moresubstantive challenge to some of the IFIs’ prescriptions lately, openingup a space for advocates to make the case that social policy is vital forboth economic stabilization and development.

Using her own qualitative work on educational, health, and social ser-vices personnel, from both the state and non-state sectors in Morocco,Shana Cohen suggests that there is no simple fit between the prescrip-tions of transnational actors and the practices of frontline workers, withmuch greater attention needed to different understandings of socialpolicies among different generations of workers and activists. The textis an explicit search for a ‘middle ground’ between Bob Deacon’s over-whelming emphasis on formal institutions as vehicles for progressivesocial policy and some of his critics’ focus on social movements. At thesame time, it is both an ethnographic exploration and refinement ofDeacon’s concern with the importance of middle-class ‘buy in’ to publicsocial provision. The text shows how the tenets of New Public Manage-ment are a vital part of neo-liberal restructurings as well as how differentgenerations of welfare workers struggle with the problems and para-doxes which this introduces, exhibiting a keen sense of ‘resourcefulness’rather more than an outright ‘opposition’. In an important argument,Cohen suggests that global social policy discourses frame emergent prac-titioner identities and, crucially, that a politics of local social actionis capable of influencing global social policy principles, methods, andpractices. Through the work of Paolo Freire (1970), Cohen helps toenvision a radical, relational, and reflexive global social policy com-plementing Deacon’s own 3Rs of rights, redistribution, and regulation.Indeed, Cohen’s text returns us full circle to Deacon’s concern, in hisearly work, with the social relations of welfare and with the dilemmasand strategies of frontline workers. Indeed, the lack of attention to boththe frontline service providers and ‘users’ of services has been a majordrawback in much of what passes for ‘global social policy’ studies, wewould argue, necessary in translating ‘abstract ideas’ into real change.

The final chapter in this book is a reflection by Bob Deacon abouthis own work in the light of the issues raised in this book. As such, itrepresents a key statement of the current state of global and regionalsocial policy approaches and thinking. Based on his recent work on theSocial Protection Floor, he suggests that the era of contestation betweenglobal social policy actors could be changing into a new one of activecollaboration, although the nature and forms of this are likely, at least


in the short term, to be heavily dependent on the nature of the relation-ships between key individuals within different global organizations. Heacknowledges the relative neglect in his work of issues relating to globalcare and climate change and engages with critiques that address the pol-itics of progressive regional and global social policies. Crucially, Deaconargues that the social reformism underpinning his work was a prod-uct of a conjuncture and that, in dramatically changed circumstances,‘the high moment of a “northern driven social reformist” global socialpolicy ha(s) passed’ (Deacon, this volume). Pointing to ever-wideningintra-country inequalities, the tendency of a new global middle class toescape from national social contracts into global private markets, and,of course, the deep global economic and financial crisis and associatedausterity politics, he argues for a more radical change in ‘the global gov-ernance of the commons’. In this context, a sense of ‘what is to be done’becomes far more open and multi-dimensional, necessitating a rework-ing of Gramsci’s famous combination of ‘pessimism of the intellect andoptimism of the will’ (1971). The suggestion that the concept of the3Rs of global social policy could be expanded to include resource con-servation and relationality forms a bridge between the legacy of workon global and regional social policy thus far and the challenges of thefuture.

Note

1. Bob Deacon, email communication, February 2013.

Bibliography

Béland, D. and Orenstein, M.A. (2013) ‘International Organizations as PolicyActors: An Ideational Approach’, Global Social Policy, 13, 125–143.

Deacon, B. (1981) ‘Social Administration, Social Policy and Socialism’, CriticalSocial Policy, 1, 43–66.

Deacon, B. (1983) Social Policy and Socialism: The Struggle for Socialist Relations ofWelfare (London: Pluto Press).

Deacon, B. (ed) (1992) The New Eastern Europe: Social Policy Past, Present and Future(London: SAGE).

Deacon, B. (2000) ‘The Future for Social Policy in a Global Context: Why theSouth Now Needs to Take the Lead’, Futura, 4/2000, 65–70.

Deacon, B. (2001) ‘Northern Inputs for South-South Dialogue on Social Policy’,Co-operation South, 2, 66–78.

Deacon, B. (2007) Global Social Policy and Governance (London: Sage).Deacon, B. (2013) Global Social Policy in the Making: The Foundations of the Social

Protection Floor (Bristol: Policy Press).


Deacon, B. with Hulse, M. and Stubbs, P. (1997) Global Social Policy: InternationalOrganizations and the Future of Welfare (London: SAGE).

Deacon, B., Macovei, M.C., Van Langenhove, L. and Yeates, N. (eds) (2010) World-regional Social Policy and Global Governance: New Research and Policy Agendas inAfrica, Asia, Europe and Latin America (London: Routledge).

Deacon, B., Ortiz, I. and Zelenev, S. (2007) ‘Regional Social Policy’, DESA WorkingPaper No.37; ST/ESA/2007/DWP/37.

Deacon, B. and Stubbs, P. (1998) ‘International Actors and Social Policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Globalism and the “New Feudalism” ’, Journal of European SocialPolicy, 8, 99–115.

Deacon, B. and Stubbs, P. (eds) (2007) Social Policy and International Interventionsin South East Europe (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar).

Deacon, B. and Stubbs, P. (2013) ‘Global Social Policy Studies: Conceptual andAnalytical Reflections’, Global Social Policy, 13, 5–23.

Deacon, B. and Szalai, J. (eds) (1990) Social Policy in the New Eastern Europe. WhatFuture for Socialist Welfare (Avebury: Aldershot).

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Penguin).Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and

Wishart).Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2005) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

(London: Hamish Hamilton).Kaasch, A. (2013) ‘Contesting Contestation. Global Social Policy Prescriptions on

Pensions and Health Systems’, Global Social Policy, 13, 45–65.Okitipi, T. and Aymer, C. (2009) Key Concepts in Anti-Discriminatory Social Work

(London: Sage).Van Langenhove, L. and Macovei, M.C. (2010) ‘Regional Formations and Global

Governance’ in Deacon, B., Macovei, M.C., Van Langenhove, L. and Yeates,N. (eds) World-regional Social Policy and Global Governance: New Research andPolicy Agendas in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America (London: Routledge),pp. 9–26.

Yeates, N. (2001) Globalization and Social Policy (London: SAGE).

2The Socialization of Regionalismand the Regionalization of SocialPolicy: Contexts, Imperatives,and ChallengesNicola Yeates

1. Introduction

This chapter revisits Bob Deacon’s ‘socialization of globalization’ andthe ‘globalization of social policy’ thesis (Deacon, 1995, 2007; Deaconand Hulse, 1996; Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997). His argumentthat the locus of contestation around the social politics of globalizationhas shifted from national policymaking arenas to spheres of cross-bordergovernance and that a new global political agenda with a substantialsocial content has emerged has proved influential in reframing con-temporary social policy research agendas around a global paradigm.At the time, his focus lay on international governmental organizations(IGOs) such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF),the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United Nations (UN) and itssocial agencies (for example, the International Labor Organization (ILO)and the World Health Organization (WHO)) and programs (for exam-ple, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF)) as the key institutional loci ofglobal social policy formation. Principal forces in ideological and polit-ical struggles to define the desirable model of welfare, these actors arealso directly engaged in ‘transnational redistribution, supranational reg-ulation and supranational and global provision’ (Deacon with Hulse andStubbs, 1997: 22, my italics).

Recognition of the plurality of actors in, and sites of, global social pol-icy formation (Yeates, 1999, 2001, 2008) has increasingly turned globalsocial policy scholars’ attention to actors other than multilateral gov-ernmental organizations, in particular to the social policies of regional

17

18 The Socialization of Regionalism and the Regionalization of Social Policy

associations of governments (world-regional formations) (Deacon, 2001;Deacon et al., 2010; Yeates, 2005; Yeates and Deacon, 2006, 2010). This‘regional’ turn in global social policy is in part a reflection of the realpoli-tik of global social policymaking and change. Organizations such asMercosur (Common Market of the South), CAN (Andean Community),ALBA (Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas / Bolivarian Alternativefor the Americas) and UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) inSouth America, CARICOM (Caribbean Community) in the Caribbean,SADC (Southern African Development Community), ECOWAS (Eco-nomic Union of West African States), EAC (East African Community)and the African Union (AU) in Africa, ASEAN (Association of SouthEast Asian Nations) and SAARC (South Asian Association for RegionalCooperation) in Asia, NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association)in North America, and the European Union (EU) and the Council ofEurope in Europe, among others, have, to various degrees, becomeincreasingly significant sites of cross-border social governance and socialpolicy formation, and of the contested social politics of globalizationand international integration. They have developed institutional remitsand capacities for defining and pursuing regional programs of welfareredistribution, rights, and regulation. They are knowledge brokers, train-ing hubs, and industrial coordinators within their respective regions.As global actors they pursue distinctive ambitions and positions in pol-icy formation processes on the global stage, including within the UNand Bretton Woods systems, as well as with each other through inter-regional cooperation, both on a North–South and a South–South basis(Deacon, Macovei, Van Langenhove and Yeates, 2010; Deacon, Ortiz andZelenev, 2007; de Lombaerde, Baert and Felício, 2012; Riggirozzi, 2010;Söderbaum and Van Langenhove, 2005; Van Langenhove, 2012; Yeates,2005, 2007a, 2007b; Yeates and Deacon, 2006, 2010; Yeates, Macoveiand Van Langenhove, 2010).

The principal concern of this chapter, then, lies with world-regionalformations as actors and sites of global social policy formation. Focus-ing on contemporary contexts, imperatives, and challenges of buildinga regional governance of social policy, the discussion highlights the dif-ferent forms that regional social policy takes, what these reveal aboutthe ‘regionness’ (Hettne and Söderbaum, 2000) of regional formations,and what these regionalizing trends imply for our understanding ofglobal social policy, campaigns to reform it and research into it. Thechapter is organized around the following principal sections. The nextsection sets out the context of regional integration, reviews the shiftingpolitical terrain giving rise to regional social policy on policy reform

Nicola Yeates 19

agendas, and sets out principled arguments in favor of building aregional governance of social policy. The discussion then considers thediversity of institutional forms, approaches, and methods of regionalsocial policy by reference to the findings of recent work on global gov-ernance, regionalism, and social policy worldwide (Deacon, Macovei,van Langenhove and Yeates, 2010). It highlights the fundamentally con-tested nature of regional social policy in practice, within and acrossdifferent regional spaces, and notes the emergence of a relatively newparadigm in regional social policy based on socialism that potentiallychallenges prevailing models of regional social policy founded on socialliberalism. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of the mainarguments presented and draws out some implications for campaignand research agendas.

2. Contexts and principles of regional social policy

2.1 On regionalism

Regional integration as an ambition and as a political practice is by nomeans new, dating back to the 19th century in the ‘Far East’, and toindependence movements in South America and Africa (Riesco, 2010;Yeates, 2001, 2005). However, the last three decades have witnessedthe resurgence of interest in the possibilities of regional integration asan essential feature of international integration. Indeed, state strate-gies to ‘lock in’ internationalizing flows of trade and investment on aregional basis among groups of ‘most favored’ nations have been a defin-ing feature of contemporary globalization strategies. It is not just thatmany nations are called while few are chosen, but that states operateon regional and global scales simultaneously. They see no contradic-tion in being members of many international organizations operatingat different scales, and they have pursued integration on bilateral,regional, as well as multilateral scales. Thus, regionalization and glob-alization strategies are not only inextricably linked to one another, bothas an ideal and as a practice, but also mutually constitutive of oneanother.

There is no single wave of globalisation washing over or flatteningdiverse divisions of labour both in regions and industry branches.Varied regional divisions of labour are emerging, tethered in differentways to global structures, each one engaged in unequal transactionswith world centres of production and finance and presented withdistinctive development possibilities. Within each region, sub-global


hierarchies have formed, with poles of economic growth, managerialand technical centres and security systems.

(Mittelman, 1995: 279, cited in Yeates, 2001)

Mittelman’s description, generalizable to most contemporary economicactivity, is of especial interest to global social policy. If contempo-rary globalization processes entail the emergence of sub-global, regional,socioeconomic structures, they also give rise to sub-global regional polit-ical structures and institutions; that is, globalization is conditionedby regionalist strategies to ‘lock in’ international flows (of trade andinvestment) on a regional scale as much as by strategies to removenational and other ‘barriers’ (to international trade) (Yeates, 2001, 2005).Regional integration embodies these apparent tensions and contradic-tions. Thus, the proliferation of regionalism in the 1980s reflected thediffusion of neo-liberal idea(l)s of ‘free trade’ generally and of ‘openregionalism’ in particular, which was itself an approach to trade-basedintegration involving the removal of barriers to, and the encouragementof, regional cooperation without discrimination against outsiders. Thisdiffusion began in the Asia-Pacific region in the 1980s (Garnaut, 2004)and spread to other regions around the world, including shaping theconstitution of new regional trade agreements (free trade areas and cus-toms unions) (Dunkley, 2000; WTO, 2000). Regional agreements havebecome increasingly significant within the global economy, with overhalf of all international trade being conducted inside them.

If regionalist strategies have been a defining characteristic of interna-tional integration, then so too has the development of sustained cam-paigns of opposition to them. Just as states form transnational alliancesand operate at multiple (including regional) levels of governance, sodo non-state actors. Their campaigns, be they conducted within thebureaux and boardrooms of international and regional organizations orat the outer perimeters of meetings at global and regional policy fora,have generated alternative visions and political practices of globaliza-tion (Brennan and Olivet, 2010; Yeates, 1999). Thus, regionalism givesan impetus, not only to the state, but also to civil society and othersocial actors, to organize transnationally:

Regionalism provides incentives for the establishment of internationalalliances as well as new forms of defending and promoting inter-ests transnationally [ . . . ] It becomes a source of political and socialdynamism as it brings new exogenous references to domestic groups,stimulating them to develop new forms of protagonism beyond their

Nicola Yeates 21

local and national frontiers through partnership, coalitions and inter-national alliances [ . . . ]. [Regionalism’s effect] is expressed in themobilisation of social actors at different levels for the sake of amore effective and direct political participation in policy-making inthe context of integration, on the one hand, and in their politicalactivism in the defense and enhancement of economic benefits andexisting social rights, on the other.

(Vaz, 2001)

Although Vaz was referring to Latin America, transnational alliances ofnon-state/civil society actors have played a formative role in the socialpolitics of international integration around the world and can be under-stood as part of the movement for democratic reform. Regional andtrans-regional alliances of networks of civil society, social movement,and community-based organizations from across Asia, America, Africa,and Europe have articulated visions of regional integration based onsocial rights, collective responsibility, social solidarity, social cohesion,social equity, and human development in place of the extant practicesof regional integration structuring international relations around corpo-rate and commercial transactions and relations of competition (Brennanand Olivet, 2010; the People’s Agenda for Alternative Regionalisms(PAAR)). PAAR, for example, draws on and extends the work of regionalalliances as the Hemispheric Social Alliance (Latin America), SouthernAfrican People’s Solidarity Network (SAPSN) (Southern Africa), Solidar-ity for Asian People’s Advocacy (SAPA) (South East Asia), People’s SAARC(South Asia), as well as organizations and networks in Europe, includingthe Transnational Institute (TNI). A principal aim of PAAR is to ‘con-tribute to the understanding of alternative regional integration as a keystrategy to struggle against neoliberal globalisation and to broaden thebase among key social actors for political debate and action aroundregional integration’.1 Through their own practices of collective actionto forge a more socially just international integration, PAAR is involvedin the making of regional political identities and communities ‘frombelow’ as well as in the placing of issues of regional social policy onnational, regional, and multilateral policy agendas. In doing so, theycontribute to the definition of ‘regionness’ (Hettne and Söderbaum,2000) itself.

2.2 Principles of regional social policy

There are several principled advantages in building a social policydimension to regional groupings of nations (Yeates, 2001, 2005; Yeates


and Deacon, 2006, 2010). Firstly, since regional formations often entailgroups of countries with similar cultural, legal, and political character-istics they can (compared to multilateral negotiations) offer countriesaccess to a broader menu of social policy alternatives and greater easeand pace of agreeing on the scope and nature of social policy, includ-ing greater possibilities for advancing their own social standards. Forsmaller and developing countries in particular, regional formations offerenhanced access to, and influence over, policy developments. Theseinfluences are not necessarily negative: more developed countries canforce social standards upwards in the poorer members, while smallercountries can have a strong blocking effect on the liberalizing ambi-tions of larger ones (or vice versa, of course). Also, individual countriesacting through regional associations can have a louder voice in globalfora than by acting alone. In addition, regionally coordinated responsescan overcome the limitations of small-scale (bilateral) initiatives whichmay not sustain the interest of all the countries involved.

Secondly, regional economic and trade strategies can protect, pro-mote, and reshape a regional division of labor, trade, and productionin ways that promote cooperation and generate fiscal resources fornational and regional social policy purposes. Too often global tradecomes with tax exemptions for local and global companies in ways thaterode domestic fiscal capacity and resources; common regional tradeand tax rules can help support and build fiscal capacity in the region.Thirdly, regional social policy can enable economies of scale and thepooling of risks and resources. For example, there is a strong argu-ment for uniting forces and resources to create regional provision inadvanced specialist education, training, or health facilities. Limitationsof small-scale social insurance schemes can be addressed by pooling andspreading risks regionally. One reason why agricultural insurance exper-iments have failed across the world is their size, that is, they collapsewhen a major catastrophe occurs (for example, drought, plant pest, orcattle disease affecting a whole country) and insurance funds are unableto cover all losses. However, agricultural insurance schemes can workif risks are pooled internationally and there is adequate reinsurancein place (Ortiz, 2001). A regional policy also offers the possibility ofmore effective preparedness and response to natural disasters, includ-ing the provision of humanitarian and economic aid. Thus, UNASUR isa principal provider of aid for disaster-stricken countries in the region,such as to Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Donor aidunder the EU’s Aid for Trade program is coordinated in West Africa byECOWAS.

Nicola Yeates 23

In regionalism we see the same kinds of issues and debates playedout as Deacon formerly raised in relation to the social policies ofinternational organizations, namely how relations among peoples andterritories are to be organized in an increasingly integrated world;what societal model should underpin visions and practices of suchintegration; and what kinds of collective political action, institutionalarrangements, and policies are needed for such a model to material-ize. The question as to what kinds of social policy for what kind ofregional integration similarly raises a range of ‘practical policy’ issues todo with whether social policy is to remain a sovereign matter (essentiallyconfined within the international political borders of the different mem-ber countries) or whether it is to evolve over larger integrative scalesand become a matter for supra-national (regional) governance. And ifsocial policy is to become a matter of regional governance, what sortsof political cooperation and modes of institutional design best promoteregional social policy and regional social convergence forged upon com-mon interests? Should the strategic ambitions of regional social policybe confined to minimal inter-state coordination necessary to promotelabor mobility and address cross-border harms, or should they aim fora more maximalist position, founded upon principles of social inclusiv-ity, democracy, and developmentalism, and instituting greater degreesof supra-nationalism to ensure common standards for and access to edu-cation, health, and welfare for all? Later in this chapter we consider howthese issues and tensions are played out in the making of regional socialpolicy as a political and institutional practice. Before that, the discus-sion reviews the contexts and sources of the rise of regional integrationand regional social policy on policy reform agendas.

2.3 The rise of regional social policy on global policyand reform agendas

One source of the rise of regional integration as an issue for global socialpolicy can be located in the context of a political impasse on globalsocial governance reform in the early 2000s, and the stalling of the Doha‘development’ round of trade negotiations. Arguments for reformedglobal institutions with strengthened social mandates, resources, and‘teeth’ to address threats to public social provision resulting from socialexperiments to reorganize systems of economic production and socialreproduction along neo-liberal and ‘free trade’ lines met sustained resis-tance from governmental and non-governmental actors from the GlobalNorth and Global South. These were suspicious of the weakening ofexisting or the introduction of new but inappropriate global social and


labor standards and of more progressive forms of aid and conditionalitywhich, they feared, would sustain minimalistic social commitments,Northern protectionism, and Southern dependency (Yeates and Deacon,2006, 2010). For many, especially those in the reformist wings of thealter-globalization movement, the arguments increasingly pointed moretoward creating new countervailing and pluralistic sources of powerand policy spaces attuned to the developmental and self-determinationinterests of the Global South. Walden Bello, for example, forcefullyargued in favor of a strategy that ‘include[s] strengthening diverse actorsand institutions such as UNCTAD [United Nations Conference on Tradeand Development], multilateral environmental agreements, the Interna-tional Labour Organization and regional economic blocs’ (Bello, 2004:116–117; see also Keet and Bello, 2004). Thus, rather than reformingtransnational corporation (TNC)-driven WTO and Bretton Woods insti-tutions, the focus should be directed toward devolving global economicgovernance by building a world federation of regional formations inwhich the role of IGOs is ‘to express and protect local and nationalcultures by embodying and sheltering their distinctive practices’ (JohnGray, cited in Bello, 2004: 118). In a similar vein, the eminent economistRobert Wade (2008), writing on the global financial crisis, has argued:

The recent strengthening of regional integration processes [ . . . ]should direct attention away from global standards and arrangementswhich, because of their maximal scope, are necessarily coarse-grainedat best. Regional trade agreements between developing countrieshave distinct advantages over multilateral trade deals, whose termsoften serve to break open economies of the global South while pre-serving intact protections for industry and agriculture in the North[ . . . ] Global economic regimes need above all to be rethought toallow a diversity of rules and standards, instead of imposing evermore uniformity.

(Wade, 2008: 21, my emphasis)

Devolved global economic governance, by these accounts, entails adiversification of economic regimes and strengthened regional politicalinstitutions to foster more sustainable and socially just forms of produc-tion and consumption. Such visions of devolved economic governanceresonate with movements for economic autonomy and self-sufficiencyin the First and Third Worlds alike, where new forms of economicorganization and cooperation to re-localize the economy have emergedamongst the poor (Norberg-Hodge, 1996; Rowbotham and Mitter,

Nicola Yeates 25

1994). Those visions also resonated with the historic ambitions of someindependence movements (for example, in Africa and Latin America),as well as with ongoing practical efforts – sometimes in response to agi-tation by social movements and non-governmental organizations – tobuild regional political capacities that amplify members’ voices in globalfora and that have more robust social policy agendas.

Many of the principled arguments in support of a greater role forregional organizations in global governance, including in social pol-icy (see Section 2.2), have found expression in global commissions,the UN system, and latterly the World Bank. The first of these, theWorld Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization (WCSDG)argued that regional integration can contribute to a more equitablepattern of globalization, but only if regional integration has a strongsocial dimension that helps build the capabilities needed to take advan-tage of global opportunities and improves conditions of integrationinto the global economy (WCSDG, 2004: 71). Regional social policyhas also gained ground within parts of the wider UN system. In theILO, the social dimension of regional integration is largely dealt withthrough a mixture of projects and research whenever sub-regional devel-opments correspond to ILO policy priorities (for example, regionallabor migration protocols, poverty reduction, and related developmentplans, skills, and social security portability, regional labor law har-monization or regional social dialog). The United Nations EconomicSocial and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) Buenos Aires Declarationcalled upon ‘regional organisations [ . . . ] in association with social sci-entists and civil society, to further develop the social dimension ofregional integration and [ . . . ] the UN to facilitate inter-regional dia-logues’ (UNESCO, 2006; see also Deacon, Yeates and Langenhove, 2006).ECOSOC has exhorted the development of multi-stakeholder policydialogues ‘with the objective of building national and regional capac-ity to develop a multi-disciplinary approach to economic and socialissues’ (UNSG, 2005). The High-Level Panel on UN Reform calling for‘One UN’ at national level also called for the regional UN economiccommissions and the UN social agencies to rationalize their regionalstructures and better target their efforts on regional associations ofcountries (UN, 2006).

Finally, a UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA)working paper argued the case for a focus on cross-border regionalsocial policies as a contribution to poverty alleviation and social devel-opment (Deacon, Ortiz and Zelenev, 2007). Drawing substantially onan earlier paper by Yeates and Deacon (2006), the UNDESA paper


argued that, in principle, regionalism would make possible the devel-opment of regional social redistribution mechanisms (for example,regionally financed investment funds disbursed to address social issuesvia the regional structure according to regionally determined priorities);regional social, health, and labor regulations (for example, regional insti-tutions to set, monitor, and enforce regional rules on health and safety,labor and social protection, and equal treatment); and regional socialrights (for example, regional courts for citizens to challenge perceivedfailures to fulfill social and human rights). Regional lesson learning pro-vides an opportunity to learn from good practices and develop solutionsthat are amenable to scaling up in forms of regional cooperation (in termsof regional production of cheaper generic pharmaceuticals to benefitfrom economies of scale, regional programs to avoid cross-border trans-mission of diseases, and sharing health specialisms or higher educationfacilities within a region).

It is not only in the UN system where the idea of a genuinelyregional social policy has grown in salience. The World Bank has, forits part, recognized the importance of an overtly regional dimension todevelopment. It argued in the African context:

Regional and global integration are not substitutes. In Africa morethan anywhere, they are complements needing to be pursued in par-allel and with equal vigor. Regional integration policies can helpto achieve economies of scale and build the supply capacity andcompetitiveness of Africa through targeted regional infrastructureto interconnect the continent; and reforms to facilitate cross-bordertrade, investments and financial flows, and migration. Global inte-gration and accompanying policies are essential, first, to scale updemand by securing market access that matches a growing sup-ply capacity. Second, these policies would provide access to effi-cient intermediate goods suppliers, often an important element inimproving African countries’ international competitiveness.

(World Bank, 2008: 10)

The World Bank has also argued in favor of scaling up individual countryinitiatives on health worker migration in the Caribbean and incorpo-rating health worker training into a CARICOM-wide regional strategy(Yeates, 2010). It posited that regional responses to managing healthworker (specifically nurse) migration can overcome the limitations ofsmall-scale (bilateral) initiatives which do not sustain the interest ofdestination countries:

Nicola Yeates 27

A regional effort to strengthen and scale-up nurse training is criticalto success. The scarcity of tutors, the intra-regional distribution ofhealth care capacity and the limited number of institutions offeringhigher degrees warrant regional coordination. Ideally, country initia-tives would be collated into a single, regional strategy. Moreover, theimplementation of the CSME [Caribbean Community Single Marketand Economy] and associated increases in intra-regional migrationrequires a coordinated approach to govern the nurse education andlabor markets.

(World Bank, 2009: 5)

We return to consider in more detail the different approaches of theUN and the World Bank toward regional social policy, and the issuesthis gives rise to, later in the chapter. At this juncture in the discussion,however, it is important to contextualize these various calls by IGOs andcivil society groups for a greater focus on regional social policy.

First, IGOs’ calls must be contextualized in relation to their historicfocus on the national policies of individual countries in which gen-uinely regional social policy occupies a very small part of their focus,activities, and resources. Regional interventions as a percentage of thetotal portfolio of regional development banks and of UN agencies suchas WHO and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) accountfor a tiny fraction (about 2 percent) of their resources (Birdsall, 2006;Deacon and Macovei, 2010). Moreover, much of these agencies’ analyt-ical and policy work focuses on the region defined as a collection ofcountries that shares a defined territory rather than as actually existingregional associations of countries. The historic weight of importance ofindividual governments within the representation, management, andgovernance structures of IGOs is further illustrated by the Global SocialProtection Floor (SPF) initiative. The SPF is a global strategy aimed atincreasing access to essential public services (water, sanitation, health,and education) and to a basic set of essential social transfers to provideminimum income security, but the essential point for the purpose of thepresent discussion is that basic social guarantees are defined in terms ofnationally defined minimum levels. It could be argued that on the face ofit, the SPF initiative represents a move away from an emergent focus onregional social policy rather than being integrated with it. However, twopoints qualifying such an argument are worth highlighting. First, thereis a recognized regional dimension (of a kind) to the implementationof the SPF. The ILO–WHO SPF implementation guidelines accord UNregional coordinators along with country teams and directors the lead


in organizing UN support for national SPF initiatives (Deacon, 2012).Second, the SPF neither precludes a role for regional organizations indefining SPF strategies appropriate to regional groupings of countriesnor negates the possibility of regional mechanisms such as regionalsocial funds or regional social rights to support the implementationof social protection floor strategies. The issue, then, is not so muchthat the SPF has defined social minima in national terms; rather, it isthat there is an obvious under-specification of a possible institutionalrole for regional organizations (as distinct from UN regions) in ensuringthat these social minima are effectively resourced and implemented inpractice.

Second, there has been a more significant role for regional organi-zations in global governance, and on global development agendas inparticular, but the form this has taken is uneven and quite different fromthat advocated by Walden Bello, Robert Wade, and others supportiveof a more devolved system of global economic governance. It tends totake the form of institutionalized forms of cooperation between globaland regional associations of governmental organizations in support ofeconomic and security agendas. Thus, the EU, ASEAN, and the AU areintegrated into the G20 system (Deacon, 2012); the EU and other IGOshave instituted partnership agreements with regional organizations,often involving capacity building of regional organizations for regionalmilitary and peacekeeping interventions, or for economic development(for example, the World Bank is increasingly engaging with Africanregionalisms, such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development(NEPAD), through its Regional Integration Assistance Strategy (WorldBank, 2009)). Only UNESCO stands out among IGOs and UN agenciesfor its capacity-building activities in the ECOWAS context in supportof a wider regional social agenda in West Africa. Also of note in thiscontext is the increased prominence of institutionalized forms of inter-regional dialog and cooperation on a North–South and South–Southbasis in development policy. The EU is a prime example of a Northernregional actor having instituted formal relations with a range of ‘South-ern’ regional formations (for example, Mercosur, the Gulf CooperationCouncil, CARICOM, SAARC, ASEAN, and SADC). South–South cooper-ation similarly has a discernible regional dimension, as in Mercosur–SACU, SAARC–ASEAN, and Mercosur–ASEAN. Modes of cooperationvary, with some forms of inter-regionalism based on framework cooper-ation agreements (for example, EU–ASEAN, EU–Mercosur), while othersinvolve meetings at ministerial and senior official level and collabora-tion around activities and programs on specific issues (Hänggi, 2000;

Nicola Yeates 29

Söderbaum and Van Langenhove, 2005). More research is needed onwhether inter-regional groupings are limited to extending and deep-ening inter-regional trade, but there is some evidence that mattersof regional social policy have made their way onto their agendas.The EU–CARICOM health partnership, for example, entails the pro-vision of services and technical assistance by the EU to strengtheninstitutional responses to HIV/AIDS among CARICOM member states(Yeates, 2005).

3. Expressions and contestations of regional social policy

Although regional formations have not (yet) attained the same status asindividual states in cross-border spheres of policy formation, they are adiscernible and growing presence on the global social policy landscape.This section of the chapter now turns to examine in more detail thescope of regional social policy as it has been realized in practice. Thediscussion draws on findings of our study of the regional social pol-icy discourses and practices of some 20 regional associations spanningfour continents (Deacon, Macovei, van Langenhove and Yeates, 2010).It focuses on three key questions: First, in what forms and by whatmethods is regional social policy realized? Second, what is the scopeof regional social policy in practice? Third, what are the axes of ideo-logical contestation around social policy as played out through regionalintegration?

Table 2.1 presents a high-level overview of some of the principalfindings of the Deacon et al. (2010) study. It summarizes the trackrecord for each of the regional formations examined as regards regionalredistribution, regulation, provision, rights, social investment, and pol-icy learning. Of all those formations examined, the EU is the mostadvanced as defined by the terms of the study, with extensive institu-tionalization across all dimensions of regional social policy. Although noother regional formation comes close to the EU in terms of the extentof institutionalized regional social policy, it is notable that all of theassociations here have instituted cooperation in social sectors and mech-anisms for lesson learning on a cross-border basis; thereafter, they haveinstituted to varying degrees different elements of regional redistribu-tion, regulation, provision, and rights. Many associations have regionalsocial funds of some kind, but most do not have forms of social regula-tion and social rights backed by the force of law. (A notable exceptionis ECOWAS, which has a regional labor court.) Regional formations thusvary in terms of the methods they use to advance regional social policy.


These include exhortative as well as legislative approaches to standardsetting, practices of policy cooperation and coordination to differingdegrees of formalization, and lesser practices of cross-border informationexchange and lesson learning.

The regional formations we examined in our study have institution-alized measures to facilitate regional labor mobility. Of note here arethe partial or full removal of work visa requirements (for example,SADC, CARICOM, ECOWAS, SAARC); mutual recognition agreementspertaining to professional and educational qualifications and educa-tional institutions (for example, Mercosur, CAN, ASEAN, Australia, andNew Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement (ANZCERTA),and SAARC); and trans-border social security portability entitlements(Mercosur, CARICOM, ANZCERTA, SADC) (Table 2.1).

Contrary to the general trend initiating policies relating to the labormarket, and to labor mobility in particular, it is important to note thatregional policy cooperation extends beyond the strict requirements ofaction to create regional commercial markets. For example, SADC hasdeveloped an infrastructure and capacity for regional cooperation onissues of child labor, communicable diseases, and the referral of patientsbetween member states. CARICOM is active in issues of health policyas regards institutional and human resource capacity and communi-cable diseases in particular. ECOWAS has a regional court of justiceadjudicating on national labor rights, with a track record of casesbeing successfully taken by citizens against ECOWAS member states.ASEAN has a regional human rights body. Mercosur has establishedregional harmonization of pharmaceutical legislation and regulationsfacilitating economies of scale in the production of generic drugs, underits access to medicines initiative. SAARC has a Social Charter thatenshrines entitlements to access basic services and a set of developmentgoals in poverty alleviation, education, health, and the environment.The Andean Community’s Social Humanitarian Fund and Integral Planfor Social Development institutes regional action on poverty, exclu-sion, and inequality. ALBA is financing anti-poverty activity in membercountries and operates trade relations and goods and services tradingschemes rooted in the solidarity economy. SAARC and ASEAN haveboth instituted regional food security schemes which in effect functionas redistribution mechanisms (Deacon, Macovei, van Langenhove andYeates, 2010, passim).

Of note is that many of these regional social policies have progressedfaster as exhortative declarations of aims and principles rather than asbinding regulatory or redistributive mechanisms. However, it is impor-tant to note the symbolic and practical uses of exhortative policy (such

31

Table 2.1 Regional social policies in practice in four continents

Regionalassociation

Re-distribution

Socialregulation

Socialrights

Cooperationin socialsectors

Cross-borderlessonlearning

EUROPEEU Yes Yes Yes Yes YesCouncil of

EuropeNo No Yes but not

force of lawNo Yes

LATIN AMERICAMercosur Yes Soft law∗ Yes but not

force of lawYes Yes

CAN Yes Soft law Yes but notforce of law

Yes Yes

CARICOM No? Soft law Yes but notforce of law

Yes Yes

ALBA Yes No No Yes Yes

ASIAYes Soft law Yes but not

force of lawYes Yes

Yes No excepttraffickingof womenandchildren

Yes but notforce of law

Yes Yes

AFRICAAU No Soft law Yes but not

force of lawYes viasub-regions

Yes

ECOWAS No? Soft law Yes Yes YesUEMOA1 Yes Covered

byECOWAS

AsECOWAS

AsECOWAS

AsECOWAS

SADC No Soft law Yes but notforce of law

Yes Yes

SACU2 Yes CoveredbyECOWAS

As SADC As SADC As SADC

Note: ∗Soft law means that regional declarations and agreements on standards and so on areleft to countries to implement with exhortation from the region.1 Economic and Monetary Union West Africa.2 Southern African Customs Union.Source: Deacon, Macovei, van Langenhove and Yeates, 2010, Figure 10.1.


as Social Charters and other declarations of intent) in creating greaterawareness of a range of common issues and a world of possibilities on awide front. Exhortative policy may not have ‘teeth’, nor is it necessarilystronger or more appropriate than the UN’s Declaration of HumanRights, but it is nonetheless vital in contributing to the forging oftransnational political alliances and political dynamics that may in turnstimulate more substantial forms of regional cooperation and action(Brennan and Olivet, 2010; Threlfall, 2010). In other words, exhortativedeclarations are important because they can be important precursorsto the development of more substantial social policies at both globaland regional levels. Indeed, it is this sustained, incrementalist, long-term project involving the participation of labor, development, and civilsociety groups alongside governments and business interests that in theWestern European context gave rise to the transformation of a customsunion with limited labor mobility rights into an economic and politicalunion with (by contemporary world standards) a relatively substantialregional social dimension with regional mechanisms of social provision,redistribution, regulations, and legally enforceable rights of citizenship(Yeates, 2005).

This is not to offer regional social policy as practiced in the EU as themodel to be aspired to or emulated by other regional organizations, norto deny that regional social policy is dynamic and unsettled, nor thatthe relationship between regional economic policy and regional socialpolicy is a shifting one. Rather, it is to point to how multiform, sus-tained civil society participation in processes of policy formation withinthe bureaux and boardrooms of regional organizations has taken placealongside, and in tandem with, concerted social and political actionoutside of them in the development of EU social policy. It is also toemphasize that this dual strategic participation proved crucial to thedevelopment of a substantial EU regional social policy forged over manydecades in parallel with efforts to construct a democratic political com-munity embracing a wide array of interests under conditions of markedeconomic and cultural differences (see, for example, Adnett and Hardy,2005; Geyer, 2000; Hantrais, 2000; Leibfried and Pierson, 1995, 2000;Threlfall, 2003, 2007, 2010).

It also needs to be acknowledged that, on experience to date, however,a degree of caution is needed about the potential of regional formationsto develop a regional social policy founded on principles of inclusion,democracy, and developmentalism. Regional associations originate indiscussions and negotiations among policy elites to create larger inte-grative scales for commercial trade and investment operations, and,

Nicola Yeates 33

historically, there has been little popular demand for such projects. Thisdoes not deny subsequent involvement and support by labor, devel-opment, and civil society organizations, or refute the ways in whichregional processes and commitments can be levered to demand ‘more’social policy, or a ‘stronger’ social policy, or a different kind of socialpolicy. However, it does mean that regionalist strategies (especiallythose founded on ‘open regionalism’, that is primarily outward-lookingintegration within international trading system and principles of ‘free’trade) have mostly operated to facilitate political agreements revolv-ing around commercial trade and national ‘security’ interests of variouskinds, and their primary purpose is not the development of comprehen-sive social policy founded on robust principles of social redistribution,social regulation, and social rights. In many ways, it could be arguedthat given the proliferation of regional trade agreements during the lastthree decades, principles and logics of commercial trade integration areeven more embedded within the political-institutional logics of regionalformations than within multilateral institutions.

It is also unclear whether even those regional formations that havegone beyond regulating cross-border labor movements to adopt a moresubstantial and ambitious regional social policy present a serious chal-lenge to the prevailing political economy of regional integration. EUregional social policy, for example, has developed a set of regionalsocial rights, regional social and labor standards, regional mechanismsof redistribution, and the right to legal redress from its original remitof facilitating cross-border labor mobility (work visas, social securityportability) and some anti-discrimination measures to accompany thecreation of a common market. However, it remains a matter of debateas to how far EU social policy has ever managed to fully break fromits trade/market origins (Adnett and Hardy, 2005). Moreover, the EU’srecent initiatives to liberalize services trade cast doubt on its commit-ment to public health and welfare services. Whereas some (for example,Dietrich, 1999) emphasize the potential of services liberalization toimprove health care as a result of greater patient mobility across bor-ders, critics emphasize the resultant damage to public services systemsand corrosive effects on the European social model (Andruccioli, 2007;Loeffler, Sobczak and Hine-Hughes, 2012).

There exists an important exception to this general point.ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas), founded in 2006 in thecontext of a resurgence of the political left in South America (Philipand Panizza, 2011), raises the prospect of radically different modelsof regional social policy (Riggirozzi, 2010; Tussie, 2009) and regional


integration (Hart-Landsberg, 2009). It is worth quoting two of those whohave commented on ALBA at length:

At the heart of the ALBA project is a state-centred development strat-egy involving managed trade based on the productive integrationrather than competition between countries’ economic sectors, adirigiste model and the creation of ‘grand national enterprises’ (Hart-Landsberg, 2009: 7) [ . . . ] ALBA’s constitutive agreements set up abroad range of goals for the organization. Among these are: to pro-mote trade and investment between member governments based oncooperation, and with the aim of improving people’s lives, to coop-erate to provide free health care and free education to people acrossthe ALBA states; to integrate the ALBA members’ energy sectors; todevelop basic industries; and to ensure land redistribution and foodsecurity (Hart-Landsberg, 2009).

(Philip and Panizza, 2011: 162–163)

ALBA is a radical, ideologically transformative project that extendsChávez’s 21st Century Socialism into a regional integration schemepursuing, in direct opposition to neoliberalism, a type of transna-tionalised welfarism based on intra-regional cooperation in areas ofhealth, education and housing. The contrasts with other regional-ist projects such as NAFTA, Mercosur, and UNASUR are seen notonly in its social dimension but paradoxically in its constructionof a regional space whose members (Venezuela, Honduras, Cuba,Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Dominica, Antigua y Barbuda, SanVicente) do not share any contiguous borders.

(Riggirozzi, 2010: 9)

It is of critical importance to grasp fully the profoundly differentconceptions of regional integration and of regional social policy inALBA compared with other contemporary regionalisms. ALBA’s regionalsocial policy is not only distinctive but also unique by contempo-rary world standards. It offers a fundamentally different model ofregional social policy: one founded on welfare solidarism and mutualaid rather than social liberalism. ALBA’s regional social policy is basedon socialist principles of social redistribution and solidarity, on a modelof state-as-producer, and the barter economy, in stark contrast withregional social policy models founded on principles of social liberal-ism, state-as-regulator, and commercial capitalism enshrined in otherregional formations contemporarily. It is in this sense that Bob Deacon,Ortiz, and Zelenev’s characterization of ALBA, as follows, underestimates

Nicola Yeates 35

the profound significance of ALBA for regional social policy andgovernance:

[ALBA] has developed some social policies to address pressing healthproblems, illiteracy and emergency relief among member countries,involving regional redistribution and technical cooperation. It redis-tributes funds for poverty relief to neighbouring countries, collabo-rates with Cuba in the regional use of health professionals and teach-ers. Its Social Charter addresses the ‘social debt’ (underinvestment insocial sectors as a result of the Latin American debt crisis). Legisla-tive priorities include the production of goods for mass consump-tion, housing, salaries, pensions, utilities, and positive legislation forwomen, afro-descendents and indigenous populations.

(Deacon, Ortiz and Zelenev, 2007)

The authors, writing in 2007, just one year after the foundation of ALBA,might be forgiven for focusing their attention on the plethora of ini-tiatives enacted under the umbrella of the highly active social policyagenda and for failing to grasp the seismic shift that was emerging inthe political economy of regional integration and social policy. Thatsaid, the historic significance of ALBA’s regional social policy cannot beoverlooked. Even if it is true that resource endowment has been criticalto ALBA (Venezuelan oil revenues have been a key factor in financingALBA’s active regional social agenda), and that the future of ALBA isdependent on the continuing supply of petrodollars, it remains the casethat regionalism is a significant source of countervailing power withinthe global political economy of international integration and that itoffers a radical alternative to prevailing paradigms not just of regionalsocial policy and governance but of global social policy itself. ALBA’ssocialist model of regional social policy practice goes beyond the dis-cursive range of social democratic, social liberal, and neo-liberal visionsdominating debates about the future of welfare that are promulgated inmultilateral spheres of cross-border policy-making.

Although the significance of ALBA failed to capture Bob Deacon’sattention (somewhat ironically so, given his early writings on socialistsocial policy), it is important to highlight the significance of his broadinsight that there is not one single global social policy but many andcontested versions of global social policy circulating within the multi-faceted, multilayered, and incoherent set of institutions and programsthat passes for a system of global governance (Deacon, 2007, 2008; Dea-con et al., 1997). From this perspective, regional formations are one siteacross which global debates about the future of welfare are articulated


and contested, made and re-made, as well as sources of countervailingpower. Moreover, the various conceptions and practices of social policythat are institutionalized on a regional scale around the world testifyto the continuing possibility of progressive (and regressive) politics andforms of collective action (including state-led ones) in support of socialequity and justice under contemporary conditions of globalization.

ALBA aside, different models of regional social policy are playedout not just between different regional organizations but within them.The playing out of these differences involves not just domestic andregional actors but multilateral actors (IGOs) and, for developing regionsin particular, development agencies (for example, donors) and inter-national industry and labor interests. Contemporary regional socialpolicy in the Caribbean relating to labor migration, and health workermigration in particular, illustrates this point well (Yeates, 2010). There,increases in intra-regional migration following the implementation ofthe CSME have raised the need for, and prospects of, a regionallycoordinated response on education, training, and labor. CARICOM’sManaged Migration Program was one such response, formulated withina context of global approaches to migration management promotedby global agencies such as the International Organization on Migra-tion (IOM) and WHO, and addressed in particular issues of a regionalapproach to nurse recruitment, retention, deployment, and successionplanning throughout the Caribbean. The CARICOM program is alsoinflected by competing visions variously articulated by global agenciesand others about the purpose, nature, and orientation of regional pol-icy. In particular, here we find, on the one hand, coalitions of domestic,regional, and international actors articulating WHO-inspired visions ofa health labor policy founded on principles of self-sufficiency aimingto reduce the attractions of emigration and to improve intra-regionalhealth worker migration and regional health worker resource manage-ment mechanisms alongside the promulgation by the World Bank of itsvision of a regional migration policy oriented toward an export-orientedmodel of health labor production in which the Caribbean becomes amajor global provider of health-care labor worldwide. As I noted in2010, this latter vision seems to be taking hold within the regionalsecretariat and among CARICOM governments. What started out asan attempt to forge a regional self-sufficiency program may be trans-mutating into a regionalized industrial nurse-export production modelresourced by (Northern) donor agencies, private organizations, andrecruitment agencies operating within and outside of the region (Yeates,2010).

Nicola Yeates 37

4. Conclusions

Revisiting Deacon’s ‘globalization of social policy’ and the ‘socializa-tion of global policy’ motif in the light of recent developments inglobal social governance, the central premise of this chapter is thatglobal social policy is formed and contested not just in multilateralspheres of policy-making but also in regional ones. The regionalizationof social policy and the socialization of regional integration have grownin salience at the current juncture in the development of the globalsystem as scholars, policy-makers, and activists debate how to preserveexisting, and develop new, transnational social policies based on socialequity and social justice. The question as to whether there should bea regional social policy accompanying regional integration has risen toprominence on research agendas, with academic analysts increasinglycognizant of the diverse levels, spaces, sites, institutions, and actorsin global social policy formation. Regional social policy has similarlyrisen in prominence in global policy debates, in a context of stalledmultilateral trade liberalization initiatives, limited possibilities for rapidprogress in multilateral social policy, and increased traction of socialreform movements and campaigns seeking greater democratic controlover global institutions.

As we have seen, in many ways the case for a social policy dimen-sion to regional integration is already established: there are, to variousdegrees, already such policies (often very long-standing and/or deeplyinstitutionalized) accompanying such integration. Regional formationsare already confronting issues such as how to forge an appropriatelybalanced relationship between trade and social (labor, welfare, health)standards, how to maintain levels of taxation and progressive tax struc-tures in the face of international competition to attract and maintaininward capital investment, how to balance national risk- and resource-pooling systems and mechanisms with regional ones, and how to fundregional mechanisms of redistribution (including attempts to define theappropriate balance between intra-regional and inter-national contri-butions). The responses they have instituted take diverse forms – fromexchange of information, through identification of common issues andpositions and collaborative action on specific issues, to coordination ofnational laws, policies, and practices, to the use of declaratives and state-ments of aspiration. A core concern common to regional social policyis the facilitation of cross-border labor mobility, though this – like anarray of regional social declarations, laws, and plans – is implementedvariably. But there are notable and important instances of substantial


regional social redistribution, regulation, and rights that extend beyondthe measures strictly needed for regional economic integration. Thereare, therefore, many different and competing visions of regional socialpolicy co-existing within the same regional spaces: models of regionalsocial policy that are entirely consistent with neo-liberalism and withopen regionalism compete with regional social policy based on socialliberalism and, latterly, with regional social policy based on socialism.In South America, all three versions co-exist simultaneously, if in ten-sion with one another. This is all the more remarkable in many waysbecause of the significantly overlapping membership of governments inthe different regional formations there.

Regional social policy is, then, integrated into the system of globalgovernance, but unevenly so, and it is characterized by a high degree ofpolitical contestation over which models of regional integration, socialpolicy, and social development are to be institutionalized. Markedlydifferent approaches and resources are brought by alliances of actorsand constellations of interests in the pursuit of regional social policy;and the working out of regional social policy becomes itself a struggleover the model of regional integration to be pursued as well as of thenature and purpose of international integration more broadly. In theCaribbean (CARICOM), attempts to link intensive export labor produc-tion, inward investment, and international services and trade vie withattempts to regionalize economies and labor migration in the interestsof strengthening regional health systems. There, World Bank visionsof an export-oriented regional migration policy aligned with princi-ples of open regionalism and trade liberalization directly compete withWHO (and allied international health/nursing organizations) visionsof regional policy coordination to promote regional self-sufficiency inhuman health resources in the interests of social equity and humandevelopment. The different approaches to regional social policy in thatcontext reflect a fundamental difference of approach as to the purposeand nature of regional integration itself: on the one hand, a sociallyprotectionist model of economic and political integration founded on‘deep’ intra-regional relations, and, on the other hand, a model of openregionalism in which issues of social regulation and provision are to besubjugated to or accommodated within a legal and policy frameworkprivileging international trade and investment.

With a multitude of actors of many ideological persuasions increas-ingly looking to regional formations as interlocutors or developmentpartners, questions arise as to the models of development being pro-moted by and through regional formations, the prospects of regional

Nicola Yeates 39

formations developing institutional and political capacities to becomemore powerful sites of and actors in global social policy, and the impli-cations of regionalism for attempts to construct a more coherent systemof global social policy and governance. One question in particular isthe extent to which relatively ‘closed’ regions that currently have, ormight develop, a robust social policy dimension are cut across by rel-atively open regionalisms that function essentially as global tradingblocs and downplay social equity and welfare issues (Yeates and Dea-con, 2006). Evidence presented in this chapter (in the Caribbean contextspecifically) suggests that this is very much a ‘live’ and highly contestedissue. Another question is the extent to which the global financial crisishas strengthened the hand of those arguing for a more devolved sys-tem of global economic governance. To date, there is no clear evidenceeither way. However, the corollary of the regionalization struggles thatare currently being played out is that battles need to be won in eachregion; with this comes the prospect not just of more socially progres-sive forms of regional social policy gaining more ground in particularregional settings but of a greater diversity of social standards. A bol-stered social regionalism may be interpreted as a retreat from the goalof achieving comprehensive social standards that are universally appli-cable to all territories and populations around the world. It may be asunacceptable to some advocates of such a goal as is the proliferationof regional trade agreements to some advocates of a single global tradeagreement.

A further question revolves around whether regional formations willdevelop genuine agenda-setting powers. As regional formations’ capac-ity to become key interlocutors and strategic partners in developmentis strengthened, will they be able to lead the setting of their ownsocial policy agendas based on regionally agreed priorities, or will theyremain as essential conduits through which multilateral economic andsocial policies are channeled and translated into ‘local’ contexts? Andwhat possibilities might there be for Southern regionalisms in particu-lar to lead the definition of regional social policy founded on inclusion,democracy, and developmentalism? Here Deacon (2012) speculates thatsuch activism by developing countries in the design and implementa-tion of their own regional social policies may well emerge in the contextof institutionalized South–South cooperation. However, the answer maylie not in reform of multilateral institutions or alterations to the terms ofdonor aid nor in the terms of inter-governmental economic and socialdevelopment cooperation but in sustained national and transnationalcampaigns by multiform citizen movements pressing for democratic


control of regional institutions as an essential condition of regional inte-gration founded on social solidarity and social justice. In calling for theestablishment of regional mechanisms for coordinating and implement-ing policies that nurture and protect public services, promote equitableaccess to decent work, adequate income, livelihoods, public health,water, and food sovereignty, citizen movements are calling not just foran inclusive, democratic, and developmental regional social policy butactively participating in the construction of the region itself, and in thedefinition of the ‘regionness’ of the community; and by extension theyare also helping to define the region’s relations with domestic and globalactors alike. Already this attempt to define a substantial regional socialpolicy based on regionally agreed priorities seems to be happening inALBA. Although the longer-term viability and robustness of this social-ist turn in worldwide trends toward regional social governance is notyet clear, a better understanding of the conditions for the emergenceof a strengthened regional social policy supportive of human rights,equality, and social justice is growing alongside growing recognitionthat regionalization trends are increasingly important in contemporarystruggles for comprehensive social policy.

Note

1. http://www.alternative-regionalisms.org

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3Global Economic Downturn andSocial Protection in East Asia:Pathways of Global and LocalInteractions1

Huck-ju Kwon

1. Introduction

Amid the global economic crisis since 2008–9, the welfare state is onceagain at the center of global policy debate. From an East Asian perspec-tive it is the second economic crisis within ten years, after the Asianeconomic crisis in 1997–8, but this time the epicenter of the crisis wasnot in East Asia. Although the crisis was not as severe as the Asian eco-nomic crisis, it was serious enough to pose a great threat to the prospectof economic growth in general and the livelihoods of the poor in theregion. While some of the European countries contemplate politicallytolerable ways of reducing welfare provisions in order to tackle deficitsin public finance, others try to reinforce it in order to cope with theeconomic crisis (Starke et al., 2013). In Asia and Latin America, manycountries are also trying to introduce new social policies and strengthenexisting programs (Mehrotra, 2009; Sugiyama, 2011). In particular, Eastand Southeast Asian countries have introduced social assistance pro-grams, including a range of cash transfers, to provide support for thepoor and the vulnerable, previously excluded from necessary socialprotection.

Why are East Asian countries so active in strengthening social protec-tion systems at a time of global downturn? At the global level, Deaconexplains in his recent work that the global economic downturn pro-vided an opportunity to break out of the neo-liberal paradigm and tomove toward inclusive social protection (Deacon, 2011). The epistemiccommunity of global social policy which believes social policy can be

44

Huck-ju Kwon 45

an effective instrument to steer the economy away from the globaleconomic crisis has strengthened its persuasive power. Creating effec-tive demand in the economy at the macro-level and investing in humancapital at the micro-level could be the way out of the economic crisis.

Furthermore, human development at the micro-level will lead to eco-nomic growth at the macro-level. Mkandawire (2004) clearly points outthat social policy can be protective and productive at the same time.This view is a clear contrast to the market-oriented neo-liberal view onsocial protection which sees it as a disincentive to work and a definitepath to economic stagnation in the end. In the context of developmentin the South, the neo-liberal view was the predominant policy paradigmthroughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, and international agenciespushed forward such a view in this period with devastating outcomesfor human development in many developing countries (Cornia et al.,1987). Now many influential international organizations, not only thetraditionally socially conscious International Labor Organization (ILO),the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and United NationsResearch Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), but also the WorldBank, believe that social protection is an essential part of developmentand that national government should take advantage of the attributesof social policy for economic purposes. Such an approach has beenbased on the theoretical grounds of human development as well ason macro-economic management. For instance, Amartya Sen’s (1993)interpretation of development – which sees development not only in aneconomic sense but also as human freedom – played an important rolein this thinking.2 The notion of human development as freedom alsoprovides the moral grounds for social protection as a set of universalrights. Every citizen should have adequate sets of functioning and capa-bility so that they can strive for a life of their own choice (Sen, 1999).In other words, social protection for such an opportunity is an essentialcondition of freedom.

Emerging policy initiatives on social protection in East Asian coun-tries can be understood in the global context of economic downturnand the paradigm shift (Deacon, 2011). Nevertheless, there still remainsan important question: How do the shifts in the paradigm of globalsocial policy influence national policy-making? In particular, how doesinteraction between global and national policy-making take place inEast Asian countries? This chapter will look at the process throughwhich global ideas of social protection are transferred from global tonational policy-making in the wake of the global economic downturn.Such interplay, however, does not go through one particular pathway,

46 Global Economic Downturn and Social Protection in East Asia

but there should be a variety of them depending on many factors, suchas the level of economic development and the power balance betweenglobal and national actors. The direction of influence may not be one-way traffic from global to national; instead of being only influencedby global ideas, national policy-makers may exercise their discretionin acquiring global social policy ideas in a strategic way so that it canwork to their political advantage. This chapter seeks to explain theways in which national politics shape the dynamics of policy trans-fer of social protection in the context of the global economic crisis.In the next section I will first set out three different pathways in whichcountries may bring global ideas of social policy to national social pro-tection systems: active learning, involuntary imposition, and a middleway between the two.

This chapter will take the cases of Cambodia, Indonesia, and Koreain order to examine those pathways. Cambodia is one of the low-income countries in the region with few social policies in place, butshe responded actively to the global food crisis in 2007 and furtherlaunched new initiatives on social assistance in the wake of the globaleconomic downturn in 2008. Indonesia, one of the low-middle-incomecountries in the region, was also hit by two economic crises – the Asianand global economic crisis – and responded with a range of socialprotection measures. Korea, a comparatively high-income country inthe region, strengthened her welfare state in the wake of the Asianeconomic crisis of 1997–8 and subsequently introduced social policiesduring the period of the global economic crisis in the late 2000s. Thewelfare state became more inclusive and effective (Kwon, 2005b). Fur-thermore, Korea has been engaged in debates on building a universalwelfare state with a high aspiration. Since the global influence andengagement of international institutions were strongly present in thepolicy experience of these three countries, we will be able to analyze thedynamics of policy transfer from global to national policy. Though nota long list, these countries can be seen as representing typical cases withtheir engagement of social protection among different countries in theregion.

2. Pathways of social protection from global to nationalpolicy-making

The global economic downturn changed the ideational topography ofsocial protection at the global level. There had been a ‘war of position’between different international agencies and actors (Deacon, 2007), but

Huck-ju Kwon 47

the economic crisis at the heart of world finance in 2008 underminedthe credibility of the neo-liberal paradigm. The US government whichhad been a staunch supporter of the neo-liberal policy paradigm had toimplement an unprecedented financial package to salvage the bankingsystem. The Chinese government also introduced a huge spending pol-icy to prevent the economy from going into deep recession. There wasalso a clear recognition of the need for social protection at the globallevel. The ILO’s Social Protection Floor initiatives are among those globalideas of social protection, especially in the context of developing coun-tries. The World Bank began to support social protection measures forthe poor, most notably cash transfer programs, and put a great deal ofeffort to transfer these programs to developing countries (Farrington andSlater, 2006). How did changes in global ideas in social protection leadto policy responses from the national governments? There can be manypathways in which global ideas of social policy are transferred, depend-ing on many factors, but this chapter contends that national strategiesfor development and the relative power of negotiation vis-à-vis globalactors are crucial factors that determine the pathways of global and localinteractions. From this point of view, we can divide those pathways intothree ideal types, which will be adopted as reference for the analysis ofthree East Asian cases.

First, active policy learning. In East Asia it is one of the most often trav-eled pathways for bringing global ideas to national policy-making. Here,domestic policy actors are actively engaged in policy learning of globalpolicy ideas and instruments. Policy experts and government officialshave been sent out to other countries to learn from previous experi-ences. The policy guidelines and recommendations from internationalagencies such as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), theILO and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) have been very influential in national policy-making. There isa clear rationale underlying such an approach of active policy learning.Gerschenkron (1962) points out that late-comer countries which seekto learn from front-runner countries can take advantage of their late-ness. This pathway has already been well trodden in East Asia. As oneof the most influential intellectuals in the formative years of modernJapan, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) preached that Japan should learnfrom the West regarding its advanced public institutions and policies(Nishikawa, 2000). Although the context is now very different, manyEast Asian countries still have a similar approach to policy learning.Considering that many East Asian countries have been very success-ful in economic development with an export-oriented strategy, these


countries have been very keen on following what happens on the globalstage and learning new policy ideas and instruments.

In the area of social protection, in particular, East Asian countries canbe very receptive to the global idea of social protection to overcome theeconomic crisis (Kwon, 2005a). Katzenstein (1985) already pointed outthat open economies need to develop an extensive welfare state in orderto meet the demand of constant structural adjustment to remain com-petitive in the world market. The small economies in Northern Europeare cases in point, but East Asian countries can adopt such a strategygiven their dependency on the global market. In fact, Korea and Taiwanstrengthened their welfare systems in the aftermath of the Asian eco-nomic crisis while carrying out structural adjustment of their industries(Kwon, 2005b).

The second pathway is the imposition of global ideas in national policysettings. In the setting of low-income countries in the global South, thepower balance between global and national actors may be tilted towardglobal actors since they may need financial and technical support frominternational institutions. In fact, the World Bank and InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF) imposed conditionalities on developing countrieswhen they provided financial support, notably in the 1980s and 1990s(Cornia et al., 1987). There were many criticisms of such a practice,partly because the recommended policy prescriptions did not produceexpected outcomes and partly because those prescriptions were seen asimpositions of an external will. In response there have been efforts toaddress such criticisms in terms of working relations with donors anddeveloping countries. For instance, in 2005, donor countries and theirofficial forum, the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD,came up with a recommendation for policy ownership for the develop-ing countries regarding development assistance in the Paris Declaration.The notion of policy ownership is based on the contention that it willenhance the long-term effectiveness of public policy. The underlyingrationale of claims for ownership was that the autonomy of nationalgovernments in policy-making would better address policy challengesfacing those countries. However, what exactly is policy ownership isanother question. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Devel-opment (UNCTAD) defines that a country has policy ownership whenthe available resources are utilized for the recipient country’s own pri-orities rather than those of the donors (UNCTAD, 2007). According toWhitfield (2009: 4), policy ownership is the degree of control over thepolicy process. The concept leads our attention to political actors whocontrol the policy process. With respect to social protection in East Asia,

Huck-ju Kwon 49

it is necessary to find out whether national policy-makers control thepolicy process of social protection vis-à-vis international actors.

With respect to social protection in low-income developing countriesin the context of the global economic downturn, international agenciesmay recommend these countries to strengthen their social protectionmeasures. Although these may be out of good intentions, such recom-mendations could be considered as an imposition if the developingcountries did not have control of the policy process. In contrast, it isalso possible that low-income countries may take the initiative based ontheir own considerations in which reinforcing social protection systemsis part of a policy strategy to steer away from the global recession. In thiscase, it cannot be considered as imposition. In this chapter we willexplore whether the recent initiative on social protection in Cambodiais primarily due to imposition or policy ownership.

The third pathway of policy idea from global to national policy-making is a process of policy transfer in which the relationship betweeninternational and national actors is more balanced than in the con-text of policy ownership. Against the background of the emergingparadigm of global social policy, global agencies have sought to trans-fer subsequent innovations of policy instruments for social protectionto national governments. From the viewpoint of the national govern-ments, they have a set of choices of whether they will bring thosepolicy ideas and instruments to their domestic settings. Transfer of pol-icy instruments has a crucial advantage to the importer nations since theideas and instruments have been tried elsewhere (Dolowitz and Marsh,2000). Nevertheless, the policy transfer of global ideas and instrument isnot a simple pathway that guarantees successful policy outcomes. Thosepolicy ideas and instruments are converted to fit into domestic pol-icy challenges, which we may call local transformation. Policy-makersin many developing countries would be faced with much greater chal-lenges to adjust transferred policies to fit to their local realities (Massey,2009). Public institutions and necessary information for the implemen-tation of transferred policy instruments may not exist in developingcountries. In this pathway, it is crucial for the national government toovercome challenges and difficulties in implementing the transferredpolicy for social protection.

In the context of the global economic downturn, international agen-cies launched social protection programs and held international con-ferences to disseminate global ideas of social policy while nationalgovernments searched for policy solutions. Due to the local challengesand difficulties in implementing those programs, the effectiveness of


social policy as a response to the global economic downturn may be lim-ited. This chapter will discuss the case of Indonesia with respect to thispathway, given that Indonesia has attempted to establish institutionsfor cash transfer programs following the recommendations of globalagencies.

In the following sections, we examine the social policy response ofthree East Asian countries – Cambodia, Indonesia, and Korea – to theglobal economic downturn with reference to these pathways. Through-out the analysis we trace the policy dynamics of social protection ofthese countries, and, in particular, the global influence on nationalpolicy-making. More importantly, we will be able to find out whetherthe recent social policy initiatives in East Asian countries are passiveresponses to the crisis or active efforts to steer away from the globaleconomic downturn.

2.1 Cambodia

With a turbulent history behind her, Cambodia remains one of the poor-est countries in the world. The Cambodian economy is still predomi-nantly an agricultural one; the population structure is characterized bya small but young population.3 Most of the poor live in rural areas andonly 25 percent of the total population are connected to the electric-ity grid (United Nations in Cambodia, 2009). As the global economiccrisis affected the East Asian region, the Cambodian economy also suf-fered from an economic downturn. While its impact is relatively modest,the textile and construction sectors that are the key driving forces ofeconomic development in Cambodia went through a significant reces-sion. Approximately 13,000 jobs were displaced due to the crisis (ILO,2012). Further, prior to the global economic crisis in 2008, the foodand oil crises that had taken place in 2006–7 had an even more directimpact and exacerbated the crisis of the Cambodian economy. Food andgeneral consumer prices reached their peak in 2009 while Cambodiaexperienced a negative growth rate.

Despite such structural weaknesses and the economic downturn, theCambodian government responded actively to the global economic cri-sis, initiating various policy measures of social protection. Since therehas been a very strong presence of international agencies in Cambodia,such as the UNDP, the World Food Program (WFP), UNICEF, the AsianDevelopment Bank (ADB), and the World Bank since the Peace Settle-ment in 1992, and a close involvement of international agencies insocial protection policy, we will examine the policy process of globaland local interactions from the pathways of imposition.

Huck-ju Kwon 51

The most important policy initiative that the Cambodian governmentlaunched was the National Social Protection Strategy (NSPS) in April2011, which aims to mobilize government efforts to ensure better socialprotection for the Cambodian people. The NSPS covers the whole rangeof policy efforts for social protection for the poor and the vulnerable inCambodia, and notably, it is mainly concerned with social assistance,targeting the poor and the vulnerable. According to the governmentreport, the NSPS has three basic rationales:

(1) protect the poorest and most disadvantaged who cannot helpthemselves,

(2) prevent the impact of risks that could lead to negative copingstrategies and further impoverishment, and

(3) promote the poor to move out of poverty by building humancapital and expanding opportunities including access to health,nutrition, and education service for poor households.

(RGC, 2011)

In a nutshell, it aims to increase the human capability of the poor withhealth and educational support while immediate contingencies are dealtwith through social assistance measures. It is clearly in line with theemerging global ideas of social policy that emphasizes the link betweenhuman development and social protection. If it shows that the policyresponses of the Cambodian government were influenced by the globalideas, which pathways did Cambodia come through? Was this imposedby global actors (albeit out of good intentions), or did Cambodia exercisefull policy ownership?

In order to understand the nature of the interaction between globalagencies and national actors regarding the NSPS, it would be neces-sary to consider, first, the previous experiences of policy-making inCambodia. Since the Peace Settlement in 1992 and following interna-tional conferences to help Cambodia, international actors were veryinfluential in policy-making in Cambodia, especially in terms of eco-nomic and social development. Considering that international actorsprovided much needed finance and technical assistance and the lackof those resources on the Cambodian side, it is understandable. Never-theless, when Cambodia launched the plan to achieve the MillenniumDevelopment Goals (MDGs), the National Poverty Reduction Strategy,in 2001, the Cambodian government claimed full national ownershipof the planning process. It is true that the Cambodian-line ministries


undoubtedly played a more substantial role than before, but the roleof international agencies was as significant as before (Nagasu, 2004).According to Ear (2007), nevertheless, the Cambodian government didnot just passively accept what the international agencies recommended.Top policy-makers were keen to have some political recognition fromthe international community that might enhance their political legiti-macy, and they wanted to be in line with international efforts, such asinternational collaboration for achieving the MDGs.

Turning to the social policy responses to the global economic crisis,the initiative for the NSPS first came from the Cambodian govern-ment. In 2008, in response to the global economic crisis, Prime MinisterHun Sen requested the Council of Agricultural and Rural Development(CARD), an influential Council of Ministers in the government, to coor-dinate government efforts for social protection within the frameworkof the development of the NSPD. He also invited donors to participatein this effort, while the donors also acknowledged the limitations of theexisting system. In the 2nd Cambodia Development Cooperation Forum(CDCF) in 2008, the government and development partners agreed todevise a social safety net on a national basis that more effectively cov-ers the broader population. Thus the Cambodian government and itsdevelopment partners by then had a common awareness of the matterat hand, and shared ownership between donors and the governmentemerged in the agenda-setting stage of the NSPS. Within the CDCF, theInterim Working Group for the Social Safety Net (IWG-SSN) was set up.

The role of the Cambodian government in preparing and adoptingthe NSPS was not so strong as to claim full national ownership, thoughthey played a more significant role than was the case in preparingthe previous development plan. Due to weak administrative, finan-cial, and technical capability, donors’ consultations became prominent.For instance, while the joint working group which was assigned toprepare the policy plan for social protection (IWG-SSN) was officiallychaired by the Cambodian government, the WFP, which led the emer-gency response to the food crisis in 2007–8, played a central role asco-convenor. Other international donor agencies which were presentat the IWG-SSN included international financial agencies such as theADB and the World Bank and UN agencies such as UNICEF, the UnitedNations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),WFP, and the World Health Organization (WHO). The World Bank par-ticularly facilitated mapping and scoping of policies and practices ofsocial protection, with CARD in the initial stage of planning (CDC,2009). In the process of determining the scope of an integrated scheme

Huck-ju Kwon 53

that was to become the current NSPS, the World Bank and ADB wereactively involved with direct consultations as well as financial support.

What was very important in the process of the NSPS was the emer-gence of a group of policy actors that shared the idea of social protectionbetween several Cambodian government officials and donor agencies.Key members of the CARD and the Ministry of Interior who partic-ipated in the Interim Working Group increasingly came to share theidea of social protection with donor agencies. For instance, participantsfrom the donors’ side were increasingly aligned with a few governmentofficials, such as the Deputy Minister of the Interior and the Deputy Sec-retary General of CARD. These officials were eager to implement the ideaof reinforcing the social protection framework and increasing the role ofthe government in providing necessary services for the poor. To borrowthe notion of Kingdon (1984), a small number of high-ranking officersbecame a kind of group of policy entrepreneurs for social protectionwithin the government. The Chairman of CARD and Deputy Prime Min-ister Chhay Ly became a guardian of this advocacy coalition within thegovernment. At the same time, the Cambodian government was able todevelop institutions that could deal with future social protection chal-lenges within the government, such as the Social Protection Unit withinCARD, and an ID Poor Unit in the Ministry of Planning.

In this context, policy ownership was shared by the Cambodiangovernment officials and development partners. The pathway thatCambodia took for strengthening social protection was not exactly akind of imposition by international donors, although their influencewas significant. The important thing to remember is that the Ministryof Economy and Finance did not go along happily with the idea ofstrengthening the social protection system. International donors werehappy to support policy dialogs and pilot projects, but they wantedthe Cambodian government to take long-term responsibility for socialprotection, especially in terms of financing. In contrast, the Ministryof Economy and Finance had their own priority for social protec-tion in terms of financing. They wanted donors to increase financialcommitments for social protection.

2.2 Indonesia

Since the Asian economic crisis of 1997–8, Indonesia has engaged indeveloping social protection programs.4 Just after the Asian economiccrisis, Indonesia implemented provisional social safety net programs forthe poor, such as a rice subsidy, health care support, and an educationsubsidy for the targeted group. The Asian economic crisis also triggered


a political crisis in Indonesia where President Suharto reigned for morethan 30 years. Not long after the economic crisis, violent protests againstSuharto’s authoritarian regime erupted in 1998, which led to its collapse,and the new government came to power.

In this situation, the social safety net program (JPS: Program JaringPengaman Social) was launched in order to reduce the negative impactof the crisis. The World Bank provided 600 million USD in the formof an adjustment loan from 1999 to 2000. It was not directly usedas a grant distributed to its target population but rather for establish-ing necessary institutions, such as a targeting and evaluation system.In addition to this financial support, the World Bank as well as theADB provided technical assistance for improving the effectiveness ofthe program. The social safety net program that was designed includedfood security, basic social services such as health and education, incomeor employment opportunities for the poor, and there was also sup-port for the development of small- and medium-sized enterprises.These small- and medium-sized enterprises provided employment tothe local communities and were considered as vital to protect the liveli-hoods of low-income people, preventing them from falling into poverty(UNESCAP, 2001). The core elements of the program, however, com-prised the rice subsidy scheme, health card scheme, and educationalprogram.

Along with the social safety net programs for the poor, the govern-ment introduced community development programs for poor areas.In fact, Indonesia had a similar community development programnamed IDP (Inpres Desa Terttingal) from 1992. During the period of theAsian economic crisis, the World Bank recommended their community-driven development (CDD) framework in the IDP and developed newprograms, the rural development program, which started in 1998, andthe urban poverty program in 1999 (Suryahadi et al., 2010).

Nevertheless, there were still criticisms raised about the effectivenessof these programs. Despite the assistance from international organi-zations, the targeting system for the social safety net program wasevaluated as very poor. Since Indonesia did not have public institu-tions responsible for social assistance before the Asian economic crisis,efficiency (avoiding giving benefits to the non-eligible) and effective-ness (providing the benefit to the poor) were low. The government andinternational donors agreed that it was necessary to establish publicinstitutions for targeting and monitoring while implementing the pro-grams (Engel, 2007), but the social protection agenda did not go beyonda provisional response to the political and economic crisis. Nonetheless,

Huck-ju Kwon 55

it was true that these experiences provided some useful lessons forIndonesia.

Given the temporary nature of the social policy response from theIndonesian government, one may ask the rationale of active socialpolicy responses in Indonesia around the global economic crisis. TheIndonesian policy response, as this section shows, was driven by multi-ple factors, both domestic and global, before the global economic down-turn. International agencies, the World Bank in particular, were ableto provide policy instruments of social protection that the Indonesiangovernment perceived were necessary for public sector reform.

In 2004, Indonesia was hit hard by political turmoil and natural disas-ter again. While political instability and internal conflict still remainedfrom the economic crisis, the tsunami and earthquake which struckIndonesia in Aceh and Nias at the end of 2004 was unprecedentedin scale. Moreover, in 2005, a hike in international fuel prices hit theIndonesian economy hard. Because Indonesia provided universal fuelsubsidy, the skyrocketing fuel price led to almost 30 percent of totalgovernment expenditure being spent on the fuel subsidy. Thus the gov-ernment had no choice but to reduce the fuel subsidy, from which therich got more benefits than the poor.

In the midst of the fuel crisis in 2005, the government first consid-ered conditional cash transfers in an effort to compensate the poor forthe reduction of the fuel subsidy. The reason why the idea of the con-ditional cash transfer came up was also related to the democratizationprocess from 2004. The president was elected by popular vote in 2004 forthe first time in many decades. President Yudhoyono wanted to garnerpolitical support from low-income people and a cash transfer programfor the poor was also part of President Yudhoyono’s political strategy.The Mid-term Development Plan 2004–9 incorporated the President’spolicy priority (Suryahadi et al., 2010).

In order to set up a system for cash transfer programs, Indonesiangovernment officials kept in constant contact with the World Bank andADB. They had frequent meetings to discuss the feasibility of the con-ditional cash transfer program. Indonesian government officials becamewell aware of the success story of conditional cash transfers in LatinAmerica during the process. For instance, three Indonesian governmentofficials attended the World Bank’s third International Conference onConditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2006. Dur-ing the conference, they were introduced by international experts tosuccessful cases of CCT programs and institutional requirements for suc-cessful implementation. Indonesia was given about 2.6 million USD to


cover technical assistance for about 18 months from ADB. However,it was implausible to introduce the conditional cash transfer withoutnecessary institutions. For instance, it is essential to have necessarydata about income, family members, and conditions of health of thetarget population and also to establish public institutions that handlesuch data.

The National Development Planning Agency spearheaded govern-ment efforts for the preparation of the CCT program. It worked closelywith SMERU, an independent research institution specialized in socialprotection and the livelihood of the poor in Indonesia, and fundedby the Australian international cooperation agency. In 2005, theyrequested SMERU to evaluate an unconditional cash transfer program,and SMERU concluded that it would be essential to build a databaseto identify the targeted population. With financial support from theWorld Bank, SMERU collected the data used for the targeting sys-tem and developed a systematic technique for targeting. At the sametime, the government attempted to strengthen the supply side of socialservices. Developing institutions necessary at the domestic level foradopting the CCT scheme was one of the essential requirements for localtransformation.

The CCT program was eventually introduced in Indonesia in 2007.The objective was to provide support for the poor while enhancing thelevel of children’s education and improve the health of prenatal women,because the fundamental goal was human development. To receivebenefits, expected recipients should comply with certain ‘conditions’:pregnant women need to visit health clinics on a regular basis, andchildren should remain at school. By meeting these conditions, poorfamilies received cash benefits, but at the same time it was also expectedthat their human capital would be raised. The program provides benefitsto women who are expected to take care of themselves and their chil-dren better. It is true that there have been some criticisms of conditionalcash transfer programs (Farrington and Slater, 2006). In Indonesia, theseprograms were implemented together with health and education sup-ports for the poor, and the programs were expected to improve thelivelihoods of the poor. The recent evaluation by SMERU reported mixedresults (Suryahadi et al., 2010).

In a nutshell, the recent evolution of social protection for the poor inIndonesia was a result of the economic and political crisis at the macro-level, while policy instruments such as CCT were translated throughefforts by the World Bank and the ADB. At the same time, it was a partof the Indonesian government’s policy to reform public finances. For the

Huck-ju Kwon 57

future direction of social protection, the Indonesian government is keento integrate social protection programs for the poor with the mainstreamof social policy measures such as social insurance.

2.3 Korea

Policy learning has been one of the important factors that have influ-enced the shaping of the social protection systems. Just as Japan learnedfrom the experiences of the European welfare state, Korea, along withTaiwan, drew policy lessons from Japanese experiences as well as thosefrom Europe and North America. Elsewhere, I argue that their policylearning was geared toward the establishment of a welfare system whichwas only a part of the policy regime for economic development (Kwon,2009). The notion of the developmental welfare state captures very wellthe characteristics of their policy regime (Kwon et al., 2009).

The Asian economic crisis of 1997–8 was a critical conjuncture forthe new turn in the development of social protection in Korea. Duringthe economic crisis, the weakness of the developmental welfare statein Korea was painfully exposed as the Korean economy was hardesthit by the crisis. The incumbent Kim Dae-jung government respondedswiftly with a range of social policy initiatives. The fragmented NationalHealth Insurance Scheme was integrated and the National Basic Liveli-hood Security Scheme for the poor was introduced in 2000 while theEmployment Insurance Scheme was extended to cover a wider sectionof the unemployed. Such a swift response was related partly to economicrestructuring and also to the Kim government’s efforts to establish thewelfare state based on social rights. In this context, the governmentwanted to call the initiative a ‘productive welfare’ policy. This welfareinitiative had two policy aims. First, welfare reform was carried out tomeet the policy demands of labor market reform, providing social pro-tection for those unemployed due to structural adjustment, which theKim government carried out to meet the conditionalities of the IMF loanduring the Asian economic crisis. Secondly, human capital investment,such as in training and capacity development, was an important ratio-nale for the productive welfare initiative, in particular with respect tothe Living Standard Guarantee and Employment Insurance Program.

In a nutshell, social policy responses in Korea seemed to be paradox-ical since they strengthened the welfare state, making it more inclusiveand comprehensive, but at the same time they were carried out in theprocess of the structural reform of the Korean economy (Kwon, 2005b).It is worth pointing out that the IMF agreed with the need to strengthenwelfare programs for the poor and unemployed (Kwon, 2001a).


Such a change was well reflected in social assistance for the poor,the National Basic Livelihood Security (NBLS). Before the NBLS, thesocial assistance program for the poor was the Livelihood ProtectionProgram (the previous public assistance program introduced in 1961and implemented from 1965). It was based on the idea of poor relief,and provided cash or in-kind support to the poor as officially defined,depending on the recipients’ situation. In 1997, people receiving bene-fits were 3.1 percent of the population (Ministry of Health and Welfare,2005). The level of cash benefits was estimated at half of the officialpoverty line defined in absolute terms (Kwon, 2001b), and it had a strictmeans-test provision. For this reason, the Livelihood Protection Programwas mere relief and not sufficient to prevent people from falling belowthe poverty line.

The Kim Dae-jung government introduced the NBLS in 2000, whilethere had been a strong call from civil society organizations for the pro-gram. The NBLS was different from the previous program in terms ofthe following two characteristics. First, it was based on the idea of socialrights, representing a significant change from the previous social assis-tance program, which provided mere subsistence for survival. It alsomeant a change in the concept of poverty: from an absolute to a rel-ative one. Second, it places strong emphasis on human development,including job training programs, public works projects, or communityservice. It highlighted the crucial change in the nature of the welfarestate in Korea toward an inclusive one. After the Asian economic crisis,the Korean welfare state was further strengthened. In 2008, the EarnedIncome Tax Credit for the near-poor working families and the Long-termCare Insurance for the elderly were also introduced. The Earned IncomeTax Credit is tax-financed income support for those working but withearnings that are just above the poverty line. It is administered by theNational Tax Agency.

During the global financial crisis in 2008–9, social protection pro-grams proved to be working effectively in providing income support andservices (Kwon et al., 2010). For instance, the NBLS and the EmploymentInsurance Program responded well as the economic crisis developed inthis period. At this point in time, there were two contrasting trends inthe welfare state. As shown in Figure 3.1, public spending on social wel-fare increased steadily, both in terms of government spending and socialinsurance spending. At the same time, Figure 3.1 also shows that thegovernment commitment on social protection stayed broadly the sameover time.

Huck-ju Kwon 59

01999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

10

20

30

40

50

60

Social insurance spending(tril.Won)

Government spending(tril.Won)

Figure 3.1 Spending on social protection in KoreaSource: http://kosis.kr/ups/ups_01List01.jsp?grp_no=&pubcode=KP&type=F (social indicatorsin Korea, Korea Statistical Office).

Another important turn took place in the development of the wel-fare state, a turn toward the universal welfare state. In 2010, duringthe by-election for the City of Seoul, ‘free school lunch for all chil-dren’ emerged as one of the most important election issues. Candidatesdebated whether every child should get free lunch or only childrenfrom poor families should be entitled. In the following presidential elec-tion, all major political parties, including the governing party, cameout in support of the idea of a universal welfare state. What was mostinteresting in this politics of social protection was that the governingconservative party’s candidate Guen-hye Park placed her welfare com-mitments at the forefront of her political programs. It was also a historicturn since she is the daughter of the late President Park, the founder ofKorean economic development and an authoritarian leader. Her father’sapproach to social protection was summarized by the catchphrase of‘economy first, and welfare later’. Further, the opposition party, find-ing their own turf of social protection encroached upon, proposed ‘free’welfare from free school lunches to free medical care in response.

As Korea has reached a certain level of economic development anddemocratic consolidation, Park seems to believe that it is time to estab-lish the welfare state with an aspiration for universal rights to social pro-tection. In December 2012, she was elected as President and reiteratedher welfare commitments on various occasions. It can be interpretedthat her welfare project is a completion of her father’s modernization


project. At present, although it is not clear what kind of policy programsthe Park government will present to the Korean public, it is for sure thatthe welfare state in Korea will be bigger in size and depth, providingsocial protection to a wider section of the population – a move toward auniversal welfare state.

The recent social consensus on universal welfare is related to under-lying social trends. First, a dramatic demographic transition is takingplace. Korea’s fertility rate has been extremely low – the lowest in theworld at 1.17, even lower than that of Japan. It is a response, inter alia,to the Korean welfare state’s inadequate social protection for childrenand women. One of the main reasons for the low fertility rate is privateexpenditure for children’s education. Most parents think that educationat public schools is not enough to get a place in a good university, andthey spend a large portion of family income on private lessons for theirchildren. Because of the high expenditure on education, families chooseto have only one or two children. In addition, there has been inadequatesocial support for young nuclear families to raise their children. For suchfamilies, it is very difficult to balance work and family life. While thereare not sufficient care facilities for children, it is fair to say that womenare discriminated against in the workplace because of their responsibili-ties for caring for children at home. To sum up, Korea’s low fertility rateis a response to the lack of family- and child-friendly social policies.

Second, economic insecurity has increased in the labor market overthe last decade. The proportion of people with regular employment sta-tus has stagnated, if not decreased. In contrast, those who are employedon precarious contracts such as temporary contracts and dispatchedcontracts have increased sharply. In particular, young people who grad-uated from university find it very hard to get a job with a regularemployment contract. In short, insecurity led the public to supportuniversal welfare.

In contrast to the experience of social policy reform during the Asianeconomic crisis, international agencies did not play an explicit role.It is also a clear contrast to the case of Indonesia and Cambodia.It is understandable, since the Korean economy during the global eco-nomic downturn was better positioned compared to the time of theAsian economic crisis. Korea is no longer considered as a developingcountry. Nevertheless, the policy debate on social policy in the con-text of the global economic downturn was in fact informed by thechanging paradigm of global social policy. Subsequent Korean govern-ments set the idea of social investment and human development as thebasic framework of social policy. In particular, the OECD has played

Huck-ju Kwon 61

an important role in connecting the global and domestic debate inKorea. Despite the recent growth in the welfare state in Korea, the OECDreminds us that Korea is one of the lowest spenders on social protectionamong the OECD countries (Goh, 2011). It put top policy-makers underpressure to keep up with other OECD countries. In a nutshell, Koreaseems to remain an active learner.

3. Concluding remarks

Following Deacon’s argument on the shift in the dominant paradigm ofglobal social policy, this chapter has traced the pathways of global andnational interaction by examining three East Asian countries, namelyCambodia, Indonesia, and Korea. The chapter set out three separatepathways through which countries may bring global ideas to theirdomestic policy settings: active learning, involuntary imposition, anda middle way in which active learning and involuntary imposition takeplace at the same time. Although factors such as economic developmentare important, we pay particular attention to national developmentstrategies and the power balance between international and nationalactors. As the chapter looked into each country case, they did not followthese ideal-typical pathways. There are many variations and nuanceddiversity which we need to carefully understand.

In Cambodia, the recent policy initiative of the NSPS was an outcomeof collaboration through a policy coalition among policy entrepreneurswho were concerned with social protection within the Cambodiangovernment and policy experts of international agencies. It is truethat external professionals provided expertise since Cambodian offi-cials still lacked the knowledge and skills to devise the policy programs.Nevertheless, it was not a clear-cut external imposition of policy instru-ments. Social reformers in the government willingly embraced the ideaof human development and social protection which had been elab-orated at the global level. This was not, however, the whole story.The top policy-makers in the Cambodian government not only wantedinternational recognition for political legitimacy through working withinternational actors but also wanted increasingly more policy owner-ship. It is also important to note that the Ministry of Economy andFinance would not support the policy coalition unless the initiativeensured a constant stream of financing for the programs.

In Indonesia, while transferring policy instruments developed else-where through international agencies, the Indonesian government andthink-tanks had to undertake local transformation of those instruments


so that they could be fit for local operation. It is also important tonote that the policy transfer of instruments was coupled with thenational policy problem, in this case, the coupling of cash transfers withthe reduction in the fuel subsidy. The other important characteristicsof the manner Indonesia went through the pathway was that it wasnot carefully planned at the outset. It was more like an evolution inwhich policy responses were made in the face of economic and politicalcrisis.

What was very interesting in the recent politics of social policy wasthat it had been driven by the national political debate without theexplicit presence of international actors in the context of the global eco-nomic downturn. This was a clear contrast to the experience at the timeof the Asian economic crisis when the IMF listed a range of condition-alities on economic and social policies. Nevertheless, policy debate waswell informed by global ideas, such as ideas of human development andsocial investment. The OECD’s league tables on social protection amongmember countries and Korea’s position in it have been subject to policydebate all the time. It is a very important contrast since Korea had beenvery keen to learn from outside. In my previous work, I raised the ques-tion whether Korea could graduate from this learner mentality as shemoves to join the other front-runners (Kwon, 2009). Korea goes throughthe pathway of learning while the Korean developmental welfare state isin transition to the ‘universal welfare state’, which competing politicalforces seem to agree on.

Despite the diversity in the pathways of policy transfer and level ofsocial protection, it is also possible to observe some commonality in thethree countries we have examined. Social protection is still consideredas part of the strategy for economic development, but it is increasinglybased on the idea of human development and social rights, a clear reflec-tion of the changing topography of global ideas. It is true that the levelof social protection in Cambodia and Indonesia is still very low to talkabout social rights, but recent developments point to such a direction.With respect to Korea, there has been emerging popular support for ‘uni-versal welfare’ that aims to establish social rights for every citizen. Thesepolicy experiences should also inform global debates.

Notes

1. The study reported here is part of a larger research project ‘Social Protec-tion in East Asia’. This chapter draws on case studies within the researchproject. It is funded by the Global Research Network (NRF-2010–220-B0027).

Huck-ju Kwon 63

The author is grateful to the members of the research projects, Sara Cook,Arjan de Haan, Eunju Kim, Jayoung You, Woorim Kim and Yusun Kim. Thechapter has also benefited from very useful comments from Paul Stubbs andAlexandra Kaasch. Usual caveats are applied.

2. For Amartya Sen, the quality of life is not attainable by an increase in income,but by an expansion of the capability to achieve valuable functioning (Sen,1993: 30–53).

3. This section draws on my co-work with colleagues, Yusun Kim andSarah Cook, ‘Making National Social Protection Strategy in Cambodia’,mimeo.

4. This section draws on my co-work with colleagues, Woorim Kim, VitaFebriany, ‘Transforming social assistance in Indonesia’, mimeo.

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Suryahadi, A., Yumna, A., Raya, U.R. and Marbun, D. (2010) Review of Govern-ment’s Poverty Reduction Strategies, Policies, and Programs in Indonesia (Jakarta:SMERU).

UNCTAD (2007) ‘Reclaiming Policy Space: Domestics Resource Mobilizationand Developmental States’ in UNCTAD (ed) Economic Development in Africa(Geneva: United Nations).

UNESCAP (2001) ‘Social Safety Nets in Indonesia: Analysis and Prospects’ inUNESCAP (ed) Strengthening Policies and Programmes on Social Safety Ntes: Issues,Recommendations and Selected Studies (Bangkok: UNESCAP).

United Nations in Cambodia (2009) Rising Food Prices Discussion Paper (PhnomPenh: UN).

Whitfield, L. (2009) ‘Introduction: Aid and Sovereignty’ in Whitfield, L. andFraser, A. (eds) The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors(Oxford: OUP).

4Common Health Policy Interestsand the Politics of Rights,Regulation, and RedistributionMeri Koivusalo

1. Introduction

The Globalism and Social Policy Program (GASPP) was a joint academicand advisory program between the National Research and DevelopmentCentre for Welfare and Health in Finland and Sheffield University inthe United Kingdom. GASPP raised issues and themes which have onlylater become more central to academic discussion in the field of globalsocial policy. One of the major themes identified by the GASPP was theconcept of rights, redistribution, and regulation in the context of globalsocial policy and in particular as part of global social governance. Thefocus on rights, redistribution, and regulation – the 3Rs – was explic-itly referred to in the GASPP policy brief focusing on ten years afterthe Copenhagen Social Summit (Deacon et al., 2005). The existence andnature of ‘global’ social policy can and has been debated, but the frame-work of rights, regulation, and redistribution continues to be a usefulmeans for analyzing the implications of global governance. This frame-work has particular salience with respect to both global institutionsand developments in the field, and how global governance in othersectors may affect the national policy space for social policies withincountries.

In this chapter I discuss global governance issues, particularly withrespect to global health policies. While global health policies are oftenseen as part of global social policies, it needs to be taken into accountthat health policies also have very distinct characteristics, especiallyat the global level. There is less discussion or emphasis on whetherthere are global health policies, but analytical differences are more

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concerned with how global health policies should be understood. Whilethe predominant focus has been on ‘global health’, which has oftenbeen equated to health in developing countries or comparative healthpolicies, the focus on international, supranational, or transnationaldimensions of health policy is increasingly important. This includeschanging global institutions, resource allocation, and regulatory mea-sures, but national health policies are also affected by global policydevelopments in other areas, such as trade, economic, and industrialpolicies (see, for example, Koivusalo et al., 2009). Furthermore, globalhealth and social policies can often be mutually supportive as has beenthe case, for example, with respect to the social determinants of healthor linkages between efforts toward universal health services coverageand the global social floor, as in both of these access to health servicesis a key aim.

Global health policy is often analyzed separately from global socialpolicies in the context of public health, health systems development,access to medicines, or other global concerns. This can contribute to theundermining of the potential of health as a key part of global socialpolicies with already a substantial global presence. Global regulationof health is widely recognized not only in the form of InternationalHealth Regulations or the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control(FCTC) but also in relation to global trade-related disputes on accessto medicines and intellectual property rights (IPR). The importance ofhealth to people is widely recognized and supported across countries.It is also likely that, if asked, most citizens would expect health policiesto be driven on the basis of health priorities rather than commercialinterests. Functioning health systems are a prerequisite for global tradeand commerce in practice, and failures to ensure this can not only leadto substantial human, economic, and social costs but also to the demiseof global trade and commercial policies.

The argument for a global social floor and more recent efforts in thecontext of a World Health Organization (WHO) and United NationsGeneral Assembly resolution (UN, 2012a) to take further the agenda ofuniversal health services coverage, health-related rights, and the nego-tiation of the Global FCTC can be seen as the ‘bright’ side of globalrights, redistribution, and regulation. However, it is also worth consid-ering the broader context of global policies and challenges from policydevelopments in other fields and what could be called the ‘dark’ sideof rights, regulation, and redistribution in global governance. From thisperspective, the broader context of redistribution, including the shiftingof economic risks and resources from the public sector to the benefit of

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the private sector and, in particular, multinational industries, challengesmore positive outcomes.

While emphasizing the importance of rights, regulation, and redistri-bution at the global level and as a relevant basis for analysis of globalsocial policy developments, this chapter wishes to draw further atten-tion to the ‘dark’ side of this issue. It is the elements of the ‘dark’ sidethat most affect the policy space that governments have to finance, orga-nize, and regulate health systems and ensure access to, and the safety of,medical products.

The chapter seeks to engage more broadly the state of the 3Rs inthe context of current politics and global policy developments. Thefirst section of the chapter discusses rights and, in particular, IPR, inthe context of the current global agenda, the access to medicines, andcommon health policy interests, but also raises the implications of thestrengthening of investors’ rights and protection. This is followed byan exploration of regulatory matters and the use of investment treatiesas an example, with a particular focus on emerging issues in regulationand impact assessment policies in the European Union (EU) and thefree trade agreement currently being negotiated between the EU andCanada. The final section of the chapter addresses redistribution andrather inevitably discusses the ways in which the financial crisis and aus-terity measures affect the redistribution of resources and national healthsystems.

2. Protection of corporate rights in the context ofintellectual property and investment

The right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of phys-ical and mental health is a fundamental human right, first articulatedas part of the WHO constitution in 1946. It was established as a partof social and economic rights in 1966 in the International Covenanton Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (WHO and OHCHR,2008). In practice, this right can be divided into matters concerningaccess to health care and treatment, non-discrimination within healthservices and public health measures, and it takes into account thebroader social and environmental determinants of health.

In the context of global health policy, human rights or rights-relatedarticulation has been particularly important with respect to HIV/AIDSpolicies. This is reflected more in further commitments in relation toHIV/AIDS, than with respect to rights to health in the context of healthsystems and access to health care, access to other treatments, or in


relation to other diseases. The articulation and emphasis on rights tohealth have benefited from activity by non-governmental organiza-tions (NGOs), the establishment of human rights rapporteurs, as wellas the inclusion of rights to health in constitutions and legal obliga-tions of governments in many countries, even in those not parties tothe ICESCR.

Challenging this position is the continued strengthening of IPR. Theserights are broadly framed by international agreements on the matterstarting from the Convention for the Protection of Industrial PropertyRights signed initially in Paris in 1883 and revised in 1967. This wasalso when the Convention establishing the World Intellectual PropertyOrganization (WIPO) was signed. While WIPO has had an emergingrole in the field, more important from a global perspective is the Agree-ment on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), negotiatedduring the Uruguay Round and hosted under the World Trade Organi-zation (WTO) since 1995. While new and extended bilateral agreementsare increasingly negotiated, TRIPS remains the reference point for suchagreements. The impact of TRIPS and trade agreements exceeding thecommitments made under TRIPS is particularly relevant in the field ofhealth with respect to pharmaceutical policies, innovation, and pric-ing of medicines. Complaints to the WTO based on the provisions ofTRIPS have also been made against Australia’s tobacco control mea-sure of plain packaging law, by Ukraine, Honduras, and the DominicanRepublic (WTO, 2012a,b,c).

A major point of contention in global health policies is access tomedicines, and in particular, access to new expensive medicines indeveloping countries. While access to medicines is not a new con-cern and has been addressed by common policies emphasizing theuse of essential medicines, the HIV/AIDS crisis and new medicinesfor HIV/AIDS changed the situation, as these were very costly andwere priced at a level beyond the capacity of even middle-incomecountries.

The high prices for HIV/AIDS medicines were a result of theexclusivity provided by the application of IPR as well as the utilizationof data exclusivity provisions. IPR as negotiated under the WTO TRIPSgrants exclusivity for 20 years as a reward for innovators. In the late1990s, international campaigning and the increasing focus of develop-ing country governments on this issue led to the Doha Declaration onTRIPS and public health in 2001. This statement clarified a dispute con-cerning the interpretation of the TRIPS agreement with respect to therights to use compulsory licensing as well as its use for countries which

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have no production capacity for medicines (WTO, 2001). However, therole of the TRIPS agreement is mediated by the increasing negotiationof bilateral agreements exceeding commitments made in the context ofTRIPS.

Intellectual property rights are private rights. However, public pol-icy measures to enforce and protect intellectual property rights havebecome increasingly extensive over the last decade. In the US and, inparticular, the EU, trade policies on enforcement and the negotiation ofan anti-counterfeiting agreement (ACTA) have further strengthened thepublic oversight of these private rights (see, for example, Ilias, 2012;Santa Cruz, 2007; Sell, 2011). Furthermore, as existing internationalagreements can be used as reference, new mechanisms for enhancingexclusivity in the form of data exclusivity provisions, and extensions topatent protection, governments may be faced with a situation, wherein the name of policies established to enhance innovation, they losethe capacity to control the costs of medicines or create sufficient com-petition within the sector to ensure lower prices of medicines. Further,particular concern has been raised in this context with respect to theimpacts of bilateral agreements (UNDP and UNAIDS, 2012), and inparticular the impacts of the EU–India FTA on prices of HIV/AIDSanti-retrovirals (UNITAID, 2012).

While the protection of IPR is generally considered to be in theinterest of national industrial policies and investment in Research andDevelopment (R&D), there is little analysis of where the balance liesas major industrial economies also provide for the core markets forthe same companies. As production and clinical trials are becomingincreasingly internationalized, the scope for taxation has diminished asa result of transfer pricing. Furthermore, profits from IPR are also veryamenable for utilization of tax management and so-called tax havens(see, for example, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 2009). There is no reasonto doubt that protection of IPR or the high rewards from undertakingclinical trials benefits the rights-holder corporations’ income. It is lessclear, however, that such activities are in the public interest of all richcountries or even those with significant industries, if they do not leadto innovation, increased employment, or tax revenue. The situation isparticularly clear with respect to health and pharmaceutical policies asOECD estimates indicate that 80 percent of R&D costs are provided frompublic resources, which are also the major markets for new medicines(OECD, 2008).

Indeed, the common health policy interests of governments are likelyto be different than the commercial interests in pharmaceutical policies


(Koivusalo, 2010). However, power and competence divisions withingovernments and regional economic cooperation organizations haveresulted in a situation where governments, and in particular developedcountry governments and regional economic cooperation organiza-tions, often undermine common health policy interests nationally,regionally, and internationally, when these are in conflict with indus-trial or trade policy priorities. This is reflected in the EU’s internalpharmaceutical policies that have been seen as an example of policy cap-ture by the pharmaceutical industry (Adamini et al., 2009) and was alsoapparent in the negotiation of the Global Strategy and Plan of Actionon Public Health Innovation and Intellectual Property under the aus-pices of the WHO. The focus on global efforts and the establishmentof global funding arrangements for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculo-sis were a response to a need, but should be seen in a broader context,where the focus on additional global financing for key areas of concernalso served the need to separate problems of access from what is negoti-ated in the context of trade policies. Furthermore, an emphasis on accessto treatment has enhanced markets for more technology-oriented ‘silverbullet’ solutions in global health, enabled also by prominent efforts andfocus of major global private foundations and actors, such as the Billand Melinda Gates Foundation (Birn, 2005).

Within governments, the usually powerful departments in charge oftrade and industry prioritize the interests of their stakeholders – industryassociations, export industries, and chambers of commerce. This prior-itization is often done at the expense of national health systems andthe public interest. In other words, great national efforts may be takento secure money to support corporate welfare and benefit sharehold-ers, without recognizing that a substantial part of these resources willderive from government funding. In pharmaceutical policies, economicgains are likely to be tainted by shifts of production and R&D effortsto lower-cost countries irrespective of the stance on IPR. While govern-ments could gain from international cooperation for common interestsin health and pharmaceutical policies, the scope for this has becomeincreasingly constrained (Koivusalo, 2010).

In addition to IPR, another challenge to global health policy is theemphasis on the strengthening of investor’s rights in the context of freetrade agreements. Governments seek to secure the interests and rightsof their corporate partners against foreign government measures, butthis is often accomplished without the realization that the proposedpolicy lines have domestic repercussions. This is particularly importantwith respect to strengthening investors’ rights, which have become

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an important aspect of new trade and investment agreements. Oneexample of such agreements is the EU–Canada FTA, which could intro-duce a NAFTA-style expropriation article protecting investors’ rights inEurope. This would establish an investor-state-arbitration mechanism,enabling investors to take governments to international commercialarbitration panels and demand compensation for government measures,which result in expropriation of their property, including intellectualproperty, and potentially prospective investments.1 This implies thatwhere governments outsource services, they would need to be pre-pared to compensate investors if they later choose to return servicesback to public provision, if these were included as part of the treaty.Furthermore, this entitles international corporations to use an addi-tional commercial arbitration-based and less transparent channel fortheir claims rather than national courts (van Harten, 2007).

The challenge of investment agreements also impacts the nationalregulation of publicly financed services provided by the private sec-tor. While investment agreements seek to provide a stable, consistent,and predictable environment for investors, the scope for governmentsto change this environment narrows and becomes subservient to invest-ment protection. This is particularly relevant in sectors where regulatoryframeworks are not extensive and where experiences of private sectorcontracts are limited or complex. Problems arise if a new governmentdecides to liberalize service provision as investment agreements arelikely to make it more difficult to return such services to public pro-vision or on the basis of changing political priorities to retreat fromprivatization policies.

The protection of IPR and the rights of investors have become stan-dard features of international trade agreements; yet protection of theserights suggests a much broader compromise as no actual commitmenthas been made to balance these rights with those of the public interest orusers’ and consumer rights. In this context, investors’ rights to compen-sation and ‘comprehensive protection of investment’ can easily becomea burden and undermine the public interest and resource use by restrict-ing the scope and possibilities for governments to regulate and organizeservices. Furthermore, investors’ rights and IPR are interlinked. Claimshave already been made on the expropriation of intellectual property bythe pharmaceutical industry, when Brazil sought to issue a compulsorylicense (Ho, 2007). Similarly, in Canada, Eli Lilly has indicated that itintends to use NAFTA Article 11 on expropriation for a claim concern-ing patents against a previous decision in the Canadian courts (Deardenand Wagner, 2012).


These examples illustrate how investment treaties provide an addi-tional avenue for corporations to challenge judgments made in nationalcourts for compensation. The ‘dark side’ of investment treaties is fur-ther exemplified by a claim by Philip Morris against Australia’s plainpackaging law for tobacco control on the basis of the investment treatybetween Australia and Hong Kong (Government of Australia, 2012).In health services, a Dutch insurance company has won a case againstSlovakia on the basis of the government’s withdrawal from a health-careprivatization program in order to establish a single-payer model (Hall,2010). There has been criticism of Slovakia in terms of the design ofthe privatization program, but this case does cause concern if govern-ments seeking to limit the role of private providers in national publiclyfunded markets may not be able to return to public provision withoutfacing compensation claims. This could form a challenge, for exam-ple, for National Health Service (NHS) in England to return from morecontractual markets to public service.

3. Global policies toward better and smarter regulationand regulatory harmonization

The ‘smart’ regulation agenda has been slowly making its way fromthe Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD),Australia, and North America to the EU. Originally, there was an empha-sis on the importance of utilizing different means and a variety offorms for regulatory purposes in order to tackle environmental prob-lems (Cunningham and Grabosky, 1998). More recently, the generalinterpretation of the virtues of ‘smart’ regulation tends to emphasizede-regulation, parsimony, and the potential of self-regulation. The prob-lem of this ‘regulatory movement’ is that it has become accepted asgeneral wisdom based on the assumption that ‘less is more’ in all regu-latory tasks; it is a regulatory approach that favors deregulation. In theEU, the predecessor of ‘smart’ regulation followed initial work on ‘betterregulation’, largely following the OECD priorities on regulatory reform.The OECD regulatory reform has been a public policy reform projectembracing largely new public management (NPM) priorities and mea-sures, but also making regulation more commercial sector and tradefriendly. This evolution is reflected, for example, in the explanation ofregulatory reform for the regulatory review of Sweden in 2007 (OECD,2007: 3):

Regulatory reform has emerged as an important policy area in OECDand non-OECD countries. For regulatory reforms to be beneficial,

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the regulatory regimes need to be transparent, coherent, and com-prehensive, spanning from establishing the appropriate institutionalframework to liberalising network industries, advocating and enforc-ing competition policy and law and opening external and internalmarkets to trade and investment.

A crucial part of the ‘smart’ and ‘better’ regulation agenda is the use ofimpact assessments. While environmental, social, and health impactsremain assessed as part of broader impact assessment processes withinthe EU, the assessment of economic impacts and costs to business aswell as the engagement of corporate stakeholders in the early stages ofplanning have become key aspects of new impact assessment processes.Smith et al. (2010a: 480) have raised eight fundamental concerns withthis process and emphasize:

The EU’s current ‘integrated’ version of IA appears to prioritise busi-ness impacts over health impacts. A legal requirement for the EU toprotect human health suggests that urgent consideration should begiven to assessing how health impacts can be better incorporated intothis system.

The EU initially had separate processes and practices for environmen-tal and health impact assessments, but it has now combined all impactassessments under a legal obligation to undertake integrated impactassessments. Information drawn from the tobacco archives has castnew light on the development and background of these policies asresearchers have found corporate tobacco involvement seeking to influ-ence the impact assessments’ process as part of policy-making in order toenhance their interests. Central to this was the introduction and priori-tizing of impacts on business (Smith et al., 2010b). Furthermore, healthand social impacts are not necessarily appropriately considered as partof the impact assessment processes (Ståhl, 2010). This has implied thatmechanisms intended to ensure due consideration of health and socialimpacts in practice have been undermined by the need to considerimpacts on business, potentially hampering further the developmentand introduction of regulatory measures for the protection of healthand the environment.

It can thus be argued that while still using the neutral if not progres-sive language of impact assessments, this new understanding of impactassessments twists the initial aims of ensuring that health and the envi-ronment are considered as a part of decision-making to the creation ofa mechanism which necessitates that all new environmental and health


regulations will need to be assessed in a way which tends to prioritizecosts to the business sector as well as clearing a path for ‘stakeholderparticipation’ and stakeholder engagement to become a key part of theoversight of the policy development process.

A focus on regulation is part of the broader trade and external policyframework of the EU and is reflected in the EU–US summit and high-level working group on jobs and growth; its interim report includesa substantial number of recommendations on regulatory cooperation.While reference is made to the right to regulate public health, safety,and environmental issues at a level that each side deems appropriate, itis clear that the proposals are more geared to making regulatory prac-tices more amenable to major stakeholders. Indeed, stakeholders, thatis, export industries, are invited to make proposals to address regulatorydifferences that impede trade.

In view of the importance of developing an ambitious and realisticapproach to regulatory differences that unnecessarily impede trade,the two sides would invite stakeholders to present, before the end ofthe year, concrete proposals to address the impact on trade of thosedifferences. Such proposals would be reviewed by both sides with theaim of developing during the course of negotiations concrete actionplans to reduce unnecessary regulatory costs and promote regulatorycompatibility, while respecting legitimate regulatory objectives.

(European Commission, 2012: 2)

The dark side of regulation in this context is the way that a focuson making regulatory processes more accountable to environmen-tal, social, and health impacts has become transformed to a kind ofmeta-regulation of government policies in other fields. This transforma-tion limits the scope for government intervention for environmental,social, or health purposes, while at the same time tightening regulatoryprocesses and oversight in favor of IPR and investor rights.

4. The financial crisis, individualization, and the shiftingof risks

The focus on universal access to health services as part of health policyhas been on global health policy agenda as well as part of a UN Gen-eral Assembly resolution (WHO, 2010; WHA, 2011; UN, 2012a). Suchgains on the global level and as part of development policies are cru-cially important, but also remain in danger of becoming compromised

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by the financial crisis, particularly in richer countries. This creates a dan-ger that the wisdom gained from decades of health-care reform in thedevelopment context may be compromised by austerity.

One example is user charges and cost-sharing, where a broader con-sensus has emerged of the problems that these cause – a particularchallenge given the impact of the financial crisis. The WHO reporton universal coverage emphasized the problems of people falling intopoverty as a result of catastrophic payments in 2011 (WHO, 2010), andthe EU Council conclusions on global health take a critical view on usercharges:

The EU should support countries to put in place fair financing healthschemes within social health protection models and mechanismswhich pool resources, avoid direct payments at the point of ser-vice delivery, particularly for vulnerable groups, such as childrenand pregnant women, and aim at achieving universal and equitablecoverage of essential health services.

(Council of the EU, 2010)

Similarly, the World Health Assembly Resolution 64.9 explicitly urgesmember states

to ensure that health-financing systems evolve so as to avoid signif-icant direct payments at the point of delivery and include a methodfor prepayment of financial contributions for health care and servicesas well as a mechanism to pool risks among the population in orderto avoid catastrophic health-care expenditure and impoverishmentof individuals as a result of seeking the care needed.

(WHA, 2011)

However, this is in stark contrast with the existing policies in Europe.Following the financial crisis, Mladovsky et al. (2012) report that sev-eral countries increased or introduced user charges for health services.User charges were initially required by International Monetary Fund(IMF) programs and promoted by the World Bank in the 1990s as akey aspect of health-care reforms in recipient countries (Koivusalo andOllila, 1997). Despite the broad recognition of the regressive nature ofuser charges, they have become an acceptable mechanism to respondto limited public resources within the health sector in middle-incomeand rich countries. The consequence of increasing user cost-sharing is


the shifting of the risks of ill-health on to individuals undermining theopportunities and benefits of cross-subsidization within a population.

The financial crisis has not only had redistributive implicationsbut also prompted particular policies to enhance economic growth.Financialization has been discussed in the social policy context by Fine(2009) and also has been applied to pension reform. This agenda hasbeen promoted by international financial institutions, such as the WorldBank and the IMF in the form of social funds, social risk management,and pensions.

In contrast to the regulation of financial markets or the introductionof new redistributive mechanisms in the form of financial transactiontaxes, the politics of enhancing economic growth through austerity hasthe potential to undermine the very basis of public policies and interests(see, for example, Boyer, 2012). This is reflected in the EU in the pressureto negotiate new and more extensive bilateral free trade agreements andthe emphasis on innovation and foreign investment in European poli-cies (European Commission, 2010 a, b). In some countries, the financialand economic crisis has legitimated the shrinkage of the state (see, forexample, Grimshaw and Rubery, 2012); in other countries, the retreat ofthe public sector is driven by lack of resources and the austerity measuresexpected by lenders, the so-called troika, consisting of the EuropeanCentral Bank (ECB), the European Commission (EC), and the IMF.

Just as in pension policies, there are likely to be financialization pres-sures on health care because of the level of resources consumed bythe sector. If the financing of health care is largely based on indi-vidual contributions and large funds, this is likely to provide furtherresources for the financial markets. This process can take place as a con-sequence of incentives for additional private insurance following theretreat of public services. Alternatively, broader reforms within health-care systems promoting individual health savings accounts and fundscan create market opportunities for the financial sector, as has been thecase with respect to pensions. There are already some experiences fromthe management of health funds in Latin America, where pre-paid planshave become financialized with dire consequences in the aftermath ofbankruptcy and problems of tax management/avoidance with respectto companies’ involvement in selling these plans (Iriart, 2005). Therole of the World Bank and international financial institutions in thefinancialization process has attracted critical attention (Bretton WoodsProject, 2010).

The evolution of health-care reforms can be conceptualized in threestages. The first stage in the promotion of an internal market applies

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competition in publicly financed services to public and not-for-profitsectors in the form of contracting out as a means of containing costs.The second stage brings the corporate sector into the funding and pro-vision of health services and the third promotes consumerism and moreindividualized financing (see, for example, Tritter et al., 2010; Dahlgren,1994). Commercialization of service provision is likely to increase thecosts of health-care services. This is legitimized through the emphasison patient choice and the focus on personal responsibility for health,shifting the risks and financing of health care to individuals so as toaccommodate choice and responsibility. This is comparable to the pro-cess which has been readily apparent in the changing welfare statepolicies within the US – a process Hacker terms as the great risk shiftand the privatization of risk (Hacker, 2004, 2006).

5. Redistribution through response to crises – doubletrouble for national health systems in Europe: Innovationand markets in services

Financial crises need not have negative redistributive impacts and couldhave positive redistributive impacts if losses from bad investments arecarried by the affluent. As financial crises are usually not simply a resultof public sector overspending in social programs and policies, it shouldnot necessarily lead to the demise of the welfare state either, and indeedcould be associated with further developments of the welfare state,as was the case in South Korea (Kwon and Tchoe, 2005, Kwon, thisvolume). In Finland, redistributive impacts were limited in the recenteconomic crisis due to the welfare state, but expanded after the cri-sis during a period of growth. Health inequalities have also furtherincreased during the period of growth in the aftermath of the economiccrisis (Tarkiainen et al., 2011).

European health systems are increasingly considered a ‘commercialsector’ and a platform for commercial opportunities in e-health andtechnology development for growth with an underdeveloped exportmarket rather than a public service with obligations toward citizens.This is reflected in the push toward the introduction of market-orientedmeasures, including competition, choice, and commercialization of ser-vices, to the publicly financed provision of health services. This focushas been apparent in Finland and Sweden since the 1990s, originat-ing in particular from the trade and business sectors, but also morebroadly as part of EU policies and priorities of center-right govern-ments (Tritter et al., 2010). This focus is also reflected in the Health and


Social Care Bill (2012) in the UK as well as more broadly as part of EUhealth policies. The new EU health program entitled ‘Health for Growth’(European Commission, 2011) also reflects the increasing considerationof health sector as a source of economic growth, rather than an enablerof economic growth.

It is very likely that, in the context of universal social security cov-erage, the increased profitability of the business sector involved in theprovision of health services and health-related products will be fundedfrom public resources. In comparison to the US, most European coun-tries have substantial potential for increased spending on health. Thefocus on innovation policies to enhance economic growth is likely toimpose a double burden on the health sector as IPR and related measuresthat secure exclusivity will lead to increasing costs for pharmaceuticalsand new health technologies and limit the scope for the applicationof competition and market mechanisms in an area where these canreduce costs. On the other hand, innovation in health services is increas-ingly sought by introducing competition into health systems despite thelack of evidence that it works in health services, and despite the factthat it has the potential for cost escalation due to commercialization.Through limiting the scope to use market mechanisms, where thesecould lower prices (pharmaceuticals), while at the same time imposingmarkets, where costs are likely to increase (health services), trade andinvestment agreements impose a double burden of costs for nationalhealth systems.

The promotion of innovation does not necessarily ensure thatthis will create public benefit; indeed, Enron was named by FortuneMagazine as America’s most innovative company for six consecu-tive years from 1996 to 2001 (BBC, 2006). Profits gained from IPRare very easily shifted into tax havens as part of tax management(PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 2009); the pharmaceutical industry has beenattentive to tax management and avoidance practices (BBC, 2012; GSK,2012). The redistributive impact of policies supporting innovation needsto take into account not only distribution across populations but alsothe distribution of resources between the public and corporate sectors.This is increasingly apparent not only in relation to pharmaceutical poli-cies (Koivusalo, 2010) but also in the context of increasing concerns overthe tax avoidance of public services contractors.

While the Nordic countries, such as Sweden and Finland, haveadopted liberalized schemes in contracting out public service provi-sion, tax avoidance by corporate sector contractors has become an issueof public concern and debate, particularly for health and social care

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providers (The Local, 2011; Martikainen, 2012). While governmentshave condemned the practice and sought to close tax loopholes, therehave also been moves to exclude such actors from government pro-curement in municipalities and cities. Local actors, such as the city ofHelsinki, are examining the possibility of excluding corporations thatuse tax havens as contractors as part of their global social responsibil-ity strategies (Helsingin Kaupunki, 2012). Helsinki University personnelhave actively lobbied the University to change Mehiläinen, its providerof occupational health care. Mehiläinen has been shown to use legaltax management practices to avoid tax (Liiten, 2012). However, whileprivate customers may be able to change their providers and exer-cise the ‘power of the purse’, public authorities may have far morelimited options in the context of public procurement. Adopting thistype of local strategies and initiatives may also be vulnerable to chal-lenges under commitments made in the context of trade and investmentagreements on the basis that these limit the scope for the mobility ofcapital.

6. Realizing common interests

The opposition to global market forces and policies has not been artic-ulated in the context of their implications for social rights, regulation,and redistribution as they have unfolded within the EU. According toSwank and Betz (2003), while more radical anti-globalization move-ments have been active on particular issues, such as financial taxes andtax avoidance, the main political response seems to have increased sup-port for conservative nationalistic and populist parties. They suggestthat universal social insurance would partly dilute this radicalization,although the combination of austerity measures and increasing liberal-ization makes such an outcome less likely. The fundamental challengefor global social policies is to strengthen critical voices and focus onglobal economic and commercial policies and their impacts on rights,regulation, and redistribution, rather than on the comparative aspectsof social policies in individual countries. The focus of the compara-tive approach often under-emphasizes the impacts of similar pressuresfrom globalization and global economic integration and their impacton different societies and political contexts. Critical analysis needs toelaborate the implications not only for social policies as a whole butfor social assistance and health, social and education services, and thoseof broader labor markets and employment. A clear illustration is pro-vided by the comprehensive welfare regimes in Nordic countries that


have been commercialized without necessarily reducing overall socialor health spending (see, for example, Tritter et al., 2010).

While the pressure for universal coverage and health care for all needsto be maintained, we also must be aware of the danger of universalcoverage being undermined by increasing commercialization and cor-poratization of health-care provision. A second set of challenges is theapparent increased individualization of financial risk and the reductionof regulatory policy space to ensure wise, efficient, and equitable use ofpublic resources (see, for example, Koivusalo et al., 2009). Without duecare, commitments to universal coverage could remain in a critical state,if not being dead on arrival.

There is still scope to focus on broader redistributive policies, includ-ing action against tax havens or the adoption of financial transactiontaxes or related measures, to address complex financing and tax man-agement schemes. Tax havens are not the result of divine interventionor an unavoidable consequence of market forces, but can and shouldbe regulated. There is also significant opportunity for different typesof taxes to raise revenue for global social policies. For example, theWorld Economic and Social Survey (UN, 2012b) highlighted the poten-tial role for new and innovative development financing. While thereport rightly notes that currently many initiatives, labeled as inno-vative, are primarily mechanisms for allocating public resources, thereare global options which could generate new resources and providepotential public interest benefits. The WHO Consultative Expert Groupon Research and Development: Financing and Coordination reachedsimilar conclusions with respect to the financing of research and thescope for using taxes to finance global health R&D efforts (WHO,2012b).

At the core of a more global policy focus is the recognition of commoninterests across countries and governments and the power and capacityof governments to intervene. This is not a minor task, but it is one whereNGOs and movements calling for financial transaction taxes or focus-ing on tax avoidance as well as new political parties, such as the PirateParties, can be seen as a source of knowledge, expertise, and capacity.It is also necessary to consider that a focus on the redistributive impli-cations of tax avoidance, IPR, and related measures, and the lobbyingpower of multinational industries may be more relevant to key globalsocial policy issues and redistributive forces, than more traditional socialpolicy research on comparative analysis of welfare regimes. In the devel-opment context, redistributional policies would include the use andownership of natural resources and land, including land-grab (Oxfam,

Meri Koivusalo 81

2011). Redistributive policies have not become impossible, but need tofocus on where and how resources and capital accumulate.

A key aspect of GASPP program work was the early recognition thatglobal social policies do not only consist of ‘social policies’ at a globallevel but are also defined by policies made in other sectors that frameand limit the scope for national social policies. In other words, it wastaken for granted that social policies were not only defined by measureswithin the social sector, but often, and more importantly, in policiesand decisions made in other sectors. The validity of this observationremains an even more important insight in the current context of policydevelopments and exploration of global social regulation, rights, andredistribution.

Note

1. The EU–Canada FTA is still under negotiation. However, some texts as wellas statements with respect to the agreement have been leaked or released,providing a basis for concern, for example with respect to expropriation andprotection of investment.

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5Global Social Justice, Ethics,and the Crisis of CareFiona Williams

1. Introduction

This chapter uses the lens of care to look at two of Bob Deacon’s intellec-tual and political concerns – global social policy and global social justice.In pursuing this analysis I am bringing full circle the connections –personal, political, and intellectual – between Bob Deacon’s work andmy own. We met as young revolutionaries in 1972 when I went towork in the Applied Social Studies Department, at what was thenNorth London Polytechnic, on a research project looking at the imple-mentation of the 1968 Seebohm Report. The Department was full ofyoung radicals: Elizabeth Wilson, Hugh Kerr, Richard Kirkwood, PaulineConroy, to name but a few. Bob set up with others ‘Case-Con: the maga-zine for revolutionary social workers’, which argued for a collective andstructuralist approach to social work and against an individualizing and,as it was seen, pathologizing practice. (In 1975 we were married.)

In 1980 Bob established, with Gordon Peters, Critical Social Policy,whose founding-day conference in London drew about 1,000 dele-gates. My concerns were to take feminist and anti-racist struggles tothe heart of social policy thinking, while Bob’s increasingly drew himinto cross-national social policy analysis, focusing in particular on statesocialism. We worked together during the 1980s on an Economic andSocial Research Council (ESRC)-funded comparative research project onthe developments of the welfare states of Britain and Hungary. By the1990s Bob’s analysis focused on the break-up of communist societies(simultaneous with the break-up of our marriage), as I took my feministand ‘race’ critique into comparative social policy, and developed empir-ical work on the social relations and ethics of care. The ways in whichpost-communist societies were drawn into new relationships with globalsocial policy actors – the World Bank, International Monetary Fund(IMF), and so on – ignited Bob’s interest in setting out the dynamics

85

86 Global Social Justice, Ethics, and the Crisis of Care

and interests of these actors in his analysis of global social policy andits governance (Deacon, 1992, 1997). Meanwhile, my own work on careand my underpinning concerns with gender and race – Work, Family andNation (Williams, 1989, 1995) – led me, by the beginning of the 2000s,into research on migrant care workers, and thus into the global geo-political inequalities that this movement of women workers signified.In this way, by the second decade of the 21st century, we both foundourselves exploring questions of global social policy and global socialjustice.

This chapter unpacks some of the key dynamics in the connectionbetween global and regional developments in migration and care workas a way of outlining how a transnational political economy of careoperates, and how it contributes to a global care crisis. While the focusis on Europe as a region of destination for migrant care workers, theimplications have wider significance. This is a crisis which affects devel-oped and developing countries in different and uneven ways but whichdemands that the issue of care becomes central to policy-making atlocal, national, regional, and global levels. With this aim in mind, thechapter ends by exploring how an ethics of care might inform strategiesand policies.

Since the 1990s, the employment of migrant workers in care anddomestic work in all parts of the developed world has become aphenomenon of social, political, moral, and economic significance(Brennan and Williams, 2012; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003;Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Lutz, 2008; Parrenas, 2001). In Europe, asI show below, it has escalated particularly since the beginning of thiscentury. The new employers now include not only the wealthy butpredominantly professional and dual-earning households, older and dis-abled people, as well as private cleaning and care agencies, and thehealth and care services of welfare states. It is migrant workers, mainlywomen, from the poorer regions, often educated and skilled, who aremeeting this demand, sometimes leaving behind their own children inthe care of other family members. Such are the care links in what isknown as ‘the global care chain’ (Parrenas, 2001). Before explaining howthis has happened, I want to frame it within a wider concern of linkedglobal crises.

2. Global crises

While media and political elites analyze the current crisis of cap-italism through the financial crisis that started in 2008, academicinterpretations tend to understand it more broadly (Rutherford and

Fiona Williams 87

Davison, 2012). Here I draw on Nancy Fraser’s analysis of the crisis ofcapitalism as multidimensional (Fraser, 2011). In developing this, Fraseroffers a critical reinterpretation of Polanyi’s 1944 classic The Great Trans-formation (Polanyi, 1944/57). She argues that most analyses of the crisisare gender blind and, at the same time, that feminism also lacks a wayof connecting those social changes affecting gender relations to the cri-sis. While Polanyi had argued that capitalism’s self-destructive impulselies in its devaluing land, labor, and money by turning them into ‘ficti-tious commodities’, Fraser rewrites this triad as the interlinked systemiccrises of ecology, finance, and social reproduction, each of which hasbecome devalued. Thus, environmental sustainability is threatened bya crisis of ecology through the commodification of the earth’s resourcesand thus forces us to question the scope of consumption. In the globalfinancial crisis, unregulated and multiple speculation (through a ficti-tious market in derivatives and credit default swaps, for example) hasshaken the stability of investment and money’s capacity to store valuefor the future. In relation to social reproduction, the value of care isundermined by its becoming a ‘fictitious commodity’ through the com-modification and marketization of care labor. One example of this is theemployment of migrant workers from the poorer regions as care anddomestic workers. The effect of this simply displaces those processes ofsocial reproduction, which were previously hidden and unwaged, intocommodified care work which is as out of sight as are the care workers’own care responsibilities. Fraser argues that the affective and care pro-cesses upon which not only productive labor but also human solidaritydepends are jeopardized by this crisis of social reproduction.

This framework is useful in making social reproduction and care cen-tral to an analysis of social change and the global crisis. In other words,processes of care and support are not subsumed under the economies ofthe environment or finance but stand, analytically, alongside them andare part and parcel of them. This implies, as I shall argue later, that carehas to be central to global strategies for change. While Fraser’s analy-sis lacks empirical detail, and, in common with much feminist analysis,positions itself within the developed world, looking out rather than inboth worlds looking across (there are of course exceptions – Beneria,2003; Elson, 2004; Katz, 2001; Razavi and Hassim, 2006), nevertheless, itis helpful in analyzing the processes at work in the increased connectionbetween migration, markets, and care work.

3. Migration, markets, and care

The connection between migration and care/domestic work1 turns onthree related aspects of social change. First is the global increase in


women’s involvement in the labor market. In 2006, an average of56.8 percent of all women was in paid employment across 30 OECDcountries (OECD, 2007: Table 1.1). These figures rise to 66.3 percentfor women aged 15–64 with children aged 6–16 in 26 OECD countries(OECD, 2007: Table 3.2). In developing countries, too, female participa-tion in formal work (often as breadwinners) is increasing and, in 2008,ranged from 24.7 percent in the Middle East to 62.9 percent in sub-Saharan Africa for women over 25 years, both increases in the previousten years (ILO, 2009: 9).

In developed welfare states, this increase is marked by a shiftaway from the ‘male breadwinner’ to a new normative ideal of the‘adult worker’ model which assumes all adults, men, and womenwill be in paid work (Annesley, 2007). In the poorer regions of theworld, the destruction of local economies, unemployment, and povertyhave pressed women into assuming a greater breadwinning role, butwith little state support, or, in the case of Eastern Europe, with theretrenchment of such support. Second, care has become a ‘new socialrisk’ (Taylor-Gooby, 2004). In the richer regions, the care deficit or cri-sis is intensified by women’s employment in the context of structuralaging and concerns about declining fertility and social expenditure cuts.These issues are no less pressing in developing countries, where at itsextreme – for different countries experience this in different forms – inAfrica, AIDS, chronic illness, natural disasters, and a high child depen-dency ratio place enormous burdens on women, who are expected tocare and earn with very little infrastructural support. In the countriesfrom which migrant workers originate, that lack of infrastructure inten-sifies both the rationale for migration and the caring responsibilities ofthose left behind.

Third, the changing patterns of post-colonial migration include themovement of women seeking earning opportunities, and related issuesof citizenship rights, and exploitation of unregulated labor. In 2005, halfof the world’s 190 million migrants were women. Over $500 billion wasprojected to be sent by migrants to families back home in 2012 (WorldBank, 2012). Many find work in care and domestic work, for whichthey are generally overqualified. In the EU-27 they are more than twiceas likely to be overqualified for the work they do as their native-borncounterparts (Eurostat, 2011).

Care and domestic workers migrate across the Global North and Southand also within those regions. Domestic workers from Indonesia goto Malaysia, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia, which also provide workfor women from the Philippines and Sri Lanka. In the North, the

Fiona Williams 89

enlargement of the EU in 2004 has been accompanied by an increasein educated younger women migrants from Central and Eastern Europefinding care and domestic work hoping this is a stepping-stone tomore professional work. Hierarchies of destination operate for differ-ent nationalities; for example, elder care workers from Poland go toGermany, while Poland receives domestic workers from the Ukraine(Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2010) – although since 2008/9 the eco-nomic recession has had the effect of decelerating general migrationwithin the EU-27 (Tilly, 2011). Superimposed on these routes are theolder trails of colonial relations, with Indian, Filippina, and Africanworkers going to the UK, and South American workers moving to Spain.Within most countries of destination, these workers enter a situationwhich has seen the simultaneous opening up and dependence throughnational economies on their labor and the political closure of nation-alist and anti-immigration sentiment, a situation that Michel and Peng(2012) have termed ‘demand and denial’.

4. Variations and convergences in migration and care

These represent the outer parameters of social change, but how thesehave connected in different countries is a story of simultaneous trendsand trajectories of convergence across developed welfare states alongwith variations in extent and form within different countries.2 Look-ing first at some converging trends, what has been noticeable since thebeginning of this century is that developments previously associatedwith the US (and documented in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003,Parrenas, 2001, inter alia) are now happening across Europe and partsof Asia. For example, in Spain in 2009, 62.5 percent of those employedin domestic/care activity in the household are migrant workers – a four-fold increase in ten years (Leon, 2010). These are migrant women fromLatin America, North Africa, the Philippines and Romania, Bulgaria, andthe Ukraine. In Italy in 2006, 72.6 percent of home-based care workerswere migrants from similar countries – a threefold increase in four years(van Hooren, 2008). These figures refer to registered workers, but thereare many who are not registered, or who are unauthorized, undocu-mented, or waiting to receive their papers, where it is difficult to accessexact numbers. Numbers for the EU-27 in 2008 were estimated to rangefrom 1.9 to 3.8 million, with between 417,000 and 863,000 in the UKand between 279,000 and 461,000 in Italy (Kovacheva and Vogel, 2009).As an example, when the UK had an au pair visa the number of visasissued stood at about 12,000 a year in the first few years of this century


(Bahna, 2005: 460 cited in Burikova and Miller, 2010). With EU enlarge-ment and freedom of movement and subsequently in 2008 the endingof the visa, many more Eastern European women used internet recruit-ment sites to apply for au pair work. By 2012 these unregistered workerswere estimated to be in their many thousands, even possibly as highas 100,000.3 In addition, both Japan and Korea, countries with a tradi-tionally ethno-nationalist sentiment that opposed the immigration ofpeople from other countries, and especially other ethnic groups, haveinitiated the recruitment of co-ethnic foreigners as care workers – inKorea these increased three and a half times between 2007 and 2010,from 93,000 to 334,000 (Michel and Peng, 2012).

Whereas in the US it has been the lack of public provision whichshapes the employment of migrant care workers, in Europe (and partsof Asia) it is the way care policies have developed that has shaped thesetrends. There are three key elements of this. First is a shift from pro-viding public care ‘services’ to giving individuals ‘cash’ payments tohelp them buy in care (Ungerson and Yeandle, 2007; Williams, 2010).The UK, Spain, Finland, and France have all introduced some formof cash provision or tax credit to assist in buying child care or helpin the home. Forms of allowances and ‘direct payments’ allow olderor disabled people or their family carers to buy in support and assis-tance, in, for example, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, andAustria. Second, and crucially, there has been increasing reliance of thestate on the voluntary and especially the for-profit private sectors todeliver care services. This has encouraged the development of a particu-lar form of home-based, often low-paid, commodified care or domestichelp. In other words, although some support for care comes from thestate, it is often in the private market where people will find their careservices and providers. This also has had the effect of turning care intoa commodity and service users into consumers searching for good valuefor money in a marketplace of care services. For example, a workingmother in London interviewed in an earlier study on home-based childcare found that ‘an au pair was what we could afford. We had a spareroom [ . . . ] because nannies are incredibly expensive if you pay themproperly’ (quoted in Williams and Gavanas, 2008: 22).4 Third, wherelocal authorities contract out provision such as domiciliary services,nurseries, or residential homes to the private sector, there has been aworsening of pay, conditions, and labor shortages (see Brennan andWilliams, 2012; Shutes and Chiatti, 2012). Where care labor has his-torically been undervalued and underpaid, it is performed by those withleast negotiating power, and this is where migrant labor steps in.

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However, while these appear to mark general trends, we need to alsoreckon with variations in these developments. So, for example, whilein Spain and Italy migrant workers are employed by families to lookafter frail older people in their homes (and supported through stateallowances to do so), in the UK migrant workers are much more likely tobe employed by private sector residential and home care services. Thissignifies different historical legacies in the cultures of care (that is, dom-inant national and local cultural discourses on gender and care, and onwhat constitutes appropriate care provision (Williams, 2012; Williamsand Gavanas, 2008)) and how these find expression in the balancebetween state, market, voluntary sector, and family provision. WhereasSpain and Italy have familialist traditions in both child care and the careof older people, the UK has a tradition of public provision for elder care.By contrast, it is only recently in the UK that there has been any develop-ment of publicly available child care (although this is mainly providedby the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors rather than the state).

Similarly, while there is a growing convergence in the use of mar-kets and market mechanisms to meet the challenge of care needs,these mechanisms can vary widely across countries. Contracting out bycentral governments or local authorities to private for-profit and not-for-profit providers, financial budgets and top-ups to enable service users’access to private services, mandatory insurance for long-term care, taxcredits, cash payments or vouchers for the buying-in of personal caresupport at home, as well forms of subsidy or tax relief to private marketproviders.

There is further diversity in the employment and migrant statuses thatworkers have. The conditions of home-based domestic and care workcan take different forms: employees may provide housework or childcare or both; they may live in or live out, working for a few hours,a few days or full time. In Austria and Germany, migrant elder careworkers from neighboring countries often work a two-week shift withother family members (Österle and Bauer, 2011). Work may involveacting as a carer or cleaner for an older, frail person or a disabledperson, or being their personal assistant. An employee may be self-employed or ‘undeclared’ – where they receive cash-in-hand as part ofthe grey economy – or they may work for a private agency, or for a localauthority. As migrant workers, they may be working under specified andtemporary work permits (say, as an au pair), part of occupational quo-tas, or on student visas, as refugees, as well as undocumented or waitingfor papers. These differences of employment status intersect with racial-ized hierarchies which operate differently in different countries. Thus,


Anderson’s research found that Parisian employers preferred Haitians(Anderson, 2000), and Williams and Gavanas (2008) found an employ-ment agency for child carers in London reporting that individualemployers had clear preferences for Filipinas, who they felt were goodwith children, but were reluctant to employ African women. In Madrid,anti-Muslim sentiment meant that Moroccans were at the bottom of thehierarchy. On the other hand, South Americans were thought of as warmbut slow and unable to discipline children; Eastern Europeans were con-sidered as Europeans, to be more like Spanish people (see also Tobio andGorfinkel’s research reported in Lister et al., 2007: 152). In Stockholm,too, employers preferred Eastern Europeans because they were perceivedto be more like Swedes (Williams and Gavanas, 2008).

In order to capture these variations and convergences in migrantcare work in different countries I employ an institutional intersectionalframework that provides for the analysis of the way care regimes carepolicies and provision (especially care markets), care cultures (especiallyfamilialization) – intersect with both migration regimes (rules, regulationsand laws and practices concerning migrants and racialized ‘others’) andaspects of employment regimes (gendered and racialized divisions in thelabor market, for example). I suggest that it is in the intersection ofthese regimes that we can identify both the simultaneous variationsand the convergences in different countries in their use of migrant carelabor (Williams, 2012). Without developing this framework in detail,it is possible to illustrate its explanatory potential by referring back tothe example mentioned above about the difference between Spanish,Italian, and English elder care. On the one hand, although elder care inEngland is different from Spain and Italy, in that it is provided in theformal care sector (predominantly for-profit private provision), ratherthan as in Spain and Italy as home-based care, nevertheless we find sim-ilar recent increases in employment of migrants as those quoted earlierfor Spain and Italy. In private sector residential and home care servicesfor older people in the UK in 2008, care workers, who were foreign-bornrecent migrants were 18 percent in number, compared with 8 percent in1998 – double the percentages since 2001 (Shutes and Chiatti, 2012).

As far as migration is concerned, in Italy there has been a com-bination of domestic worker quotas and amnesties for irregular careworker migrants, and even where immigration policies in 2008 crimi-nalized undocumented workers, an exception was made for badanti –domestic/care workers (van Hooren, 2008). In contrast, in the UK,migration policies have been increasingly restrictive to those defined asless skilled (much care work is defined as unskilled). This means many

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migrant care workers from countries outside the EU have only been ableto work in the UK on, essentially, temporary work permits attached to anindividual employer. Yet, in spite of these differences Shutes and Chiatti(2012) in their comparison of elder care in the UK and Italy found theeffects for migrant care workers in both countries to be similar: longhours, low salary, restricted choice in employment situations.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of these trends toward conver-gence is that it has started to include the Nordic countries, giventheir historic commitment to women-friendly public services. To beginwith, in Sweden, foreign-born workers (mainly permanent residents) arefound mainly in the lower grades of home-based care, domestic work,hotel work, and health care (Statistics Sweden, 2011). Contracting outin elder care combined with existing racialization in the care labor mar-ket has seen migrant groups channeled into less attractive areas of carework. Figures for Stockholm show that 39 percent of assistant nursesand auxiliaries and 46 percent of personal assistants and care aidesare foreign-born (Statistics Sweden, 2011). Similarly, in Oslo, in 2008,almost 40 percent of employees in the nursing and care sector weremigrants (Homme and Høst, 2008). Isaksen (2010: 13) notes that a thirdof these are ‘non-Western’.

The second trend is in the commodification of domestic work: in2007, Sweden introduced tax breaks for people employing domestichelp in the home, following Denmark, Norway, and Finland. This wasintroduced in the name of both gender equality (at least for profes-sional families) and to regularize the gray market although, accordingto Platzer (2010) and Gavanas (2010), the effect has been to legitimize,in a similar fashion to other countries, the commodification of house-hold work and to create new employers – older people and middle-classfamilies with young children. In fact, seeking individualistic solutionsto work/life balance has become unexpectedly common for professionalwomen in some of the Nordic countries. Between 2000 and 2008 thenumber of au pairs in Norway increased tenfold, and 72 percent ofthese were Filipinas by 2008, denoting a shift from a system of culturalexchange to one of care/domestic work (Bikova, 2010). Stenum (2010)notes a parallel pattern of increase and change in origin in Denmark andquotes the words of the Social Democratic Mayor of Copenhagen who,writing in the city council’s recruitment magazine, noted that ‘mod-ern’ executive women need not be faced with the dilemma of familyor career – ‘in special cases the local council can even offer a subsidyfor au pair and cleaning services as part of the salary package’ (Stenum,2010: 40).


5. A continuum of migrant care work

So far I have identified two aspects of care policy developments whichshape the employment of migrant women as domestic and care workers:the use of cash or tax benefits to buy in care services and the process ofcontracting out. There is a further aspect of care provision which needsto be added to the picture. Pressures to reduce costs of state health andsocial care provision result in not only private employers but also statesrecruiting cheaper health and care labor from the poorer regions. Thissuggests a continuum in migrant care labor that stretches from home-based live-in care to informal and formal private care provision and theninto state care and medical employment. This end of the continuum hasbeen termed by Yeates (2009) as ‘global nursing care chains’, which con-tribute to ‘a new international division of reproductive labor’. So, toput figures on this aspect, in the UK, 23 percent of nurses were foreign-born in 2009 (Cangiano et al., 2009). In fact, the highest employmentof foreign-born people in health and community services in 2004–5 was18.6 percent in Sweden and 24.2 percent in Norway (OECD, 2006a: 57).In Norway, as with au pairs, while these workers used to come fromwealthy countries, nurses were recruited from Poland, Latvia, and thePhilippines recently (Bach, 2003; Isaksen, 2010; Redfoot and Houser,2005). By the end of 2005, 30 percent of UK doctors and 10 percentof nurses had received their initial training overseas (Crisp, 2007:16).In France, at the turn of the century, a quarter of all hospital doctorswere foreign or naturalized (Bach, 2003). What this suggests is that whilestates might differ in terms of which sector (family, not-for-profit, for-profit, public) delivers care provision, all of those sectors still depend,albeit to differing degrees, on migrant labor. It also reveals the extent towhich many states are now global employers, working through privaterecruitment agencies. As Bach’s research has shown (Bach, 2003), thesestate migrant workers share common experiences with migrant home-based and private sector care workers: gender and racial discriminationat work especially in the form of lack of recognition of skills and qual-ifications is reflected in pay levels and their concentration in the leastskilled and desirable specialisms. While these workers may pay taxes andcontributions to national insurance systems, they may find themselvesexcluded from benefits in both their countries of origin and destina-tion. Indeed, the last point indicates the extent to which transnationalmigration challenges long-standing territorially based social security sys-tems which limit eligibility to those residing in (and/or citizens of) anation-state. Some multilateral and bilateral agreements exist for the

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right to portability of social security benefits, such as between EU mem-ber states and more recently between individual member states andthird countries – France and Morocco, for example. However, bilateralagreements often depend on there being a corresponding income main-tenance infrastructure in both the country of origin and destination(Schumacher and Cissé, 2011).5

5.1 Converging trajectories

Four points emerge from these observations about convergences andvariations in migrant care work in Europe. First, the convergencesundermine the traditional distinctions of welfare regimes, especially inrelation to social democratic, liberal, and familialistic regimes. On theone hand, in many countries previously committed to care as a familyresponsibility – the Southern European welfare states, but also Germanyand the UK – there has been, influenced by the EU, a recognition ofpublic responsibility for collective care provision, especially in relationto child care. On the other hand, in moving care into the public domain,the most striking development cross-nationally is its marketization. Thisis not just restricted to Europe: Australia, the US, Canada, Japan, andKorea are all characterized by increasing marketization, even though thistakes different paths in different countries (see Brennan and Williams,2012). Furthermore, the strategy of attracting migrants to fill care labordeficits also undermines traditional claims to ethnic homogeneity. Thisis not only the case for the Nordic countries but, as Michel and Peng(2012) show, while Korea and Japan formally eschewed the idea ofimmigration into their ethnically homogeneous societies, in responseto the needs of their aging societies they are now working toward themigration, albeit highly managed, of elder care workers.

Second, while marketization has been seen as having a crucial role toplay in the dynamics of migration and care, there is also the larger ques-tion of the unfinished business of equality between men and womenin relation to issues of work/life balance, and associated with this, thelow priority the value of care has, especially in times of retrenchment ofservices. This is not just an issue for developed countries but developingcountries too.

Third, both these dynamics operate within a context of geo-politicalinequalities between richer and poorer nations and are superimposedon historical precedents. In the 1950s and 1960s in Britain, the recruit-ment of health and care labor from the colonies both provided labor forthe new institutions of the welfare state and met a labor shortage whichotherwise would have had to be filled by married women. This would


have disrupted the strong ideology of a male breadwinner society where(white British) women were assumed to have primary responsibilities tothe home and children. Today, the use of migrant domestic and carelabor prevents the disruption of the new adult worker model of welfare,where women are encouraged into paid employment. These were then,and still are today, cost-effective ways of securing family norms andmeeting care needs, even though these norms and needs have changed.

Fourth, while there are variations across Europe in the employmentof migrant care workers in home-based child or elder care, there is alsoa convergent trend in the employment of different types of migrantworkers in different types of care regime, sector, and site. The dif-ference is dependent on the positioning of different welfare regimeswithin the global market for social and health care labor. In so far asthere is convergence it is toward reinforcing these geo-political inequal-ities. In other words, there are divergent processes moving toward acommon trajectory in the direction of a transnational political econ-omy of care in which European and other developed countries’ welfarestates reduce, directly or indirectly, their increasing social expendituresthrough strategies that involve migrant health and care labor.

5.2 Convergences in a transnational political economy of care

Some social protection and mitigating policies do exist for migrantcare/domestic workers, as do active forms of mobilization of migrantworkers themselves. This is a point to return to, but first I outline the fivekey dynamics involved in the transnational political economy of care(elaborated in Williams, 2012). First is the dynamic which has just beendescribed: the transnational movement of health and care labor and itseffect on draining the care resources of poorer regions that often bear thetraining costs of these workers. Second are the transnational dynamicsof care commitments as people move and leave behind younger or olderpeople to be cared for at a distance. Like the first, this constitutes a globalsocial policy problem and carries policy implications that affect all peo-ple involved in transnational movement: the portability of pensionsand benefits across national borders, opportunities for family reunion,as well as support for caring for children and older people left behind.It is important to note here that the care crisis in poorer regions morethan outweighs the care deficit of richer countries even though theireffects are similar. For example, in the Philippines – the main countryof origin of domestic, care, and health workers – there is a vicious circlewhere the effects of structural adjustment policies have increased foreigndebt and reduced the capacities of the Philippines state to improve its

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own health, care, and education infrastructure. It is this social and eco-nomic instability and lack of access to public services which provide theeconomic context in which families make moral decisions about theircollective well-being: that it is better served through the migration ofa family member to increase their economic security. This strategy hasbeen encouraged by an export-oriented economy in which care laborprovides, through remittances, the largest source of foreign currency inthe Philippines (Parrenas, 2001). This export of care is matched by thepressure to import care by richer countries in order to save social expen-diture costs and to meet care needs resulting from women’s increasedearning responsibilities.

At the same time the combination of care, markets, and migrationhas opened up the third dynamic: the transnational movement ofcare capital. The private market in health and social care has becomebig international business. For example, in long-term care, the BritishUnited Provident Association has operations in Spain, Ireland, Thailand,Hong Kong, and Saudi Arabia (Holden, 2002). Because of the labor-intensive nature of care, profits are made through economies of scale,often forcing the smaller more specialist provider out of the market. Effi-ciency strategies pursued by large corporations (such as deskilling) ofteninfluence those developed in the state sector. Quality of care is cededin favor of greater standardization, making these providers ‘market-following’ rather than ‘client-seeking’ (Holden, 2002: 62). The principlesof market investment (risk, expansion, profit) conflict with the princi-ples of care provision (individual needs, continuity, and quality serviceprovided by skilled labor). Collective commitment to public subsidydoes not guarantee quality and equity, but it provides a sounder basisfrom which to meet them.

The fourth and fifth dimensions refer to transnational and interna-tional political actors (Deacon, 2007). On the one side, the influence ofcare policy discourses in international organizations has transnationalrepercussions. One example of this is the commodification of care,the development of markets, and the related discourse of ‘choice’ forservice users which accompanied the introduction of forms of cashor tax allowances in both child care and provision for older peo-ple across many OECD countries (see Brennan and Williams, 2012).To some extent this has been mediated by another powerful discoursearound ‘social investment’ which has been taken up by the EU andthe OECD among others and has shaped anti-poverty and child careprograms in developed and (some) developing countries. It has under-pinned the implementation of work/care reconciliation policies in the


EU, international organizations, and national governments (Jenson,2009; Mahon, 2010). Its key characteristics include an investment inthe capabilities of human capital – mothers as workers and children ascitizen-workers-of-the-future. This is to be achieved through support forlabor market activation, anti-poverty measures, and education and childcare through services that represent good value for money, with theaim of maintaining competitiveness in the global economy. These ideashave been developed by the OECD, which argues for the need to investin early childhood programs in Starting Strong (OECD, 2006b), and itsinfluence can be seen in the United Nations Educational, Scientific andCultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Children’sFund (UNICEF) policies (Mahon, 2010). Molyneux’s (2006) account ofanti-poverty Progresa/Oportunidades programs developed from 1997 inMexico shows how anti-poverty policies were framed in terms of theneed to develop human capital. The problems in this program illustrategeneral difficulties with the social investment approach. While high-lighting women’s care responsibilities, it sidestepped crucial issues ofwomen’s empowerment by ignoring women’s voice and gender inequal-ities in the division of household labor. The recognition of care involvesmore than an investment in women’s maternal roles; it requires chal-lenges to the structural inequalities that underpin its practice and thesubservience of its policies to economic development.

Collective voices that can articulate such challenges are also fun-damental and these represent the fifth dynamic – the transnationalactivity of social movements, non-governmental, and grassroots orga-nizations. Many of these focus on aspects of the global care crisis.Women’s movements have had a long tradition in organizing transna-tionally around care issues, for example, in the 1995 Beijing Conference(Mayo, 2005). Organizations such as Kalayaan and RESPECT advocateon behalf of migrant domestic and care workers (Oxfam and Kalayaan,2008). In part, such mobilizing put pressure on the ILO in June 2010to agree to adopt an international convention for the protection ofthe rights of domestic workers (which the UK refused to ratify on thebasis that the household should be exempt from social protection). Dis-ability movements too organize transnationally, especially in taking updisability as a social development and human rights issue.6 Accordingto the World Report on Disability (WHO, 2011: 262), disability affectsvulnerable populations in a disproportionate way, with a higher dis-ability prevalence observed in lower-income countries, people from thepoorest wealth quintile, women, children, and older people. Lobbyingby networks of activists and researchers also finds representation in

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umbrella organizations, such as in the European Social Platform’s rec-ommendations on social care presented to the European Commissionin 2011, which argues that to receive and to give care is a fundamentalhuman right and includes improvements in the conditions and rightsof migrant care workers (European Social Platform, 2011).

6. Strategies

There are many strategies that would improve the conditions of migrantcare workers and mitigate the worst effects of the transnational politi-cal economy of care. These can be considered temporally in terms ofboth immediate and longer-term strategies: geo-politically, in terms ofstrategies for migrants’ countries of origin and countries of destination;and in the scales of policy-making – for pressure on national, bilateral,international, and global social policy. Thus, for example, in terms ofimmediate strategies in countries of destination, these might includethe regularization of care and domestic work; improving migrants’ rightsof citizenship (including family reunion, rights to contracts, social pro-tection, training, language acquisition, guidance on cultural norms,freedom from discrimination, and so on); and coordination across thedifferent policy areas of migration, health and social care, employment,and development. To talk of the intersectionality of regimes is ironic, inthe sense that what exists in many countries is, by default rather thanby design, a failure to address and coordinate the problems faced byall actors – the welfare states of destination countries, private employ-ers, international agencies, the care needs of countries of origin, and ofmigrants themselves. Also important is the development of bilateral eth-ical recruitment codes in health care to prevent ‘poaching’ health-careworkers from poorer countries and the guarantee to provide free trainingand support for returning doctors and nurses (Bach, 2003). Fundamen-tal to all these strategies is the opportunity for migrant workers to havea voice in their countries of both destination and origin.

However, many of these measures would not necessarily tackle theissues that give rise to women’s decisions to migrate in the first placeand, without further strategies in the countries of origin, protectivemeasures may reproduce discriminatory practices in employment. Thesemight include making the decision to migrate one of informed choicerather than pressured by lack of financial and professional improve-ments. Pillinger (2011) cites examples of strategies for ethical emigrationpolicies worked through at local level in countries of origin throughcoordinated social dialogs between different political and social actors.


As with the examples above on portable social security systems, suchmeasures also require the improvement of the public health and careinfrastructure in order to stem migration in the first place.

7. Toward a care-ethical notion of global social justice

Some of these activities find reflection in the goals of international orga-nizations. For example, the ILO has sought to protect workers worldwidethrough its core labor standards, and the UN to protect the humanrights of migrant workers. The 2005 Report of the Global Commission onInternational Migration (United Nations, 2005) recommended increasedinternational cooperation and agreements between states to secure therights to social security and health care of migrant workers (Deacon,2007: 161–162). However, these developments do not guarantee thatthe significance of care and the global care crisis is taken on board asa central issue for global social justice, that is to say, that the every-day relations of care carried out within a context of different forms ofinequality are embedded conceptually and strategically in global socialjustice. This would be necessary if the longer-term underlying issues,such as the limited advances of gender equality in countries of both ori-gin and destination, the marketization of care provision, or geo-politicalinequalities, are to be tackled. For example, as Razavi has pointed out,although the World Bank has taken on board gender mainstreaming,when it mentions care as in its World Development Report 2006, it talksabout child care as an economic investment, yet it is ‘silent about thehuge amount of unpaid care work that goes on in all societies to sus-tain infants and children (as well as people who are elderly, sick ordisabled, and also able-bodied adults) on a day-to-day basis and fromone generation to the next’ (Mahon, 2012; Razavi, 2007: 30–31; see alsoRazavi, 2012). Similarly, Robinson argues that while social protectionstandards, employment rights, and human rights through internationalorganizations are essential, such standards are based on assumptions ofthe rights-holder as an atomized individual rather than as an individualconstituted through their relations of care of support for and from oth-ers. As such, these rights do not really begin to challenge the thinkingthat places social questions of care as subordinate to economic issuesof productivity, profit, and performance. Better to embed rights in anunderstanding of all people as carrying the need to care, and to be caredfor, by others (Robinson, 2006a, 2006b).

To put this in a different way, recently the philosopher MichaelSandel, in an echo of Polanyi’s ‘fictitious commodities’ mentioned at

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the beginning of this chapter, has argued that markets and care do notmix (Sandel, 2012). Care is one of those areas of social life where theintroduction of markets undermines their intrinsic value. He also positsthat the question of markets is not a question of economics alone buta question of how we want to live and what values we want to live by.It is here, in this question of values and its relation to economics, thatthe ethics of care can be fruitfully employed to develop notions of socialjustice at both local and global levels (see Hankivsky, 2006; Held, 2005;Robinson, 2006a, 2006b; Tronto, 1993; Williams, 2001).

The dominant logic of policy-making in both developed and develop-ing countries focuses on economic competitiveness, on the facilitationof markets, on the ethic of paid work, and now on austerity. Theprinciple of paid work has been central to welfare reforms, provid-ing the financial imperative to get people ‘off welfare and into work’,and the moral imperative to turn people into more responsible andself-sufficient citizens. Where care policies have been developed, theirrationale has often been to get women into work. Economic logicscrowd out the intrinsic value of good quality care provision. Yet careis central to the global economy, its inequalities, and its crises. Demand-ing an understanding of this means raising the social, economic, andpolitical value of care.

In terms of its social value, we need arguments as to why it is nec-essary to invest in care, especially in those such as older and disabledpeople who have no so-called productive potential. That means raisingthe moral dimension of care as a universal practice and an ethic. Care isuniversal in so far as care of both the self and care of others are meaning-ful activities in their own right; they involve us all, men and women, oldand young, able bodied and disabled. Care sustains and repairs society.Care is ethical and political in so far as care is a civic virtue and as suchpart of citizenship. While care relationships can be unequal and oppres-sive, in the right conditions of mutual respect and material support, wecan, in receiving and giving care, learn responsibility, trust, tolerancefor human limitations and frailties, and acceptance of diversity. Theeconomic value of supporting care needs is that it is cumulative: themore people are supported the better they are enabled to provide carefor others, and this promotes social solidarity. This enhances generalwell-being which in turn enhances productivity, mental and physicalhealth, and self-sustainability. In these terms, investment in quality careis a productive investment.

This economic argument requires support for its political value. Theethics of care are about interdependence, mutuality, and human frailty


rather than individualism and self-sufficiency. And it is this, the under-standing of care as a collective social good, which needs to be centralto concepts of global justice. This requires that interdependence beseen as the basis of human interaction. In its turn this presupposesthat human flourishing is the key to our sustainability and that there-fore the conditions for this – care and co-operation – are also central.In these terms, autonomy and independence are about the capac-ity for self-determination rather than the expectation of individualself-sufficiency.

The beginning of this chapter referred to the global care crisis as partof other crises – of finance, of ecology – faced by the world. My argumentwould suggest that any visions for stemming these two crises would alsohave to face a ‘care ethics’ test: that is how far do visions understandthe centrality of care in everyday life? For example, following Stiglitzet al. (2009), the New Economics Foundation has argued for new waysof measuring gross domestic product (GDP) that include measures ofcollective environmental friendliness and well-being. Their proposal fora shorter working week – an average 21-hour week which would dis-tribute employment – would give people time to care, to share caringand domestic work, as well as to break the habit of ‘living to work,working to earn and earning to consume’ (NEF, 2010).

At the heart of global care chains and the global care crisis are twointersecting processes of interdependence: the interdependence whichis part of everyday care giving and care receiving and the global interde-pendencies between richer and poorer countries. On the one axis is thedevaluation and invisibility of care activity and its subservience to thepublic world of work and markets and on the other is the asymmetricdraining of care resources from some regions to save the care costs ofothers. As this happens care becomes once more reprivatized – invisibleand out of mind. The global crisis of care is a crisis with moral, political,economic, and social dimensions. It is vital to make these visible and todevelop for the future a more imaginative vision of how personal andglobal interdependencies might operate.

Notes

1. In many aspects of care work carried out in people’s own homes (called here‘home-based care’), it is difficult to distinguish between domestic work –cleaning, cooking, and so on – and work that involves tending for anotherperson, usually a frail older and/or disabled person or a young child. Thus,when referring to the generality I use the term care/domestic work, and whenreferring to the specifics of work that involves care of another I use the term‘care work’.

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2. Elsewhere, I have called these ‘converging variations’ (Williams, 2012).3. Personal communication, British Au Pairs Agencies Association who arrange

placements for au pairs. They also noted an increase of applications fromcountries most affected by the financial crisis in Europe, particularly Spain.

4. This was a qualitative research study by Anna Gavanas and Fiona Williamsof the experiences of individual and agency employers and migrant workersin home-based child care in UK, Sweden and Spain, with interviews by AnnaGavanas in London, Stockholm and Madrid, carried out between 2003 and2005 (ref MEIF-CT-2003–502369).

5. The limited progress on bilateral agreements with third countries suggests theneed for more strategies. Schumacher and Cissé (2011: 6–8) propose extensionof use of the ECHR to ensure portability as a basic right; access to voluntarycontributions in countries of destinations by migrant workers; reimbursementof social security contributions; community-based strategies in those coun-tries without developed social security programs, such as use of remittancesto develop micro-insurance schemes for families staying behind as well assupport for global initiatives such as the UN Social Protection Floor initiativewhich includes a basic set of social transfers.

6. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities focuses onrespect, autonomy, and independence; on freedom from discrimination; andon inclusion participation and equality.

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Lutz, H. and Palenga-Mollenbeck, E. (2010) ‘Care Work Migration inGermany: Semi-compliance and Complicity’, Social Policy and Society, 9,419–430.

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Mahon, R. (2010) ‘Early Childhood Education and Care Policies aroundthe World: The Impact of International Organisations’ in J. Bennet (ed)The Routledge International Handbook of Early Childhood Education (London:Routledge).

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Michel, S. and Peng, I. (2012) ‘All in the Family? Migrants, Nationhood, andCare Regimes in Asia and North America’, Journal of European Social Policy, 22,406–418.

Molyneux, M. (2006) ‘Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda:Progresa/Oportunidades, Mexico’s Conditional Transfer Programme’, SocialPolicy and Administration, 40, 425–449.

NEF (New Economics Foundation) (2010) 21 Hours. (http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/21-hours, date accessed 31 May 2012).

OECD (2006a) International Migration Outlook 2006 (Paris: OECD).OECD (2006b) Starting Strong: Early Childhood Education and Care (Paris: OECD).OECD (2007) OECD Factbook (Paris: OECD).Österle, A. and Bauer, G. (2011) ‘Home Care in Austria: The Interplay of Fam-

ily Orientation, Cash-for-Care and Migrant Care’, Health, Social Care andCommunity, 20, 265–273.

Oxfam and Kalayaan (2008) The New Bonded Labour? (London: Oxfam andKalayaan).

Parreñas, R.S. (2001) Servants of Globalization (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress).

Pillinger, J. (2011) Quality Healthcare and Workers on the Move, Public ServicesInternational, International Migration and Women Health and Social CareWorkers Programme (Ferney-Voltaire: PSI).

Platzer, E. (2010) ‘Care Work and Migration Politics in Sweden. The Snake inthe Grass of Gender Equality: Au-pairing in Women-friendly Norway’ in L.W.Isaksen (ed) Global Care Work: Gender and Migration in Nordic Societies (Lund:Nordic Academic Press).

Polanyi, K. (1944/57) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Originsof Our Time (Beacon Hill: Beacon Press).

Razavi, S. (2007) The Political and Social Economy of Care in a DevelopmentContext: Conceptual Issues, Research Questions and Policy Options (Geneva:UNRISD).

Razavi, S. (2012) ‘WDR 2012: Too Little, and Already a Bit Out-of-Date?’, GlobalSocial Policy, 12, 193–197.

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6Climate Change, Social Policy,and Global GovernanceIan Gough1

The two great challenges we face are overcoming poverty andmanaging climate change. If we fail on one, we will fail on the other

(Lord Stern, 2009: 4)

We are all in the same boat, but some of us have much nicer cabinsthan others

(Ackerman et al., 2012: xii)

1. Introduction

Those of us who study social policy, and global social policy, mustnow address a new global threat, that of climate change. In May 2013global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, as measured atopHawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, reached 400 parts per million (ppm), upfrom around 280ppm before the Industrial Revolution. According toProf Sir Brian Hoskins, ‘[t]he last time in the Earth’s history when we sawsimilar levels of CO2 in the atmosphere was probably about 4.5 millionyears ago when the world was warmer on average by three or fourdegrees Celsius than it is today’.2 The challenge of climate change is,in the words of the Stern report (2007), ‘big, global, long-term, cumula-tive, and uncertain’. It has been described as posing a ‘truly complex anddiabolical policy problem’, a new all-encompassing social risk. It is notonly global but intergenerational in its impact, threatening the humanwelfare of future peoples, both born and unborn.

This chapter adopts a global perspective – it sets side by side globalsocial policies and global climate change policies, and surveys the gov-ernance of each. In charting the role of major global actors, I adopta list common in the international relations literature: nation-states,

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international governmental organizations (IGOs), the corporate sector,the global environment movement, and expert groups (O’Neill, 2009,Chapter 3).

In the first section I summarize Deacon’s (2007) view of global socialpolicy in recent years, distinguishing (a) the policies and practices pur-sued in the global arena, and (b) the structures of global governance andthe role of significant global actors. The second repeats this at greaterlength for global climate change, surveying both the policies and theglobal governance of climate change. The third then considers the rela-tionship between these two sets of policies/practices and governancestructures, in particular the potential conflicts between the pursuit ofsocial justice and environmental sustainability. I conclude by identi-fying potential synergies and strategies to achieve them. The chapterprovides a conceptual mapping of two domains of global public policy,together with analysis and evaluation.

This is a vast topic – but not encompassing enough. Left outside theremit of this chapter are global economic management and develop-ment policies and their governance. Since these remain the dominantdrivers of the global system, this gap must be borne in mind in what fol-lows. In between these three governance areas – economic managementand development policy, social policy, and climate change policy – twoother areas of global discourse and policy have emerged in the last threedecades: ‘social development’ or ‘human development’, and ‘sustainabledevelopment’. I will need to say something about each of these as well,especially the last which is the most all-embracing idea.

Meadowcroft (2005, 2012) was one of the first to notice certain par-allels between social and environmental policies, contending that overthe last four decades an ‘environmental state’ or ‘eco-state’ was emerg-ing alongside the welfare state in some OECD countries. He argued thatboth social and environmental problems involve market externalities – agap between private and social costs – which require collective action toovercome. In another time and discourse, Polanyi (1944/1957) consid-ered both Labor and Land or Nature to be ‘fictitious commodities’ whichrequired social counter-movements to restrict their commodification.For these reasons scholarship is slowly growing around the developmentand interrelationship of welfare states and environmental states, thoughthe latter have lagged for a generation or more behind the former (seeGough et al., 2008).

Environmental policy and governance cover a wide range of issues,many of which are intra-national: in the case of such problems as leadin petrol or protection of domestic nature reserves, the distance between

110 Climate Change, Social Policy, and Global Governance

the preventive program and the beneficial outcome is relatively closein time and in space, facilitating collective counter-measures. However,others are ‘transboundary’, crossing or spilling over country borders.O’Neill (2009: 34–36) distinguishes 11 major groups here: climatechange, stratospheric ozone pollution, transboundary air pollution,biodiversity loss, deforestation, desertification, persistent organic pol-lutants, hazardous waste trading, rivers and lakes, whaling, and marineecosystems. These all require some form of international agreement toprevent, mitigate, or rectify them.

Of these, climate change is particularly intractable because of itstimescale, cumulative nature, its intersection with numerous otherenvironmental problems, such as biodiversity loss, desertification anddegradation of marine ecosystems, its intersection with other policyareas, such as the economy, and its impact on the global socioeconomicsystem. Several scholars have defined it as a ‘wicked’ or ‘diabolical’ prob-lem that defies resolution because of its enormous interdependencies,uncertainties, and conflicting interests of major actors (Garnaut, 2008;Head, 2008). This chapter narrows its environmental scope to climatechange alone; thus it is tackling the most intractable and egregiouschallenge in global environmental management.

2. Global social policy

Social policy can be defined most loosely as ‘the practices of govern-ments and other agencies that affect the welfare of populations’, butthis leaves the goals of such practices unspecified. The goals of socialpolicy are many and various but can be distilled as meeting basicneeds, protecting against risks, developing human capacities, and pro-moting human well-being in an equitable way. They frequently appealto notions of social justice. Bob Deacon has pioneered the study ofglobal social policy, arguing that ‘since about 1980 we have witnessedthe globalization of social policy and the socialization of global poli-tics. By the last phrase is meant the idea that agendas of the G8 areincreasingly filled with global poverty or health issues’ (Deacon, 2007:3). Studying this field covers two broad areas: first, the emerging patternand governance of critical global actors in the field of social policy; andsecond, the emerging supranational policies and mechanisms of globalredistribution, global social regulation, and global social rights.3

2.1 Global governance of social policy

Deacon’s picture is one of great fragmentation, complexity, andcontestation. There are several fault lines. The first is between the United

Ian Gough 111

Nations family of IGOs and the Bretton Woods family (the InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and now the World Trade Orga-nization (WTO)). Both sets of institutions originated during and afterthe Second World War, but their goals, powers, and governance struc-tures are quite different. The Bretton Woods institutions are concernedwith the governance of the international capitalist economy and havefew formal powers over global social policy. But their impact has beenhuge: the IMF has dictated the terms and conditionalities for loans andcredits across the world. The World Bank has similarly imposed numer-ous conditions on aid and loan flows, and moreover has set itself upas the ‘Think Bank’ for global social policy across the entire range ofsocial issues. Since it is far less constrained, far better financed, and farmore unified than the UN family, it successfully dominated thinkingon global social policy in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to play amajor role.

Second, within the UN family there is a plethora of organizationstasked with aspects of global social policy. The litany of acronymsinclude ECOSOC, UNDESA, UNDP, ILO, WHO, UNESCO, UNICEF, FAO,UNRISD, and many more. This makes for fragmentation, and contrastswith the simplicity and power of the Bank–IMF–WTO triumvirate.

Third are country groupings representing nation-states and their dif-ferent interests in the global governance of economic and social issues.The basic fault line has been between North and South: the G7/G8 andthe G77 (actually now the G-132). The OECD also represents the ‘West’plus some emerging capitalist economies. Within this group there aredivisions on some issues between the global hegemon, the US, and theEU. The rise of the new global powers, notably China, but also includingBrazil, India, the dynamic capitalist economies of East Asia and others,led to the formation of the G-20 major economies and the BASIC group(Brazil, South Africa, India, and China).

Finally, there are all the non-state actors that exert an influence onglobal social policy-making. By far the most important, in my view, aremultinational corporations, including financial institutions, which stilldominate the world economy, but these receive little attention fromDeacon (cf. Farnsworth, 2004). Others include the burgeoning inter-national NGOs (INGOs), religious organizations, big philanthropy, andglobal social movements such as the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancelThird World debt.

It is a hallmark of his case that the governance of global social policycannot be understood without taking account of the interrelation of allthese actors and the networks between them. At the same time, Dea-con has been criticized for privileging state and inter-state institutions


within these networks (Yeates, 2008). This is an accusation which appliesas much to myself in this chapter.

2.2 Global social policies

Deacon usefully distinguishes here three categories of social policy:the ‘3Rs’ of redistribution, regulation, and rights. The picture can besummarized as follows.

Redistribution: Following the heyday of neo-liberalism in the 1980sand 1990s, there have been some positive developments. These includeincreased international development aid combined with some debtcancellation, the human development agenda, and the adoption ofMillennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015 covering a wide rangeof social needs, a recognition of global public goods, and some smallsteps on international taxation. In terms of social results, levels ofhuman development have narrowed between the South and the Northand several MDGs, notably poverty reduction, have been met or areon target to be achieved. These are historical achievements. But againstthis, inequality has increased across all world regions (apart from LatinAmerica, which started from the highest levels) and this has harmedimprovements in human development as measured by the HumanDevelopment Index (HDI) – reducing it by one quarter from what itwould otherwise be, according to the United Nations Development Pro-gram (UNDP) (2011). Moreover, the focus on the poor together with theideology of minimal government has spread minimalist, targeted socialprograms, weakened universal provision, and ignored all the lessons tobe learned from established Northern welfare states (cf. UNRISD, 2010).

Regulation: The picture painted here by Deacon is rather minimal,with the spread of global labor standards (ILO) and health and health-care targets and standards (WHO), not being complemented by globalcorporate, financial, and tax regulation (as of 2007).

Rights: Deacon is rather downbeat about the spread of global socialrights, noting a few advances but recognizing two setbacks: the lack ofeffective enforcement mechanisms, and a Southern backlash against cer-tain labor and other rights, regarded as Western cultural impositions oras subterfuges to maintain trading benefits.4 This second point raisesbig questions about the origins and ethical priority of human rights, adiscourse that Sen, for example, has been keen to broaden. Yet the factremains that the last half-century has witnessed a rapid extension ofsocial rights, in general and for specific groups, such as women, chil-dren, the disabled, and ethnic minorities. Though driven by civil rightsthey have all encompassed social and welfare aspects. Blackburn (2011)

Ian Gough 113

refers to ‘the extraordinary predominance of human-rights discoursein the second half of the 20th century’, one which should be recog-nized as a progressive force, but which needs to be situated within thestructural inequality and injustice generated by the process of capitalistaccumulation.

Deacon summarizes all this as ‘stumbling towards the global 3 Rs’.More solidaristic, social democratic ideas are gaining some ground afterthe decades of strict neo-liberalism. But he notes that this progress mustalways be set in the context of two factors: first, the constraints of thestructure of the global economy and the role of global business, and, sec-ond, the pursuit of domestic interests by powerful nation-states, notablythe US. His book was published in 2007, so to these I would now add athird constraint: the ongoing impact of the 2008 global financial crisiswhich is probably only halfway through its course as I write.

3. Climate change and its global governance

3.1 The challenge of climate change: A brief note

The best current estimates of the global threat are dire and are wellknown (see Metz, 2010, for a clear and comprehensive analysis). Thetarget agreed at the COP 17 (Conference of the Parties) meeting inDurban is that the rise in global temperature since the Industrial Revolu-tion should not exceed 2◦C. Yet current trends in greenhouse gas (GHG)emissions look more consistent with a median temperature increase of3.5–4◦C (Rydge and Bassi, in press). Such temperatures would redrawthe physical geography of the world and generate vast movements ofpopulation with a high risk of conflicts and war (Stern in Kaul et al.,2009: 136). The World Bank (2012) has recently lent its weight to theseforecasts. It agrees that the globe is on a path to heat up by 4◦ atthe end of the century if the global community fails to act on cli-mate change. This would trigger ‘a cascade of cataclysmic changes thatinclude extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks and a sea-levelrise affecting hundreds of millions of people’. Metz (2010) provides aclear, comprehensive, and authoritative account of the challenges ofclimate change.

There is an asymmetry between ‘responsibility’ for this global warm-ing and its predicted damaging ‘impacts’. The gap in current per capitaemissions between nations is wide, still more so if historical emissionsof countries over the last century is taken into account. Standards andmeasures of responsibility are disputed, but most analysts who havestudied the problem from a normative perspective have concluded that


the minimum standard of distributive justice between nations is to aimfor equal emissions per head across the globe (Baer, 2011). As regardsimpacts, the consensus remains that tropical regions of the world,which are predominantly developing countries, will be more negativelyimpacted than temperate regions. On balance these responsibilities andimpacts combine to create a ‘double injustice’, a point regularly madeon a world scale by the BASIC and G77 groups of countries. One illus-tration of the contemporary imbalance: if all 40 million drivers of SUVsin the US switched to fuel-efficient cars, the savings would alone offsetthe emissions generated in providing electricity to 1.6 billion people inthe South (World Bank, 2010: 3).

However, the situation is changing rapidly. China now accounts for29 percent of global CO2 emissions, almost double that of the US, andits emissions per capita have risen remarkably to within the EU range.It is a feature of climate change governance that both emissions perhead and total national emissions, influenced as they must be by popu-lation size, count. Thus the North–South duality in global social policyis fundamentally qualified in the global politics of climate change.A Third World grouping of fast-growing capitalist economies is emerg-ing between North and South; in the absence of any suitable acronymI shall label these countries the ‘East’.

However, an important qualification should be noted here: the exportof industry to the developing world in the recent phase of globalizationhas relocated significant emissions from the North to the East. Thus atone extreme the emissions by UK consumers far exceed emissions fromproduction in the UK national territory – by 23 percent in 2009. At theother extreme China’s consumption-based emissions are only one halfof its production-based emissions. This transfer has been a great help inenabling the UK to reach and exceed its Kyoto targets. There is a growingcase for monitoring national emissions using consumption accounting,but at present the Kyoto basis of territorial emissions is still regularlyused (Gough, 2013a).

3.2 The global governance of climate change

This chapter takes for granted that the present international climateregime has been built on multilateral foundations and that multilateralagreements between states will continue to be the core of what climategovernance there is, notwithstanding widespread agreement that it isin a state of crisis (Falkner et al., 2010). ‘States are still the primarygatekeepers of the global order’ (Christoff and Eckersley, forthcoming).Thus this survey begins with the predominant multilateral institution of

Ian Gough 115

climate change governance, the UN Framework Convention on ClimateChange (UNFCCC).

Rio 1992 and the UNFCCC. The UN Rio Earth Summit in 1992 provideda radical statement of principles intended to guide global environmentaland climate change policy. These included the ‘precautionary princi-ple’ (Principle 15), the ‘polluter pays’ principle (16), and Principle 7on ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ between developed anddeveloping countries (Christoff and Eckersley, forthcoming). These wereprescient articles which have not in practice been adhered to. TheSummit also established the UNFCCC, significantly governed by theUN General Assembly. This remains the key framework for multilateralaction on climate mitigation and adaptation (Falkner et al., 2010). So faralmost every nation has signed up to become a party to the treaty, andthese meet every year in ‘Conferences of the Parties’ (COPs), the majorones shown in Figure 6.1.

Intergovernmental conferences of nearly 200 governments, sur-rounded by a vast noisy collection of business representatives, interestgroups, INGOs, social movements, and community groups cannot pro-vide a mechanism for resolving such momentous disputes. The usualresult is the ‘law of the least ambitious program’: ‘where internationalmanagement can be established only through agreement among all sig-nificant parties involved [ . . . ] collective action will be limited to thosemeasures acceptable to the least enthusiastic party’ (Foryn, 2007). Littlehas been achieved and there is no active promotion of sustainable devel-opment goals, partly due to the opposition of developing countries onsimilar grounds to those noted above regarding global social regulation,but most notably due to the opposition of the global hegemon – theUS (see below).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was establishedin 19885 to provide a clear scientific view of the current state of knowl-edge about climate change. It has so far produced four voluminousAssessment Reports (AR in Figure 6.1), the last in 2007, and the fifthis expected in 2013–14. According to Jacobs (2012), it is a unique,unprecedented, and extraordinary body: It ‘gathered together almostevery climate scientist in the world across a range of disciplines, to pro-duce consensus reports on the nature of the problem, the evidence onwhat was happening now, and what you could do about it now’. ForBiermann (2011), ‘governance by scientific assessment’ is unique to cli-mate governance. This is all the more remarkable given that scientificunderstanding of cause and effects and the possibility of prediction arevery difficult in climate change, due inter alia to the complexity of the

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Ian Gough 117

global climate system, the inherent problems in predicting the effectsof a unique, rapid, one-off shift in the parameters, and the long causalchain linking global warming to human welfare. Of course the IPCC iscontinually challenged by powerful, well-funded ‘climate denial’ inter-ests and parts of the media. But contrary to widespread opinion in theWest, this skeptical current has not made great headway in terms ofpublic opinion across much of the world, with the notable exception ofthe US (Gough, 2013b). The scientific integrity of the IPCC is not (yet)seriously impugned.

The Bretton Woods institutions. Turning to other intergovernmentalactors, the Bretton Woods institutions have played a mainly minimalor negative role until very recently. The World Bank, despite its intro-duction of environmental impact assessments for all projects, continuesto direct the bulk of its lending toward unsustainable development(Clapp and Dauvergne, 2011). Article XX of the WTO permits mem-ber states to use regulations to restrict trade if they are necessary forthe protection of human, animal, or plant life or the conservation ofexhaustible resources. The WTO has worked together with the UnitedNations Environment Program (UNEP) on how far this article can beused to justify protection of national climate change programs in tradenegotiations (UNEP-WTO, 2009). Essentially, though, ‘the parties to theUNFCCC have been at pains to avoid any rule collision by adaptingthe climate change regime to the goals and principles of the tradingregime’ (Christoff and Eckersley, forthcoming). This echoes Bernstein’s(2001) ‘compromise of liberal environmentalism’, whereby environ-mental governance since the 1970s has been progressively predicated onthe promotion and maintenance of a liberal economic order (cf. Newell,2012).

National groupings. These have played an important role – in the caseof the US, a consistently oppositional one. Because it is still the globalsuperpower, this has blocked and qualified numerous global agreements;for example, it was able to persuade other countries to accept the Flex-ible Mechanisms as a condition for its joining Kyoto. It has also playeda role in shifting global policies toward ‘marketized climate governance’(see below; Paterson, 2011). The EU has equally consistently played arelatively progressive role in global climate negotiations, in setting moreambitious domestic emission targets than Kyoto and in putting in placethe EU Emissions Trading System (ETS). The BASIC and G77 groups ofcountries regularly reject any use of climate change arguments to cir-cumscribe their economic development programs. The BASIC group hasthe potential to represent the third category of fast-growing economies


with fast-growing emissions, but at present it is a fragile coalition – theinterests of China, Brazil, and India are very divergent.

Business interests. Business interests are very important and, poten-tially, a positive contributor to the global politics of climate change, in away not paralleled, I would argue, in global social policy. Carboniferousenergy producers and high emission industries, such as aluminum,cement, steel, and so on, are well organized to block climate changetargets, policies, and programs which would undermine their busi-ness opportunities and profitability. They continue to play a blockingrole in the US, Canada, and Australia (Christoff and Eckersley, 2011).Until recently, the Global Climate Coalition, a business organizationdominated by US multinationals allied with oil exporting countrieslike Saudi Arabia, worked to slow down negotiations and block action(Paterson, 2011).

However, these ‘brown capitalist’ interests are now opposed by agrowing force advocating green growth and ‘green capitalism’ (Falkner,2008). There are now powerful business advocates for mitigationand adaptation programs across the world. The motives for greeningbusiness range from pre-empting government regulation and avoid-ing reputational damage, through minimizing risks of climate changeto future business (as in agriculture or insurance), to securing firstmover advantage in developing green industries. Corporate responsesinclude new forms of private cross-border regulation, such as the ForestStewardship Council and Fairtrade Labeling, and extending ‘corporatesocial responsibility’ practices to reducing carbon footprints, as Walmartare doing (Newell and Paterson, 2010, Chapter 3; O’Neill, 2009, Chapter7). Whereas global social policy must in large part question privateinterests and market solutions, the climate change agenda providesunprecedented opportunities for profitable new industries, financialinstruments, and markets.

The evidence thus far suggests that this can be mobilized more eas-ily in coordinated market economies, whether social democratic, as inthe Nordic countries, corporatist, as in Germany and Austria, or morestatist, as in East Asia and France (Gough, 2013b). Indeed this is thedominant paradigm in much of Europe, and especially Germany, wherethe ‘ecological modernization’ thesis emerged. According to the OECD,it is also dominant in Korea and some other emerging economies. Yeteven in the UK the Confederation of British Industries (CBI, 2012) hasissued a call for consistent support for ‘green growth’, arguing that theso-called choice between going green or going for growth is a false one:‘In reality, with the right policies in place, green business will be a majorpillar of our future growth.’

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On the other hand, the involvement of capitalist players has sup-ported a preference for market-friendly and supportive solutions ratherthan public regulation and carbon taxation. The former include cap-and-trade measures such as the EU ETS and the Clean DevelopmentMechanism (CDM). This bias also reflects US hegemony and the dom-inance of neo-liberal thought during the key period in which globalmechanisms were discussed and established (Paterson, 2011). In thelast two decades widespread carbon finance interests have spawnednew companies, bank operations, markets, and associations (Newelland Paterson, 2010). Once established, emissions trading systems cre-ate opportunities for rent-seeking, gaming, and vested interests whichthen lobby heavily for its continuation and for less restrictive imple-mentation. Once these market-friendly policies become ‘locked-in’ itbecomes very expensive to change direction toward carbon taxation andregulation (Gough, 2013b; Hepburn, 2009).

Social movements, INGOs, Green parties. The rise of global environmen-tal governance has been pushed by a flourishing network of INGOs, civilsociety actors, and social movements across the world. These include theinfluence of green social movements and green parties (Dryzek 2003).Over the past four decades there has been an ‘efflorescence of non-state activism’ to fight against the exploitation of the earth (Lipschutzand Mckendry, 2011). In particular, large numbers of people mobilizedacross the world in 2005–9, leading up to the UN Copenhagen confer-ence, motivated by an urgent moral concern to safeguard the planet.The international day of action preceding the Copenhagen conferencein 2009 organized by 350.org has been dubbed ‘the most widespreadday of political action in the planet’s history’. Many of these activistsoppose the commodification of the earth and the financialization ofclimate policies demanded by business interests; yet, it can be arguedthat their activity has at least modified the nature of ‘climate capitalism’(Newell and Paterson, 2010).

3.3 Global climate change policy

This is too big an issue to summarize conveniently here. What follows isbrief and selective, concentrating again on multilateral initiatives, andusing the 3Rs framework.

Regulation. The third Conference of Parties held in Kyoto in 1997adopted the ‘Kyoto Protocol’. This recognizes the responsibility of theNorth for accumulated past emissions via the principle of ‘commonbut differentiated responsibilities’ (IPCC, 2007: 33). It set manda-tory GHG emission targets for developed countries during the firstcommitment period (2008–12) and provided a framework for further


climate negotiations. The Protocol entered into force in 2005, followingRussian ratification, but was rejected by the US. This remains the onlystill binding international target for the reduction of emissions, but itsdirect impact on emissions has been small.

The process since then has been halting, divisive, and relativelyunproductive. Some progress has been made elsewhere. For examplethe REDD program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and For-est Degradation) has been designed to create a financial value forthe carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for developing coun-tries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbonpaths to sustainable development. The CDM was another innova-tion, but it has been bedeviled by so many problems that at bestonly one-third of the projects funded have actually achieved anytransfer of clean technology (World Bank, 2010). COP17 in Durbanagreed to the ‘Durban Platform for Enhanced Action’ which extendedthe Kyoto Protocol up to 2017 and agreed to ‘launch a processto develop a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed out-come with legal force’ by 2015, which would enter into force by2020. This agreement is ‘applicable to all parties’, which is widelyunderstood to mean that developing as well as developed coun-tries should take on binding commitments in the future (Jacobs,2012). However, countries could still disagree on the extent to whichthe binding agreements need to be similar across countries what-ever their level of development – the US is likely to lobby hardfor this.

Rights. There has been no international recognition of the rights of‘climate losers’ to be compensated by those who have thus far gainedfrom the exploitation of carboniferous energy, despite campaigningfrom the Southern governments and rights-based organizations in theNorth (Ikeme, 2003; Paterson, 2011). There is also a case for a radi-cal rights-based approach to thinking about the future wherein futuregenerations have a fundamental and inalienable right to the non-substitutable services of nature and the current generation has a duty ofintergenerational stewardship. The International Court of Justice (ICJ)has thus far played an insignificant role, and has been hampered bydivided opinion over whether there should be a separate InternationalCourt for the Environment.

Redistribution. There has been little progress in bringing about theenormous transfers from North to South required to enable developingcountries to adapt to climate change and develop low-emission practiceswhile maintaining economic and human development. Negotiations

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have effectively stalled on funding for the Green Climate Fund anddisagreements continue over the share of public and private funding andwhether public funds will be ‘additional’ to existing aid commitments(Bassi et al., 2012). There is an urgent need to move the equity agendaforward, but this encroaches on the most sensitive areas of nation-states’interests, especially in the North: their respective contributions to bothemission reduction and to financing climate adaptation in the South.6

3.4 Comparing global social and climate policy

Table 6.1 summarizes the key governance institutions in the two policydomains. There are of course profound differences: three deserve men-tion. First, climate change is the classic global phenomenon and suchgovernance as it has is inherently global, whereas social policies emergedand flourished in national contexts in the North and this pattern is

Table 6.1 Summary of key governance institutions in the two domains

Institution Global social policy Global climate policy

UN –multilateral

Plethora and fragmentation:ECOSOC, UNDESA, ILO,WHO, UNESCO, UNICEF,FAO, UNDP, UNRISD, andso on

UNEP, UNFCCC(post-Rio92) -> COPs,important but weak: ‘Leastenthusiastic party’ game

BrettonWoodsgroup

World Bank a dominantplayer

Lower key role, butUNFCCC adapts toWTO trading regime

Countrygroupings

G7 vs. G77 key division, butG20. Within North: US vs.some EU countries

G7 vs. G77 with BASICgroup emerging to representthe ‘East’. US a key blocker,US vs. EU

Interests:business

Blocking role of vestedinterests; CSR weak

GCC (US, Saudi Arabia) vs.EU. ‘Brown business’ vs.‘green business’. Pressure todevelop ‘market-friendly’solutions

Othernon-stateactors

INGOs, global campaigns(for example, Jubilee, 2000),provision by religiousgroups, new philanthropy,NGOs

INGOs, global campaigns,green parties

Scientificbodies

– IPCC unique and important


repeating in the East and South. Global governance of social policyhas emerged as part of the international development and transnationalrights pressures, but this can block as well as complement national ini-tiatives. A second difference is the role of scientific assessment: there isno parallel in global social policy to the unique role played by the IPCCin providing a consensual knowledge platform for policy-makers. Third,the role of business and financial interests differs: in social policy thesehave been traditionally negative or indifferent; in the governance of cli-mate change they play a major role. However, the direction of impactdepends on the division between ‘green’ and ‘brown’ interests and thenational and international clout they can muster.

Comparing policies and outcomes is difficult. From one perspectiveglobal climate initiatives have been a success story: an internationalframework negotiated in 1992 and a protocol in 1997 – well beforewidespread concern about climate change took off (Jacobs, 2012). Yetin terms of outcomes, there has been further and accelerating deteriora-tion: ‘The message is strong and clear [ . . . ] since the start of climatechange negotiations in 1992 global emissions have more than dou-bled’ (Bassi et al., 2012). Neither the aggregate threat of climate changenor the distributive allocation of responsibilities has been effectivelyaddressed thus far. In global social policy there has been some progressin global agreements on social rights and regulation and some progressnotably in poverty reduction and human development goals, but littlemovement thus far toward a framework for global social security andsocial public goods. In neither domain is there anything approachingan international welfare or environmental state.

4. Combining social justice and sustainability: Globalgovernance issues

What are the prospects for combining these two policy domains? Canrapid reduction of GHG emissions be combined with green growth? Cangreen growth be combined with global poverty alleviation, human andsocial development, and a more equitable and just world? In a word,can we shift toward sustainable social development or a global ‘greensociety’, rather than a green economy (Cook et al., 2012)? Where dopresent global actors stand on these issues and what are the prospectsfor future change?

These are big questions. The key concept straddling the two areas isthat of ‘sustainable development’, famously defined by the BrundtlandReport as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without

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compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’(WCED, 1987: 43). This entails two key concepts – needs and limits –the first of which situates social policy and human development at itsheart, and it provides an optimistic vision of a common goal for allhumanity, North and South (Baker, 2006). Realizing this in practice,though, has proved extremely difficult. The Rio Declaration did try tobalance a concern for strictly environmental principles with socioeco-nomic concerns and generated some radical principles, but it was atenuous bridge. For Vogler (2007), sustainable development was a polit-ical construct designed to facilitate a bargain across the deep structuraldivide of the North and the South. At Rio, the North did not want torecognize the role of high incomes and consumption in climate changewhile the South wanted to avoid the role of population, so what wasleft was technology, the role of human ingenuity in extracting more andmore growth with fewer and fewer emissions.7 Similarly, there were deepdivisions over who would contribute the aid to pay for the Rio decisions.

The compromise at the heart of sustainable development has led tothe stagnation we observe in global policy and governance. The sameapplies to the later, and weaker, bridging concept of green growth, advo-cated at the Rio+20, which again revealed deep divisions between North,East, and South, and within each region, over its global social implica-tions. It has acted as a ‘floating signifier’, amenable to forming a broadconsensus but hiding very different interpretations (Cook et al., 2012;Jessop, 2012). Yet one purpose of this chapter is to return to these issuesto consider what social policy can contribute to clarifying and resolvingthis compromise.

There are several potential conflicts between a green economy anda fair or just society (Cook et al., 2012). In the North, all measures toincrease the price of carbon – an absolutely essential component of effec-tive carbon mitigation – will tend to be regressive in the first instance,bearing more harshly on lower-income households and localities. Oneexplanation is that energy for heating and cooking absorbs a larger shareof consumer expenditure among the poor (Büchs et al., 2011; Dresneret al., 2013; Gough, 2013a). In the South, the REDD program, somehave argued, can undermine the indigenous use of forests and harmlocal livelihoods. On a global level, converting land to biofuel produc-tion has driven up the prices of essential foodstuffs and thus cut the realincomes of poorer peoples.

Dercon (2012) notes that the rural poor depend more on directlyutilizing environmental capital; thus policies to internalize their costs,while beneficial in the long run, will lower their returns. Nor is it the


case that green sectors are necessarily labor intensive, benefitting wagelaborers. He concludes that unalloyed green growth may result in thepoor being asked to pay the price for sustaining growth while greeningthe planet: it might engender ‘green poverty’. Put starkly, might thedouble injustice which characterizes global environmental relations beconverted into a triple injustice, whereby the poor emit less, suffer more,and bear the brunt of climate mitigation policies.

These problems demonstrate that building a global green economyneeds to be coupled with building an effective global social policy ifharmful and inegalitarian social outcomes are to be avoided. Thereare of course strong ethical arguments for combining environmentalsustainability with social justice, but there is not the space here todevelop those (Baer, 2011; Caney, 2009; Eckersley, 2004). Combiningclimate mitigation and social welfare is an ethical priority, as well as alikely political precondition if a fast switch to a green economy is to beachieved. But how can this be done?

I have suggested that there are three stages of integrating social policywith climate change policy: compensation, co-benefits, and integratedeco-social policies (Gough, 2013a; Gough and Meadowcroft, 2011).A recent paper published by UNRISD has taken this further and appliedit to countries in the South (Cook et al., 2012). This three-stage model isoutlined below and in each case recent IGO reports on climate changeare summarized to identify the roles they envisage for ‘social policy’.

4.1 Social policy as compensation

The first level is to use social policy in a classical way to ‘compen-sate losers’. Any realistic carbon mitigation program must entail raisingthe price of carbon, whether through carbon taxes or a variety of cap-and-trade schemes. Yet all general taxes on consumption tend to beregressive, as noted above: in any pricing-based ‘efficient’ green growthstrategies the poor will suffer as consumers unless compensated (Dercon,2012). However, compensation is difficult to do as attempts in the UKto tackle ‘fuel poverty’ testify. Winter Fuel Payments are paid to pen-sioner households and the Warm Home Discount reduces the energytariffs faced by pensioners, but both programs are remarkably poorlytargeted (Hills, 2012). One reason is the sheer heterogeneity of fuel-poorhouseholds (Gough, 2013a).

Compensation remains the dominant social proposal in IGO dis-course. In Towards Green Growth, the OECD emphasizes market-basedincentives and the leveraging of private finance. It pays little atten-tion to the social dimension, noting simply that negatively affected

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households ‘need to be offset through well-targeted programs [ . . . ]across the entire tax and transfer system’ (OECD, 2011: 85). This is amarket liberal view of both climate mitigation and social policy, the lat-ter being mainly compensatory. The IMF (2013) has persistently arguedthat fossil energy subsidies across the world are wasteful, distorting,unsustainable, and unfair, and should be phased out to be replaced by‘targeted measures to protect the poor’. Yet such proposals have fre-quently met with mass opposition and street demonstrations. Despiteofficial protestations, citizens doubt that the compensatory benefits willever be realized. And in place of ‘universal’ subsidies the alternativesoften entail targeted programs likely to result in gaps, traps, corruption,and stigma.

The World Development Report 2010 on Development and ClimateChange favors much more finance to drive mitigation efforts in theSouth, though it recognizes that ‘a drive to integrate climate and devel-opment could shift responsibility for mitigation onto the developingworld’ (p. 21). To protect the poor it recognizes that policies must gobeyond risk reduction and co-insurance (‘governments will increasinglyneed to act as insurers of last resort’) to include social investment, socialprotection programs, and social safety nets. It engages more seriouslywith the social dimension but in practice settles for a compensationstrategy.

4.2 Social policy as co-benefits

The second strategy is to identify and foster co-benefits – ‘win-win’ poli-cies which simultaneously meet social and environmental goals. In theUK and the North these would include retrofitting the housing stockwith more energy-efficient heating systems and much improved heatinsulation, which would also reduce bills, increase comfort, and expandgreen employment (Gough, 2013 a, b). Calls for a ‘Green New Deal’extend this approach to include sustained public programs to investin renewable energy and deploy radical conservation measures (Barbier,2010; Nef, 2008; UNEP, 2011). Other examples of co-benefits would be toreduce car use and discourage excessive meat eating, both of which canharm health and certainly boost emissions (Gough and Meadowcroft,2011).

The co-benefit approach has much in common with a multi-sectoralpreventive strategy, which prioritizes ‘upstream’ programs to preventharm before it occurs, usually focusing on whole populations andsystems, rather than the dominant ‘downstream’ programs to copewith the consequences of harm (Coote, 2012). This is an increasingly


popular refrain in social policy discourse in Northern welfare states, fac-ing fiscal pressures in post-crisis economies, but it usually focuses onaltering individual and family behaviors rather than more integratedupstream strategies. Cross-national evidence shows that coordinatedmarket economies do better here than liberal market economies andare thus better placed to secure social and environmental co-benefits,as illustrated by the German integrated house retrofitting and micro-generation programs (Gough, 2013 a, b).

Cook et al. (2012), drawing on research at UNRISD, give several exam-ples of similar co-benefit programs in the South. Switching to renewableenergy for cooking stoves can bring significant reductions in air pol-lution and improvements in human health. Other programs includelinking the Indian national workfare program National Rural Employ-ment Guarantee Act (NREGA) to develop environmental rehabilitationand green jobs. Another is the Brazilian Bolsa Verde program whichprovides, within the cash transfer system, incentives for sustainablemanagement and conservation of ecosystems. Some incipient examplesof this strategy in IGO thinking are given below, but it remains marginalat present.

The UNEP Report Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to SustainableDevelopment and Poverty Eradication (2011) goes some way toward thissecond strategy. It is upbeat that a green economy can reduce povertyacross a range of important sectors, notably by creating green jobs andreducing unemployment. It estimates that fairness and sustainabilitycan be achieved by meeting the MDG targets and the InternationalEnergy Agency’s (IEA) ‘Blue Map’ emissions reduction scenario (a ratherconservative one) at a cost of $1.1–1.6 trillion annually at the outset,or about 2 percent of global product a year for the next four decades.UNEP claims this could be done through boosting private transfers, butit would also need public financing, which could come from removingpro-carbon subsidies and scaling up the CDM and REDD+ programs andthe Global Environmental Facility.

The UNDP in its 2011 Human Development Report, Sustainability andEquity: A Better Future for All, also envisages a closer configuration ofenvironmental sustainability and social justice. It confirms that coun-try carbon emissions are strongly correlated with per capita income, butfinds that this link is weaker – though still positive – with the HDI,and ‘non-existent’ for health and education. This provides support forthe idea that many synergies are possible between sustainability andhuman development, if not with GDP growth per se. It also finds thatinequality causes large aggregate losses in HDI, demonstrating further

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synergies with equity. The report focuses on identifying and buildingup areas where there are positive synergies between the two, such asproviding universal access to energy, water, and sanitation across theSouth. The most advanced example of the co-benefit approach is per-haps the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative, which has the threegoals of providing universal access to modern energy, doubling the shareof renewable energy globally, and doubling the rate of improvement inenergy efficiency – all by 2030. However, it is doubtful if this co-benefitprogram can achieve both its human development and climate changegoals simultaneously (Bhattacharyya, 2012).

4.3 Toward eco-social policy

The above solutions all assume that green growth can work – thateconomic growth can continue while the world rapidly decarbonizes.One implication of this assumption is that a growing quantum ofresources will be available to fund social programs to ‘mitigate the mit-igation’ of climate change. However, the arguments of Jackson (2009)and others remain compelling – that it is not technically or arith-metically possible to reduce GHG emissions quickly to safe levels in aworld of full-scale capitalist expansion coupled with population growthto at least nine billion by 2050. His scenario would require a radicalrethink of social policy to match the radical environmental challenges.Social policy would need to combine with environmentalism to forgea unified eco-social policy that can achieve ecologically beneficial andsocially just impacts: by promoting new patterns of production, con-sumption, and investment, changing producer and consumer behaviorwhile improving well-being, and ensuring a fairer distribution of powerand resources.

In the North, this means taking seriously our responsibility for thehistoric development of carboniferous capitalism, accumulated GHGs,and the major part of global warming thus far. Models of a ‘steadystate economy’ would need to be explored (Daly, 2008; Victor, 2008).This would very likely entail some move away from the consumptionof commodities toward de-commodified production – reducing workinghours and commodity purchases, developing ‘co-production’ (compris-ing civic and household economies), and fostering preventive socialbehavior (Coote, 2012; Gough and Meadowcroft, 2011).

Within this scenario potential eco-social policies in the North couldinclude the following – though there is not the space here to explainor justify them (see Gough, 2013a). First, some form of personal car-bon rationing plus trading would award all citizens a tradable carbon


allowance to be used when purchasing energy, petrol, flights, and otherhigh-carbon products and services. By effectively giving important com-modities a parallel carbon price as well as a money price, and byallocating carbon allowances on an exactly equal citizenship basis, thiswould bring about relatively equitable reductions in consumption andemissions. Second, preventive eco-social programs could further reg-ulate consumption that is both harmful and carbon-intensive. Third,more basic needs items could be provided publicly on a citizenshipbasis.8 Fourth, an active time policy to progressively reduce hours ofpaid work could reduce consumption and emissions. In the context ofthe grossly unequal trends in income and wealth over the past threedecades, such a time policy would also require redistribution of wealthand income, returning us to one of the ostensible, if not always realized,goals of social policy (Gough, 2013a).9

The UNRISD report characterizes this as a ‘transformative socialpolicy’ to promote new patterns of production, consumption, andinvestment, change producer and consumer behavior while improvingwell-being, and ensure a fairer distribution of power and resources (Cooket al., 2012: 11). This would require extending the current dominantconception of social policy. In recent decades social policy in both theSouth and North has seen a shift from social protection to embracesocial investment in such services as health and education. A trulysustainable social policy that complements a sustainable economy mustextend further to embrace a wide range of ‘social reproduction’ and‘eco-maintenance’ functions. The UNRISD report gives examples fordeveloping countries of eco-social policies that can achieve ecologi-cally beneficial and socially just impacts, in housing, transport, energy,and agricultural production. At present this is all a long way from themainstream of global governance.

5. Some concluding reflections

Public policies to address social risks and climate change risks have dif-ferent historical origins, system functions, political drivers, and socialimplications. Yet there are commonalities between welfare states andemerging ‘environmental states’, notably which address both negativemarket externalities and the costs of commodifying fictitious commodi-ties. Just as social policies emerged to counter the human and social costsof capitalist industrialization, so have environmental policies emergedlately to counter the destruction of the environment. At this level, bothinvolve new functions and competencies for national states.

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However, in the case of planetary challenges such as climate change,the risks are inherently global and require global, and thus importantlyinter-national, responses. Here the parallels with national social policiesare less convincing. Yet there are now global social agendas, as we haveseen, such as the MDGs and the ILO Social Protection Floor initiative.The purpose of this chapter has been to consider their relationship tothe suite of international climate change policies.

The goals of social policy are many and various but can be distilledas meeting basic needs, protecting against risks, developing humancapacities, and promoting human well-being in an equitable way. Theyfrequently appeal to notions of social justice. The goals of climatechange policy, and similar planetary-level interventions, are to securethe planetary basis for human life and well-being in the face of gath-ering threats. Can these two sets of goals be simultaneously achieved?What are the conflicts and what are the opportunities for synergies?

Since the Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987) such a synergeticapproach has been represented by discourses of ‘sustainable develop-ment’ and more recently the ‘green economy’. These concepts areinherently contested, however. Perhaps two major levels can be distin-guished: those maintaining that a safe and equitable planet for humanwell-being can be attained within a global economy of green growth,and those who maintain that, beginning with the rich North, we mustprogressively shift toward a steady state or zero-growth socioeconomicsystem.

The first is the only realistic prospect today. Thus this chapter takesfor granted the structures of the global economy and the internationalstate order and asks what has been achieved in terms of global social andclimate change policy, what is being advocated, and what in the systemof global governance explains these. It goes on to consider how rapidand radical carbon and GHG mitigation programs could be combinedwith equitable programs of social and human development, and the roleof global social policies in achieving these. Three combinatorial strate-gies are discussed – compensation, co-benefits, and integrated eco-socialprograms. In the perspective of urgent GHG reductions, the best likelyoutcome at present is effective compensation for the distributional con-sequences of climate mitigation and the fast implementation of a rangeof co-benefit strategies.

The jury is still out on whether a global green growth strategy couldachieve the necessary absolute reductions in GHGs within the minutetimescale now available. Following the precautionary principle, though,we should be prepared for the eventuality that green growth will not


secure the essential planetary boundaries, in which case a more radicaleco-social strategy will become essential. This would entail a profoundtransformation of national and global social policies, as well as eco-nomic and environmental policies. This of course does not mean that itwill happen, but it will be the only way to secure even minimal levels ofhuman well-being in that eventuality.

Notes

1. This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grantnumber 000–22–3683). Thanks also to the Grantham Research Institute at theLSE for further research support, and to Alex Stark for valuable research assis-tance. I am grateful to Alex Bowen, Anna Coote, Robert Falkner, AlexandraKaasch, James Meadowcroft, Paul Stubbs, and two anonymous reviewers forhelpful comments on an earlier draft.

2. http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_10-5-2013-16-39-30

3. I omit here his third aspect of global social policy – the impact of global actorson domestic social policies.

4. One promising new development in social rights is the 2012 ILO recommen-dation to establish National Social Protection Floors, which would establishnationally defined sets of basic social security guarantees to secure income andhealth protection aimed at preventing or alleviating poverty, vulnerability,and social exclusion (Deacon, 2013).

5. By WMO (World Meteorological Organization) and UNEP (the UN Envi-ronment Program) which was established earlier in 1972 to coordinateUnited Nations environmental activities and assist developing countries inimplementing environmentally sound policies and practices.

6. See Climate Action Network: http://gdrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/CAN-ERF-discussion-paper.pdf

7. These are the three factors in the classic Ehrlich-Holdren identity I=PAT, wherethe environmental impact of any given factor such as climate change (I) isthe product of Population (P), average Affluence (A), and a Technologicaltransformation factor (T).

8. Our research shows that use of UK social services result in a much more‘equitable’ distribution of GHG emissions than the purchase of privatecommodities (Gough, 2011: 22).

9. Given rapidly rising incomes and inequality in the South similar or alternativepolicies to restrain luxury consumption among the rich would also be neces-sary in the global South. Chakravarty et al. (2009) estimate that by 2030 onehalf of all ‘global high emitters’ – half a billion people – will be living outsidethe OECD.

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7Poverty and Climate Change: TheThree Tasks of TransformativeGlobal Social PolicyAsunción Lera St. Clair and Victoria Lawson

1. Introduction

We live in times of overlapping and complex crises: socioeconomic,political, financial, and also environmental. Perhaps the most challeng-ing of these problems are the risks posed by climate change to bothbiophysical and social systems in situations where structural conditionsof poverty and inequality prevail. Unless we address the causes of cli-mate change and protect vulnerable populations we are heading towardchanges in biophysical systems that would create a planet Earth wehave never seen and, perhaps, social collapse. The IntergovernmentalPanel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report already estab-lished the links between climate impacts on natural resources of centralimportance for poor people, such as water and food security (IPCC,2007). Climate change is likely to lead to both substantive water scarcityand water-related damage. Higher temperatures along with higher con-centrations of CO2 in the atmosphere also affect the onset of seasons,change disease vectors, increase ocean acidification, and lead to destruc-tion of coral reefs and salinization of coastal areas. Increases in wildfires,changed insect life cycles, changes in the onset and end of seasons, andchanges in ecosystems leading to less biodiversity are all expected resultsof small overall increases in temperature of about 1.5 to 2.5 degrees(IPCC, 2007). There is also an increasing amount of evidence showingstrong correlations between higher temperatures and changes in dis-ease vectors such as malaria, dengue fever, and cardiovascular problemsrelated to heat. In short, climate change affects biological processes thatrule ecosystems around the world.

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Asunción Lera St. Clair and Victoria Lawson 135

Climate change further affects the fundamental requirements forhealth, clean air, safe drinking water, sufficient food, and secure shelter(WHO, 2010). The lack of action to mitigate CO2 emissions is lead-ing more and more scholars to identify the likelihood of passing the2-degree threshold and the possibilities that we need to adapt to high-end temperatures (Joshi et al., 2011; New et al., 2011; Stafford Smithet al., 2011; World Bank, 2012). The IPCC Special Report on ExtremeWeather Events released in 2012 shows evidence of increased heat wavesand extreme events such as storms or droughts. The report argues thatthe capacity to respond to such extreme events is determined not onlyby the magnitude of the natural event but also, and often perhaps moreimportantly, by the social and human conditions of the regions affected(IPCC, 2012). Millions of poor and marginalized people live in poorhousing conditions and are vulnerable to small weather events. Thereport documents that around 90 percent of all natural disaster-relateddeaths occurred in developing countries (IPCC, 2012). These impactsmerge with existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities, existing inequalitiesin access to resources and services, coupled with a lack of political powerfor marginalized groups. These conditions pose limits to adaptation, andshall force us to think creatively about protection and responsibilities.

Social injustice in times of climate change emerges as the most daunt-ing challenge of the 21st century; what Ian Gough calls the tripleinjustice of the combination of social and climatic injustice (Gough,this volume). Climate is a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973).Wicked because impacts are due to complex social processes and prac-tices that although they lead to increased CO2 emissions, they aredifficult to characterize as harmful or to challenge because they havebecome our way of living. The problems created by climate change areof a transboundary nature, and although the result of actions in thepresent, a changing climate has consequences in the future. As impactsmultiply in intensity and in frequency, with multiple extreme eventshitting all countries and threatening basic natural resources such as foodand water, we will need extensive social protection mechanisms locallyas well as globally. Impacts are uneven, and some areas may have morecapacity to produce food while others will face chronic food insecurity.At the same time, existing social protection systems will be under enor-mous stress. We argue this is the time for transformative thinking andfor transformative global social policy-making that is in conversationwith Bob Deacon’s ground-breaking work.

This chapter addresses the dual potential of transformative globalsocial policy. First, its potential to protect those most vulnerable from

136 Poverty and Climate Change

existing socio-ecological vulnerabilities and climate change impacts.Second, its potential to prevent the dismantling of existing protectionsystems and to prevent social collapse. The chapter starts with a sum-mary of the central ideas presented in Bob Deacon’s work on globalsocial policy (GSP) and his latest work advocating for an extended ver-sion of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Social ProtectionFloor as a means to realize the goals of GSP. We focus our attention onthe three central principles of GSP: the principle of global redistribution,the articulation of a global social regulatory regime, and the recognitionof global social rights.

The second section of the chapter sets the principles of GSP within thecontext of contemporary visions of climate change as a human secu-rity challenge. In order to set the stage for a productive conversationbetween GSP and human security views on climate, we begin by disman-tling the negative synergies created by the dominant poverty knowledge(hereafter DPK), as well as the dominant view of climate as a ‘mere’ envi-ronmental problem. These two framings distract our attention from thecrucial work ahead that will allow the global community to implementthe right to social protection and redistribution and attend simultane-ously to poverty and climate impacts. This part of the chapter also drawsfrom Deacon’s contributions to critical poverty studies, in particular, hisemphasis on the importance of a focus on the middle classes in order togenerate feasible and credible poverty policies. After a section highlight-ing a rich tradition on critical development thinking, of which globalsocial policy was part, the rest of the chapter argues for an enrichmentof Deacon’s tradition of global social policy to include concerns foraddressing social protection within the context of not only socioeco-nomic and political stressors but also those imposed by climate changeand global environmental change.1

2. The three principles of global social policy

One of the major contributions of Bob Deacon and his colleagues’ workis making explicit the link between achieving welfare and social justiceat local and national levels and the role of structural conditions imposedby global relations, globalization processes, and both the dangers andopportunities created by global-level institutions and interventions. In aglobalized world, governance institutions need to fill in the gap thatnational states cannot. An additional important dimension of globalsocial policy is its emphasis on rejecting the usual dichotomies createdby global development institutions about what is and is not feasible in


countries with poor economies, so-called failed states and poor institu-tional mechanisms to protect their own citizens. GSP fills the gap byarguing for the transformation of global institutional mechanisms asa means for redistributing wealth and resources as well as protectionacross states. It is thus a way to universalize the normative dimensionsthat underpin conceptions of national welfare because it insists that allhuman beings need a system for meeting and protecting basic humanneeds. And once institutional mechanisms are in place, it pushes foruniversal basic rights for all people.

The three main principles of global social policy, as re-articulated byDeacon and Stubbs (2013), are redistribution, regulation, and rights.Redistribution is one of the central tasks of all social policy; here itis meant to apply to the transnational arena. Regulation is achievedwith better-functioning global institutions which regulate not only theredistribution of wealth and resources but also regulate the criteria thatallocate those redistributions. And the third principle is rights, becauseglobal social policy is per se an intrinsic recognition that all humanbeings are equal and thus they require equal protection regardless of theparticular national state in which they live.

In his latest work, Deacon engages with the effort driven by theInternational Labor Organization (ILO) and other progressive globalinstitutions for the creation of a United Nations Social Protection Floor(SPF) (Deacon, 2012, 2013). This was initiated as a concrete policyproposal to realize the principles of global social policy. According toDeacon’s analysis of building the global coalition that makes this ini-tiative possible, he clearly identifies the barriers in the way, such asa stronger commitment for a global governance mechanism to imple-ment the SPF. But on the other hand, the success of the concept and itsmaterialization as an initiative sanctioned by the G-20 is a substantivereason for hope that mechanisms to implement the principles of globalsocial policy are indeed possible. In recent debates about its likely powerto address the central issue of the right to food, Oliver de Shutter, theUN Rapporteur on the right to food, argues along the lines of Deacon,claiming that eventually, once the SPF is implemented nationally bygovernments, it can then be tested regionally and eventually multilater-ally. We need this hope, and these transformative conceptions of socialprotection emerging from GSP, precisely because of the challenges posedby climate change.

We live in times of a changing climate, which we know will impactall people and all places. However, we do not know exactly whenimpacts will occur nor how severe they will be. In this uncertain context,


these three principles emerge as crucial gaps in global governance.First, because climate impacts are the most dramatic in populationsand regions which already are vulnerable and lack national systems ofbasic social protection. Here, climate change is likely to bring increasedpoverty, new vulnerabilities, maladaptation, conflict, and social col-lapse (Barnett and O’Neill, 2011; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2012; IPCC, 2007,2012). Second, because responding to impacts and making the necessarytransformations to avoid further emissions is going to produce winnersand losers, the costs and burdens of these impacts will be unfairly dis-tributed unless they are somehow redistributed and regulated throughthe guidance of protecting basic human rights (Marino and Ribot, 2012;O’Brien et al., 2010; St. Clair, 2010). At the same time, and as clearlydeveloped in this volume by Ian Gough, climate impacts and the costsof mitigation are going to lead to a competition for resources at allnational levels, as welfare states compete with the demands of usingpublic resources for mitigation and adaptation costs. The social andenvironmental tasks of states will need to find an appropriate balance,but nevertheless we are likely to see increased competition between thewelfare and the environmental duties of states.

The three principles espoused by Deacon and GSP scholars havealready entered the critical literature on climate change that reframesthe problem as a question of human security, even if there is not yetexplicit recognition of Deacon’s contributions (O’Brien et al., 2010).Human security is an integral concept, as a state that is achieved whenand where individuals and communities have the options necessary toend, mitigate, or adapt to threats to their human, environmental, andsocial rights; have the capacity and freedom to exercise these options;and actively participate in pursuing these options (Sygna et al., 2013).The emphasis is on agency, and on people’s and communities’ exist-ing capacities to respond to any threats – whether social, human, orenvironmental – presuming that there is no fundamental differencebetween threats and harms caused by entitlement failures or pervasiveconditions of poverty, and threats and harms caused by environmen-tal changes, including climate change. This focus on freedom to act andrecognition of people’s own capacities to respond to structural and envi-ronmental conditions implies that poverty and environmental changeare more than linked; they are both part of a single frame that includesboth symptoms and results of unjust and unsustainable developmentpathways.

There is no doubt we need to enrich the tradition of global socialpolicy research to link it with ongoing impacts, vulnerability, and


adaptation literature and with the tradition of the human dimensions ofclimate change research and the framing of climate as a human securitychallenge. For this conversation between Deacon and other scholars tobe advanced, we argue that it is first vital to unsettle the dominant con-ceptions of what is poverty, who the poor are, and what are the mostimportant ways to assure social protection and equity within societiesand across societies in a changing climate. What we call here ‘domi-nant poverty knowledge’ (DPK) is a widespread discourse that sees thereduction of poverty as contingent upon unending growth and con-sumption that ignores the insights of global social policy as well asthose of environmental sustainability. At the same time, climate changecalls for turning DPK upside down if we are to prevent catastrophic cli-mate change. The three transformative principles of GSP are a centralagenda for climate change as a question of human security address-ing both socioeconomic and environmental vulnerabilities. But first wemust unsettle the DPK.

3. The traps of dominant poverty and climate knowledge

The dominant approach to poverty studies is ill-prepared to contributeinsights on the human dimensions of environmental change as much asit is contrary to the principles of GSP. DPK presumes that the reductionof poverty is dependent upon continuing a vision of development thatis based on increased production and consumption, unending economicgrowth, externalization of environmental impacts, and the underlyingview that ‘more is better’. This is, not surprisingly, one of the centralarguments used by energy companies to promote the need for moreoil- and carbon-based energy sources. The outcomes of this approachare both destructive to nature and the source of massive inequalities;empirical evidence shows that increases in material wealth (includingthe wealth produced by the exploitation of oil) have ended up in thehands of a few, leaving a large number of people powerless and unableto exercise their rights, and without access to basic needs (includingaccess to energy). Exceptions such as Norway’s use of oil revenues tocreate a trust fund for future generations are unlikely to be replicatedelsewhere. Emerging initiatives to leave the oil in the soil are just excep-tionally rare and punctual cases, tied to concrete political leaders, andwith scant likelihood of being replicated even if a strong movementis building up around it.2 DPK begins from the assumption that thereduction of poverty is contingent upon unending growth and con-sumption. DPK embodies the following fundamental characteristics: it is


economistic and based on neo-liberal premises; it emphasizes economicover ethical concerns; and it disassociates the majority and minorityworlds, depicting poverty as outside social and geographical relations,in fact obscuring the forces that produce poverty in the first place,also in advanced economies (Hickey, 2009; Lawson, 2011; Mosse, 2010;O’Connor, 2011). DPK treats social protection in a residual way, oftenthrough market mechanisms, and gives priority to means-testing poli-cies that create further differences across social sectors in all societies.Such dominant ideas on social protection give little attention to theagency and autonomy of all human beings (the poor included), on thecentral role for redistribution, and on the vital importance of socialcohesion.

First, DPK is economistic, arguing for the primacy of economic causesof poverty and for narrow quantitative and aggregative definitionsof poverty, primarily in terms of income. Indeed, econometrics hasbecome ‘the science’ of poverty and has been influential in discountingalternatives. DPK is also methodologically individualistic and reduc-tionist, constructing ‘poor people’ as a category that stands outside ofsocial relations. This view ignores the egalitarian, redistributive, andtransformative set of universal social policies that were fundamental tothe construction of welfare societies in Europe. Specifically, Europeanwelfare policies redistributed resources and opportunities to the poorand nascent middle classes, created social compacts, and promotedinter-class solidarities (Haarstad and St. Clair, 2011). DPK disregards thishistory, presenting both ideas and data in an ahistorical manner, andignoring the role of economic and political power differentials in cre-ating and perpetuating poverty and limiting rather than empoweringpeople and collectivities. DPK is based on neo-liberal premises to thepoint of even privatizing poverty and possible policy solutions, anddoes so very often by situating the task of poverty reduction under themandates of global development agencies largely driven by neo-liberalpolitics of ‘aid’ and consistent with the goals of global capitalism. One ofthe most pervasive and perverse consequences of this economistic andneo-liberal view of the poor is that it ignores processes of accumulationand wealth creation that have produced and perpetuated situations ofpoverty across the globe.

DPK also shifts the burden of responsibility for poverty to individu-als. Poverty is explained in terms of personal deficiencies, inappropriateor even immoral behavior, or as a result of insufficient engagementwith markets, rather than the result of structural socioeconomic andpolitical conditions or unequal distribution of resources in need of


redistribution as advocated by GSP (Deacon and Stubbs, 2013; Lawson,2011; O’Connor, 2001; Roy, 2010; Schram, 2000). As argued by Lawson(2012), this shifting of responsibility applies to places as well as peo-ple. Failing places are viewed as responsible for producing povertythrough deficiencies of governance, corruption, and/or an overall cul-tural disposition that is seen as preventing market forces from takinghold or preventing people from engaging their (presumably inherent)entrepreneurial spirit. Poor places are framed as isolated, disconnected,and inherently lacking the wherewithal (capital, free and functioningmarkets inter alia) to raise themselves out of poverty as expressed in the2009 World Development Report (World Bank, 2009).

Second, DPK blinds us to the ethical and justice aspects of poverty andthe poor by treating poverty issues as technical matters with manage-rial solutions, removed from social relations. This view leads analysts toignore one of the areas of work that Bob Deacon has pioneered, the roleof the middle classes as sites of intervention for building lasting solu-tions to poverty (Deacon and Cohen, 2011), an idea that also appliesto elites and has been investigated in the context of both the US anddeveloping countries (Lawson, 2012; O’Connor, 2011). Elites are cen-tral to any policy-making or desired change. Elites do have power andthus, by definition, they have influence in politics and in making thingshappen. Analyzing the factors that produce or reduce poverty withoutlooking at the non-poor tells us little about how those with power arepart of the problem or can be part of the solution.

Rather than the ethics of the three transformative principles of GSP,DPK follows the ethics of the market; that is, the presumption that mar-ket relations are the fairest way to allocate resources, condemning thosein structural traps to their own destinies and leading to ineffectual pol-icy solutions that have later been reframed as market failures. The spacethat the ethics of the market occupies has further consequences, as itdisplaces a serious reflection about the extent to which poverty is, infact, not a market failure but a moral failure. Treating poverty as a tech-nical issue precludes ethical thinking, while the dominant perceptionof economics as the science of poverty leads to the rejection of politi-cal science and philosophy as sources of relevant knowledge on ethicsand global justice. In addition, DPK ignores a central argument of globalsocial policy: the role of social rights (Deacon and Stubbs, 2013).

Moreover, this technocratic understanding of poverty ignores theagency of the non-poor in the production and transformation ofpoverty. At the same time, DPK ignores the many ways in which poorpeople themselves are able to cope and to creatively act in seeking


alternatives (UNRISD, 2010). It also neglects the enormous importanceof global norms, such as, for example, the relations between the Treatyon Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and the lack of entitlement tomedicines for the poor, or the role that global trade agreements craftedby the WTO have in perpetuating unfair global relations that bene-fit elites at the expense of the majority (Pogge, 2010; Koivusalo, thisvolume).

Third, DPK disassociates the majority and the minority worlds by rep-resenting poverty as a problem that occurs only in the Global Southand ignoring the role of global and historical economic and politicalrelations across countries and peoples. This framing represents povertyas spatially static and contained, rather than an issue calling for glob-ally linked social protection and redistribution of harms and benefitsacross people and societal sectors. In DPK, poverty is conceived as aproblem of and in specific places, despite the fact that these places areintegrally connected through a multiplicity of processes that are contin-uously produced and reconfigured, including through the central roleof global organizations in creating structural conditions of vulnerability(Deacon, 2003). This methodological territorialism represents povertyas not relational, while also obscuring the role of the non-poor in eitherproducing or helping to eradicate poverty. The association of povertywith the Global South further ignores the millions of people in advancedeconomies who also experience conditions of relative poverty and insome cases live close to absolute poverty, and divides the world arti-ficially between the North and South while ignoring middle-incomecountries and transition societies also. Perhaps the most perverse con-sequence of this dislocation is the blindness toward the very importantlessons from advanced economies in minimizing poverty and protect-ing the poor from the negative consequences of markets and ruthlesscapitalism. By contrast, the GSP literature insists upon the intercon-nectedness of local and global processes based on the central role thatglobal institutions, mechanisms for decision-making and distributionsof benefits and loses, as well as the central role global networks play ininfluencing the actual structural conditions of local communities andpeople.

Importantly, DPK avoids a very serious factual question: How feasibleis it, after all, to eradicate poverty? While we know that wealth redistri-bution works within countries, DPK ignores the possibility of redistribut-ing wealth worldwide as argued by the GSP principle of redistribution.At times of unprecedented wealth, the abolition of severe povertyis less costly than the bailouts most Western countries’ governments


made of selected private sector companies during the financial crisisin 2008/2009. In Europe, bailouts to companies is accompanied bystructural adjustment policies that have passed on the crises to aver-age citizens, leading to deepening poverty and insecurity, particularlyfor children and poor households (Ortiz and Cummings, 2012).

These broad characteristics of DPK are incompatible with the searchfor win-win strategies that link poverty and environmental issues,including climate change. DPK is antithetical to the framing and visionof human security and global social policy that seeks to focus attentionon interconnectedness based on the acknowledgement of the intrinsicvalue of all human beings embedded in rights (Gasper, 2010). If povertyis viewed through an economistic lens and action is based on neo-liberal premises, it is difficult to see how actions of some on one sideof the planet have consequences for others far away. This then hidesthe fact that relations among people are central to the productionand perpetuation of poverty, diffusing rather than promoting collec-tive responsibility, and negating rather than embracing trans-boundarysocial relations (Eriksen and Silva, 2009; O’Brien et al., 2010, Young,2006).

4. A rich history of problematizing development

The critique of dominant models of development and their negativesocial and environmental consequences is nothing new. In this sectionwe summarize literature from three complementary fields – criticaldevelopment studies, development ethics, and pioneers of alternativeeconomic thinking – to illustrate that there is a rich history of prob-lematizing mainstream development and DPK. Climate change is adevelopment issue. Today, we know climate change is the result ofusing fossil fuels to pursue unsustainable models of progress and devel-opment associated with unending economic growth, land and naturalresources use, and mass consumption (Dryzek et al., 2011; IPCC, 2007;O’Brien et al., 2010; Parry, 2009). In order to build models of devel-opment that change direction and help address global environmentalchange and climate change, we first and foremost have to revisit the cri-tique to dominant models and the many alternatives that have beenput forward. Equally importantly, fighting poverty does not requiredestructive growth. While levels of poverty are associated with limitedconsumption and the absence of basic needs and opportunities, the rela-tionship between poverty reduction and unending economic growthhas always been contentious. This carbon-driven economic growth,


promoted through capitalist economic liberalization policies worldwide,large-scale development projects such as the construction of dams,mines, or massive transformations in agricultural production throughindustrial agriculture schemes, has led to unequal harms and benefitsempirically documented in a large body of development research liter-ature that needs to be revisited when addressing climate impacts. Theliterature explaining and justifying why prosperity is not the same aseconomic growth is indeed large (Fitoussi, Stiglitz and Sen, 2010; Sen,1999).

The development models that have led to the climate crises arethe same processes of rapid capitalist transformation identified by KarlMarx. As Karl Polanyi puts it in his brilliant book The Great Transforma-tion, the emergence of the market economy means primarily one thing:the disembedding of economic action from nature and the social sphere(Polanyi, 1944). While the term ‘development’ is used to convey theplanned social change coordinated by international and national devel-opment aid agencies that emerged after World War II, this obscures thefact that since the 19th century there have been competing views aboutthe direction of socioeconomic transformation (Cowen and Shenton,1995). A particular view became successful and dominant: progress asthe pathways of societies that are commercialized, individualized, indus-trialized, and urbanized. What emerges is a system that creates povertydiscursively and materially, while it perpetuates existing inequalities anddepends on structural conditions that keep poor people and communi-ties subsumed to the functioning of a world economy in the making andunmaking of the ‘third world’ (Escobar, 1995). As Denis Goulet (1980)argued, development is a cruel choice, leading to winners and losers. Theprofessionals of development, the aid agencies, act like one-eyed giants,asking poor people in the Global South to follow certain developmentpathways while not seeing the negative consequences of such pathways(Goulet, 1980). Modernity led to improved lives for some, especiallyin colonizer countries, but much poverty existed and still exists withinmodernities, bringing ‘disenchantment, alienation and loss of meaning,and from concern for the vulnerable and suffering’ (Gasper and St. Clair,2010: 20). Some get gains and some pains, argues one of the first socialscientists to populate the World Bank, Michael Cernea, referring to thesocially and environmentally harmful consequences of large develop-ment projects such as building large dams, as the result of ignoring bothpeople and nature (Cernea, 1985).

Decades of this purposeful development have led to a present path-way marked exactly by these two ills: massive inequalities and extensive


environmental damage. Inequality, although very well documented,remains an externality in most processes of planning and social trans-formation and is a defining characteristic of contemporary globalization(Gills, 2008; Milanovic, 2007; Munck, 2004). Much of the critical liter-ature on development and inequality has one common characteristic:it proposes the thesis that any plausible conception of what may con-stitute fair globalization and social transformation processes needs toaddress the power relations that produce and reproduce global poverty(St. Clair, 2006, 2007). Current data on poverty trends present a verytroubling picture. There are almost one billion hungry people on theplanet, and a similar number lack suitable housing, access to safe water,or to basic education. More than two billion lack access to sanitation andessential medicines and health care. Over 200 million children work forwages, and more than 1.6 billion people do not have access to electricityor any energy service (CROP, 2010). As Branko Milanovic (1997) argues,the 6.4 percent of global household income that has gone into expand-ing the share of the top 10 percent would be sufficient to double allincomes for the bottom seven-tenths of humankind. The transformativeprinciples espoused by GSP would draw attention and action toward thisimbalance, one that remains hidden as long as we look at the forces thatcreate and perpetuate poverty in isolation from the sources of wealthand power.

Equally important, unending economic growth models of develop-ment have been the main cause of pervasive environmental degra-dation, ecosystem degradation, and biodiversity loss. While growth isoften depicted as the driver for better environmental regulation andthus environmental quality, the so-called U-shaped curve linking moregrowth and more environmental protection is a theoretical constructrather than a ‘real fact’. Economic liberalization and other policiesthat promote gross national product growth are not substitutes forenvironmental policy (Arrow et al., 1995). There are limits to the car-rying capacity of the planet, but these are not central to contemporarygrowth practices that presumably are the main driver of poverty reduc-tion. Economic theory driving the modern project of prosperity hasalways treated the environment as a sink and a never-ending source ofresources to be turned into products. There is a large body of environ-mental economics and alternative economic thinking that has warnedagainst unending growth and its negative effects. In 1967, Ezra Mishanargued that the dream of unending economic prosperity and risingliving standards was deeply dangerous because of its social and envi-ronmental costs. Mishan (1967) contended that we may be heading


toward chaotic environmental damage. Later, steady state economics,proposed by Herman Daly (1991), warned of the flaws in traditionaleconomic theory in improperly valuing natural resources. Environmen-tal economists such as Joan Martinez-Alier (2002) demonstrated howenvironmentalisms are numerous, and that an environmentalism forthe poor requires valuation of natural systems and accounting of eco-logical debt to the poor. As the movement and scholarship groundingclimate justice builds up, we see repeated claims for exactly the solu-tions that could be brought about by a proper national and internationalimplementation of the transformative principles of GSP.

More recently, a de-growth movement has developed in response toclimate change impacts and widespread environmental degradation.The term de-growth was invented by the French economist SergioLatouche, as part of his critique of dominant models of develop-ment’s social and environmental impacts. Sustainable de-growth arguesfor lower levels of both production and consumption in ways thatincrease human well-being and equity while protecting the environ-ment. It means living within the ecological boundaries of the planet,and truly dethroning growth as the main driver of societal well-being.Localized economies, new democratic institutions, and innovationbased not on mere technological advance but advance in enabling lowconsumption and low production are the central policy objectives ofthis alternative (see http://www.degrowth.eu/). Tim Jackson (2011) hasargued for shifting gears in relation to unending growth by changingthe ways we conceive of and practice economic transactions and invest-ments. What we see emerging is a new conception of prosperity andprogress that takes social and environmental consequences as an inter-nal part of their definition. Among those alternatives, we must alsoadd a new way of seeing the causes of poverty, who are the poor, andwhat to do in order to eradicate poverty while protecting the naturalenvironment through valuing differently.

5. Enriching global social policy

The three transformative principles of GSP – redistribution, social pro-tection, and social rights – can guide us toward political and socialsupport for alternative development pathways that would attend thetasks of protecting the poor and preventing more damage to the globalclimate. Synergies can be built by linking together the many alternativesbeing put forward by human security scholars on climate justice, criticalpoverty, and development studies’ social critique of sustainability and


GSP initiatives like the Social Protection Floor (Deacon, 2013; O’Brienet al., 2010; UNRISD, 2011). Currently, productive connections can bemade between the SPF and the Basic Income Grant idea as compensa-tion for the ecological debt of developed societies to the South and asprotection for future, unexpected, damages advocated by climate justicescholars and activists (Sharife and Bond, 2013).3 There is also substantialwork to be done in making sure the social dimensions of climate changeand the responses to climate change and transitions to sustainability areconsistent with GSP core principles and long-term critical perspectives.Together, these perspectives may offer a way out of the vicious cycle ofpromoting destructive growth in the name of the poor while doing littleto protect them while ignoring related social challenges in rich coun-tries. As climate impacts increase, and the pressure to respond builds,we are likely to witness a competition for funds between the welfarestate and the environmental state. At the same time, if social issues arenot central to debates and policy processes, we may face multiple socialcatastrophes in both richer and poorer countries. There are feasible andpossible futures that call for foresight and prevention. For example, awin-win approach might involve the creation of strong global socialprotection and social policy mechanisms following the traditions ofScandinavia’s welfare states and GSP recommendations.

These pathways are premised on a fundamental reframing of bothpoverty and climate change, grounded on alternative visions that nolonger view climate change as a threat to our ability to reduce povertyor a threat to existing (limited) social protection. Such visions do notpresent the current efforts to reduce poverty as an ideal state: as if wealready were on the path toward a just world were it not for the threatof climate change. Alternative perspectives on poverty complementedwith insights from global social policy and a strong focus on the socialdimensions of climate change is a win-win discourse that can strengthenthe possibility of alliances across critical fields of development studies,globalization studies, environmental economics, social development,and global social policy. We propose a perspective more suited for anintegrated, relational, agency-based, and equitable joint framing of bothchallenges: poverty and the environment.

An alternative framing of poverty starts with the proposition thatpoverty occurs in all parts of the globe (both majority and minorityworlds, or Global South and Global North) and poses questions aboutthe interconnected global material and discursive dimensions of povertyprocesses in their relation to wealth and prosperity. Poverty is relational,produced through material social relations and discursive processes in


the context of specific histories, geographies, and ecologies (Deaconand Cohen, 2011; Hickey, 2009; Lawson, 2012; Mosse, 2010; O’Connor,2001). The production of poverty through material social relations isone of the central insights that Deacon and GSP have contributed,through the central recognition of how poverty is produced by thechanging political economy of globalized capitalism across both major-ity and minority worlds. Ecological connections between human beingsand the places they inhabit are key to understanding poverty and situat-ing humans as part of their environment. Here the tradition of GSP canproductively engage with the existing interdisciplinary literature on thehuman dimensions of global environmental change and the poverty,development and climate debate, including particular attention to pol-icy responses and mechanisms such as Loss and Damage or the limitsand barriers to adaptation. Deacon’s innovations in GSP and his focuson the three principles of regulation, redistribution, and rights are vitalelements of a progressive conversation.

We argue for work that addresses simultaneously the contradictionsinherent in market-based approaches to poverty reduction as well asmarket responses to climate and global environmental change. Thisincludes critiques of the extension of market relations into almosteverything, the rolling back from state to private social protectionsystems, and the implications of neo-liberal rollbacks in institutionalinvolvements in poverty reduction (at various scales with different pro-files in different places). We suggest that market-based approaches topoverty reduction and as responses to climate change losses and dam-age are deeply political, despite their apolitical claims. This narrativeproduces flawed subjects and flawed places through categorizing ‘thepoor’ and ‘the vulnerable’, by discursively framing who is counted asdeserving/undeserving, in their exclusion of care activities and rela-tions (cf. Williams, this volume), and in how the state is reframed asa neo-liberal actor in policy decisions, both for poverty and to respondto climate impacts. By contrast, relational analyses of poverty, and asocial perceptive on the challenges posed by climate change, focus atten-tion on the co-production of poverty and vulnerability, attending tohow people interpret and challenge both these categories and processesproducing impoverishment and environmental susceptibility, as well ascontest and negotiate protection processes. Co-production also includesattention to how global actors engage in poverty polices, co-producingbureaucratic social orders and institutional power relations at the sametime as they produce knowledge (St. Clair, 2006). But this attention


to global actors also allows us to view a possible central role for GSPmechanisms needed to change policy directions to be more responsiveto the realities of vulnerable people and more also to those who may notbe vulnerable today but may find themselves seriously affected by thefuture impacts of climate that will change social conditions and socialrelations.

Finally, we argue for an ethical perspective and the treatment ofpoverty and climate as a question of social and global justice, andfor attention to the relations to and complementarities with solidar-ity, virtues, care, and social cohesion and the fundamental role thatinequality plays in preventing just processes and outcomes.

To adequately address poverty and vulnerability in the context of cli-mate and global environmental change crises, scholars must explore thesimultaneity of material processes, the social constructions of poverty,and how these depict the relations between poverty and climate change.We argue that DPK excludes critical perspectives such as global socialpolicy. Feasible and equitable solutions to both climate change andpoverty may be crafted only when climate change and poverty areseen together, guided by solidarity and justice concerns, guided by thetransformative principles of global social policy, informed by politicaleconomy, linked to consumption and production, and within a jointframework that is critical of dominant discourses on development andprosperity. This leads to placing the central concern on social, global,and climate justice and to call for serious engaging and enrichment ofthe tradition of global social policy with the current risks and challengesposed by a world moving straight to ecological disaster and multiplesocial tipping points. The three transformative principles of global socialpolicy are central to this agenda.

Notes

1. This chapter complements Ian Gough’s contribution to this book by linkingthe bridges between climate and global social policy through a reframing ofunderstandings on poverty. As Gough argues, situating GSP within climatechange challenges is a large task. Both chapters aim to open this debate andplace seeds for the further development of GSP as a way to protect vulnerablecommunities for climate change impacts.

2. http://www.ejolt.org/2013/05/towards-a-post-oil-civilization-yasunization-and-other-initiatives-to-leave-fossil-fuels-in-the-soil/

3. See also http://www.bignam.org/ and http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html


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8Antagonism and Accommodation:The Labor–IMF/World BankRelationshipRobert O’Brien

The World Bank should apply the Hippocratic rule to ‘do noharm’ by ensuring that country-level policy advice or loan con-ditions do not constitute de facto recommendations to violateCLS [core labor standards]

Trade Union Official (Bakvis, 2002)

that part of the Hippocratic Oath that warns doctors that theyshould first do no harm [ . . . ] should be heeded by those ofus who seek to advise and support policymakers committed toreform.

First Deputy Managing Director, IMF (Kreuger, 2004)

1. Introduction

The latest international salvo in the battle for a decent standard of liv-ing for a majority of the world’s population is the Social ProtectionFloor (SPF) initiative.1 In April 2009, the United Nations System ChiefExecutives’ Board adopted the SPF initiative as one of a series of prior-ities to respond to the 2008 financial crisis (ILO, 2010). The initiativeis led by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the WorldHealth Organization (WHO), but an additional 17 international organi-zations (mostly UN agencies) have signed in as partners. The initiativeis designed to encourage countries to implement a basic or minimumlevel of social policy. The SPF consists of a series of services and socialtransfers. Basic services that should be provided include water and san-itation, food and nutrition, health, education, and information aboutsaving, and other social services. Social transfers require the allocation

153

154 Antagonism and Accommodation

of cash or in-kind provisions to ensure a minimum income for vulner-able populations such as the poor, children, the sick, and the old (SPF,2012).

Bob Deacon (2012) has identified four variables that are likely to influ-ence the possibility of the SPF initiative being a success: the strength ofnational civil society groups advocating its implementation, the amountof high-level UN support, the degree to which the World Bank tempersits advocacy of targeted social programs over universal ones, and theInternational Monetary Fund’s (IMF) willingness to give countries fiscalspace to implement SPFs. The last two variables concerning the role oftwo key international financial institutions (IFIs) are interesting becauseof the mixed history of those institutions’ engagement with social pol-icy. The IMF and the Bank have had a turbulent relationship with oneof the most important civil society actors that would work on support-ing the SPF – organized labor. The history of IFI–labor debates suggestscaution about being optimistic about the role that the IFIs will play inthe SPF initiative.

This chapter analyzes the labor–IMF/World Bank relationship on aseries of labor and social policy issues since the early 1980s to determinewhat the future might hold for the SPF initiative. It argues that whilethe relationship has evolved from one of antagonism to one of (limited)accommodation, differences in philosophical orientation and interestssuggest that the SPF initiative will face challenges from the Bank andthe Fund depending upon its ultimate shape and content. Based uponprevious interaction, it is likely that the greater the degree to which theSPF remains a minimalist and targeted initiative, the greater the chancethat it will receive IFI support. To the degree to which the SPF threatensthe liberal thrust of the IFIs, the more likely it is to encounter resistance.The chapter unfolds by examining the antagonism and accommodationin the labor–IFI relationship before turning its attention specifically tothe SPF dynamic.

A survey of the labor–IFI relationship over the past 30 years revealstwo ongoing conflicts. The first takes place in the realm of ideas andconcerns how economies should be governed and what role labor playsin economic growth. A model which gives priority to deregulated mar-kets as a source of economic growth and prosperity confronts a modelwhich stresses the significance of social protection in bettering the livesof citizens. The first could be labeled neo-liberal or market fundamen-talist while the second has echoes of a social democratic or a broadsocial policy-oriented approach. The second conflict takes place moreexplicitly in the realm of politics. The competing ideas are sponsored

Robert O’Brien 155

by different groups and the success of one or the other is linked tothe ability of the competing interests to deploy their power resources.In this conflict elite interests (political, managerial, and financial) com-pete with labor (primarily, but not exclusively organized labor). Bothof these conflicts are waged diachronically and synchronically. We cansee a change in the balance of forces over time and at any particularmoment we are able to observe the conflict within organizations orbetween these organizations and outside interests (such as labor or cor-porations). The SPF initiative is a continuation of these struggles as it hasthe potential to challenge the neo-liberal model of market deregulation.

2. Antagonism (1980–2000)

Whereas some international organizations use the soft power of knowl-edge or expertise (ILO, OECD) and others use more coercive tools such asfinancial muscle or legal standing (WTO) to demand policy compliance,the Fund and the Bank have been able to use both financial incen-tives/penalties and policy expertise in development and economics topush particular policy options (O’Brien, 2002). For much of the 1980sand 1990s, the policies advocated by the IFIs ran counter to policyoptions advocated by groups representing workers. The relationshipcould be characterized as antagonistic, in that the institutions and thelabor movements often viewed the other’s policy preferences as harmfulto their own goals.

The ability of the Fund and Bank to influence broad macro-economicpolicy decisions, as well as a number of other policies ranging fromprivatization to pensions to labor market reform, has been a factor inundermining labor conditions in many countries that have turned tothem for assistance in the 1980s and 1990s. This section outlines aneconomic and political critique of IFI conditionality and its impact uponlabor during the 1980s and 1990s.2 The economic critique stresses thedamage done to labor by IFI conditionality, while the political critiquestresses the exclusion of labor from decision-making and the politicalimplications of weakening labor as a strategic actor.

In return for disbursing funds, the IMF and World Bank impose con-ditions upon borrowers. However, the degree to which conditions areimplemented varies considerably. Simply because a state signs on toparticular conditions does not mean that those conditions are actuallyimplemented. Critics of IFI conditionality sometimes portray the orga-nizations as being able to dictate policy to national governments whilesupporters of liberal structural adjustment programs often bemoan the


lack of compliance of member states. Critics argue that conditionalityhas resulted in poor economic growth while supporters counter that ithas been state failure to fully implement the conditions that caused pooreconomic performance. Unfortunately, conditionality is both difficultto measure and varies between countries and sectors within countries.A thorough review of the compliance literature has suggested that com-pliance on specific elements of IMF conditionality ranges from 30 to70 percent (Vreeland, 2007: 110–111). What this means for our analysisis that things may not be as good or as bad as they first appear, giventhat compliance is variable.

Labor organizations and labor markets have been influenced byIFI conditionality as it has evolved over the last 50 years. Prior to the1980s, however, conditionality was relatively light and not of great con-sequence.3 The early 1980s debt crisis brought many Latin Americanstates into close contact with the IMF, the collapse of Communist statesin Eastern Europe and Russia from 1989 onwards brought in ‘transitioneconomies’, the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis exposed formerly success-ful newly industrializing countries in East and Southeast Asia, whilethe credit crisis and the ensuing sovereign debt crisis brought a num-ber of European states into the fold. A significant result of these globaleconomic crises was that the IMF took on a critical role of providingfinancial support for numerous developing, middle-income and evendeveloped countries outside its earlier core of very poor sub-Saharanstates. Loans given to these newcomers were conditional upon under-taking large-scale structural reform of their economies. States that hadpreviously used private capital flows for relatively autonomous develop-ment strategies were required to enact policy reforms if they wanted IMFassistance and a resumption of private capital flows.

The specific content of conditionality varied from country to coun-try and from loan to loan, but reflected a general agreement thatclient states should liberalize and deregulate their economies. Theterm ‘Washington Consensus’ was coined to reflect the 1980s agree-ment among Washington-based policy-makers at the top of the IMF,World Bank, and US government institutions such as the US Treasury.To IFI critics the term ‘Washington Consensus’ came to signify neo-liberal or market fundamentalist policies advanced by the Fund andBank (Williamson, 2000). Although the particular policies negotiatedbetween the IMF and recipient countries varied, most agreements con-tained measures aimed at demand management through decreasinggovernment budget deficits and borrowing; devaluating the nationalcurrency; implementing real interest ratites and liberalizing prices; and


liberalizing trade and reducing real wages, especially in the public sector(Williams, 1994).

It should be noted that these structural adjustment conditions werea departure from previous IMF practice of the 1970s. Earlier policiesconcentrated upon correcting short-term balance of payment crises.Post-1970s policies concerned themselves with deeper structural eco-nomic changes. While the IMF continued to emphasize goals of macro-economic stability and demand management, it increasingly focusedattention upon micro–issues, such as privatization, the pattern of pub-lic expenditure, financial sector reform, and mobilization of domesticsavings (Williams, 1994). The IMF increasingly became involved in long-term development strategies, blurring the division of labor betweenitself and the Bank (Bird, 2001).

Over at the Bank an equally dramatic development was under way inthe early 1980s. The Bank began to shift some of its lending away fromprojects to structural adjustment loans. Rather than finance a bridgeor a dam, money was increasingly flowing to help states restructuretheir economies along neo-liberal lines. In 1980, the Bank created thestructural adjustment loan (SAL) to encourage recipients to engage inpolicy reforms that would liberalize their economies. This was followedby the introduction of sectoral adjustment loans (SECALs) meant toreform particular sectors. Similar to IMF conditions, SALs and SECALswere designed to promote external trade, mobilize resources, and initiateinstitutional reforms (Williams, 1994). While program lending contin-ued to be a larger share of Bank activity than structural adjustmentlending, the Bank’s activity in this new area generated similar forms ofcriticism that were aimed at the IMF’s structural adjustment policies.

2.1 The economic critique of IFI conditionality

A critique of the economic impact of IFI conditionality on labor oper-ates at two levels. At a very broad level the issue is that strict monetariststructural adjustment programs which focus upon suppressing demandhave the effect of lowering economic growth and redistributing incomeaway from workers to economic elites. At a more narrow level, objec-tions have been raised to specific IFI-sponsored policy initiatives such asprivatization of state industries, movement to individual privately heldpensions, and deregulation of the labor market.

It is perhaps not surprising that research has indicated that the initialimpact of an IMF structural adjustment program is to reduce economicgrowth (Conway, 1994). Countries usually approach the Fund whenthey are already in an economic crisis and need assistance to respond


to a difficult situation. However, Przeworski and Vreeland (2000) showthat IMF programs lower annual economic growth every year that acountry participates and that there is no evidence that they help in thelong run.

From a labor perspective, an even more worrying finding is that SAPshave a negative effect on labor’s share of income. In a study of 18 LatinAmerican countries between 1965 and 1981, Pastor (1987: 89) con-cluded that ‘the single most consistent effect the IMF seems to haveis a redistribution of income away from workers’. Garuda’s study of39 countries between 1975 and 1991 suggests that income distribu-tion deteriorates for those countries that enter IMF programs underthe threat of severe balance of payments crisis, but can improve whenthey enter under less serious circumstances (Garuda, 2000). Vreeland(2001) worked with a database of 110 countries from 1961to 1993,of which 91 participated in IMF programs. He concluded that thelabor share of income is ‘lower for countries that participate in IMFprograms [ . . . ] best off in countries that never participated in anIMF program, and worst off in countries currently participating in anIMF program’ (p. 141). An equally telling finding was that althoughlabor was worse off under SAPs, capital was often better off. AlthoughSAPs caused growth to decline by 1.5 percent per annum, the shift ofincome from labor to capital was 3 percent per annum, which morethan compensated for economic slowdown. So, not only are economicelites successful at transferring the costs of adjustment to other groups,they actually profit from the adjustment.

The quantitative data suggests a negative relationship betweenIFI structural adjustment programs and labor income. However, quan-titative approaches are limited due to the impossibility of findingcomprehensive data sets. In such circumstances it is useful to augmentanalysis with qualitative data from the people directly affected by suchprograms. An example of this approach is provided by the researchproject jointly developed by a coalition of NGOs and the World Banktitled the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI).4

SAPRI surveyed the experience of people in nine developing coun-tries. The report’s employment and labor market chapter focused uponEcuador, El Salvador, Mexico, and Zimbabwe. It concluded that SAPsworsened employment levels, reduced real wages, increased incomeinequality and precarious employment, gave more workplace power toemployers, disadvantaged women workers, increased the necessity ofchild and senior citizen labor, and hindered the pursuit of long-termproductivity and competitiveness gains (SAPRIN, 2002).


Moving away from general structural adjustment policies we cometo specific policies that the Fund or Bank advocates, which impactupon labor markets. Formally, the World Bank and IMF do not haveexplicit labor market policies.5 Since IFI member states subscribe todifferent labor practices from neo-liberal to social democratic to staterepression, discussion is avoided at the level of the Board of Directors.As a result, relations to labor groups and IFI advice on labor policy aredecentralized and varied.

At the World Bank, labor issues are subsumed under what was calledthe Social Protection Unit (SPU), but is now referred to as the Social Pro-tection and Labor Unit. This unit deals with a range of social protectionissues, including unemployment insurance and corporate responsibil-ity. Within the Bank, positions on organized labor range from socialdemocratic analysis which sees trade unions as crucial for economicjustice to the view that unions are a privileged minority who workagainst the interests of the poor. In many developing countries, theformal sector is relatively small and trade unions only cover a smallsection of the formal sector. Protections for this small sector were viewedby many in the Bank as coming at the expense of the majority ofthe poor. Individual country teams within the Bank may or may notconsult the SPU on labor issues and may or may not work with ILOrepresentatives.

During the 1990s, the Bank committed itself to expressing support forthree of the four core labor standards (CLS).6 The Bank supported thestandards that prohibited child labor, forced labor, and discrimination.However, the Bank consistently stated that it could not support the finalCLS which guaranteed freedom of association and the right to collectivebargaining. Freedom of association and collective bargaining were saidto have political dimensions which would violate the Bank’s mandatenot to interfere with national politics.

The IMF does not have a specific unit which deals with labor issues.Attempts to articulate a single overarching Fund view have not been suc-cessful. As a result, country-level IMF representatives are free to developor not develop contacts with labor groups. This contributes to wide vari-ations in practice from little contact with labor groups in the MiddleEast to good contacts in Europe and limited contacts in Latin America.However, during times of crisis, labor contacts and issues are taken moreseriously. The IMF sees some attraction in dealing with organized laborduring crisis periods because it is seen as a civil society actor that candeliver on promises because of its institutional structures. If a deal isstruck, unions can deliver their members.


Despite variations, a prominent stream of thought at the World Bankand IMF is that competitiveness of countries would be increased if laborwas more flexible and wages were lower. This view is sometimes articu-lated in the policy advice given to member states. For example, a WorldBank-sponsored report on Mexico suggested that its labor laws be revisedto increase flexibility because the labor code was ‘at best, outdated (partof it dates back to 1917), at worst, an impediment rather than a tool forworkers’ (Oliver et al., 2001). A Letter of Intent between the IMF andEcuador outlined how the government’s ‘economic transformation law’will facilitate the introduction of temporary contracts to increase labormarket flexibility and boost employment (Ecuador, 2000). The IMF hasprescribed similar neo-liberal policy advice to the European Union (IMF,2003). Such examples reinforce labor fears that the IFIs systematicallywork to weaken labor rights and wages as a development strategy.

Another significant labor issue is pension reform. Pension systemsare designed to support that part of the working population too oldto work. In the absence of adequate pensions systems, older peoplemust work longer, live in abject poverty, or become dependent upon theextended family for survival. Beginning in the 1990s, the World Bank(1994) began advising developing countries that state-managed pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension systems should be transformed or supplementedby individual savings systems managed by private financial institutions.

Trade unions have argued that the shift to private pensions is havingharmful labor market effects because it is increasing inequality betweenretirees (especially for women), delivering lower rates of coverage, gener-ating high administrative costs which will result in lower future benefits,and posing severe fiscal pressures on governments financing the switchover (ICFTU, 2003). From a labor perspective, IFI officials are encour-aging developing countries to dismantle pension policies which play apositive role in redistributing resources to workers.

2.2 The political critique of IFI conditionality

Leaving the economic impact of IFI policies aside, another set of argu-ments about the effects of IMF and Bank policies is that they haveharmful implications in the political arena. For example, a study ofIMF conditional lending in Latin America (Brown, 2009) suggestedthat extensive IMF-mandated reforms have a negative impact upondemocratic practice. Extensive conditionalities undermine the domesticpolitical process and often result in widespread public resistance. Thisin turn can provoke states into anti-democratic responses to domesticunrest.


In the context of the labor movement, one concern is that IFI policiesweaken labor as a political actor and this tilts the balance in favor ofdomestic actors working toward a more unequal society. The argumentis that the IFIs advocate policies which impose economic costs and thatthe content of those policies weakens the domestic actors which wouldwork toward a fair distribution of those costs. Several studies, includingthose done by the IMF (Johnson and Salop, 1980), support the proposi-tion that the distribution of the costs of structural adjustment policieswithin societies is influenced by the political capabilities of nationalactors. The more powerful the actor, the more likely they will be ableto shift the costs to other actors. Yet, as the previous section pointsout, the policy prescriptions advocated by the IFIs weaken the powerof labor groups as an organized social force. Privatization of state-ownedindustries weakens public service unions; increased flexibility increasesworker insecurity; failure to support core labor rights takes away the abil-ity of workers to defend their interests; and increasing unemploymentmakes labor more pliable to the demands of economic elites.

Another argument against labor-unfriendly policies which worsen theworking and living conditions of the general population is that theygenerate political resistance which undermines the desired goals of theadjustment policy. Work from the 1990s on ‘IMF Riots’ (Walton andSeddon, 1994) and a survey of developments in the year 2000 foundIMF-related protests in Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, Ecuador,Honduras, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Paraguay, and Zambia, ranging fromlocal protests to demonstrations suppressed by violence to generalstrikes (Woodroffe and Ellis-Jones, 2001). Similar to judging the eco-nomic effects of IMF programs, it could be argued that such protestis linked to the general economic situation rather than IMF programsper se (Auvinen, 1996). The point is debatable, but what seems clearer isthat, in many cases, IMF-sponsored policy reforms fall short of securingthe civic buy-in that is thought to be necessary for their success.

While the IMF and its main funders and supporters (such as theUS Treasury) often see labor organizations as an obstacle to economicrestructuring, there are times when organized labor is seen as a potential(junior) political partner. These periods of greater interest in organizedlabor correspond with severe global economic crises. During the 1997Asian financial crisis, the activity of labor organizations was viewed ascrucial to the success of IMF financial packages. One example occurredduring the December 1997 discussion between a US Treasury officialand incoming South Korean President Kim Dae Jung about IMF rescuepackages and economic reform. David Lipton, the Undersecretary for


International Affairs at the Treasury, indicated to the president elect thatlabor and labor flexibility were key to Korea’s situation (Blustein, 2001).Other evidence can be seen in the willingness of the IMF First DeputyManaging Director Stanley Fischer to meet with legal and (at the time)illegal union leaders in Indonesia in 1998 (Scholte, 2002).

Despite acknowledging labor’s key role in economic restructuring,there is no institutionalized mechanism for labor to consult with theFund or the Bank. IMF officials have attended some labor-sponsoredseminars and the World Congress of the leading international unionconfederation, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).7

Labor officials have also held meetings at IMF headquarters, but no per-manent instrument of consultation exists. In September 1999, the Fundand the Bank announced that countries seeking debt relief would berequired to produce poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs). PRSPsrequire states to consult with civil society and submit a report outlininghow their reform measures would affect poverty levels. Initial indica-tions were that consultation varied greatly between countries and thatorganized labor was not brought into the process (ICFTU, 2004a).

3. Accommodation (2000–10)

In the mid- to late 1990s the IMF and the World Bank began to respondto mounting criticism. Complaints about SAPs in low-income countrieswere followed by the failure of ‘successful’ protégées such as Mexicoin 1994 and Argentina in 2001. While the World Bank struggled withexternal and internal criticisms of policy failures in Africa and in theenvironmental field, the IMF was attacked for mismanaging the 1997Asian financial crisis and Russia’s transition to capitalism.

In response to criticism from multiple directions, IFIs have takena number of steps. One initiative has been to increase transparencyby providing more public information. For example, country povertyreduction strategy papers (see below) and the IFI secretariats’ responsesin the form of Joint Staff Assessments are available on the institu-tion’s websites. Similarly, the World Bank’s Country Assistance Strategieswhich set out policy advice can be found at the Bank website, andinformation on IMF Article IV consultations with states are easier togather.

Another response of the IFIs has been to highlight their dedicationto dealing with poverty both rhetorically and institutionally. Rhetori-cally they affirmed that the reduction of poverty is a central goal andthat economic growth is aimed toward that end. Institutionally, the


IFIs have renamed lending programs and introduced new proceduresto involve civil society groups and target poverty. A visible example wasthe 1996 launch of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initia-tive. The HIPC initiative offered debt relief to low-income countries that‘face an unsustainable debt burden’ (IMF, 2004). HIPC is an acknowl-edgement by the IFIs and key donors that certain states have no chanceof improvement under existing financial arrangements.

The World Bank’s major response was the launching of a Compre-hensive Development Framework (CDF) in 1999. The CDF advocatesshifting development strategy to pro-poor policies and embedding eco-nomic growth in sustainable and equitable development which wouldcover factors such as health, literacy, and participation. The CDF alsostressed that the Bank and national governments should work in part-nership, with governments and civil society groups backing or ‘owning’development plans (Pinder, 2001).

While the CDF approach promised to loosen liberal economicconditionality by contextualizing economic growth and stressing part-nerships, it also threatened to vastly expand the scope of conditionalityby examining a longer list of variables. Since development was no longerconfined to economic growth, a series of other issues were now of con-cern. In announcing the Bank’s desire to integrate more issues into thedevelopment mix, World Bank President Wolfensohn argued that thedevelopment framework should include good government, legal andfinancial systems; safety nets and social policies, including educationand health issues; public services and infrastructure via urban and ruralpolicies; environmental and cultural sustainability (Wolfensohn, 1998).The vast expansion of the nature of development and the Bank’s posi-tioning itself as the gatekeeper for knowledge about these various issuesled some to accuse the Bank of aspiring to a role as ‘mother of allgovernments’ (Cammack, 2002).

The tool for implementing the CDF was the PSRP – a joint WorldBank/IMF innovation introduced in September 1999. Countries seek-ing debt relief through the HIPC initiative, concessional borrowingthrough the World Bank’s International Development Agency, or fund-ing from the IMF’s Poverty Reduction Growth Facility were required toprepare a PRSP or an interim PRSP. PRSPs had to be prepared by indi-vidual countries, involve civil society consultation, and specify howmacroeconomic, structural, and social policies would target long-termpoverty reduction as a policy goal (World Bank, 2004).

PRSPs were advertised as mechanisms to increase dialog in theconditionality process. However, an August 2004 survey of trade unions


in 23 developing countries showed the shortcomings of the PRSP process(Egulu, 2004). While trade unions in most of the countries participatedin the process in one form or another, the participation was superfi-cial and had no discernible impact on policy. Participation was limitedbecause trade unions were brought into the process late, were not sup-plied with crucial documents, or given information at a very late stage.Many trade unions lacked the resources to participate without externalhelp, such as that provided by the ILO. Crucially, this participation wasseen to have no noticeable impact upon policy. For example, Sri Lanka’sPRSP contained policy recommendations in favor of labor law changesand widespread privatization, despite labor resistance to these policies.Skepticism about the policy relevance of the PRSP process was sharedby non-trade union civil society groups which pointed to an inabilityto challenge key policy objectives such as privatization, labor marketreform, or macroeconomic targets for budgets and monetary policy(Rowden and Irama, 2004).

The IMF also introduced changes, such as renaming ESAF as thePoverty Reduction and Growth Facility and signing on to the PRSP ini-tiative. At least in rhetorical terms this was a significant developmentsince it highlighted the issue of poverty and put economic growth in abroader social context.

In terms of specifically labor-related issues, the IFIs have taken anumber of sometimes contradictory actions. They have taken steps toregularize (but not formalize) their contact with trade unions at theinternational level. Every two years the leadership of the IMF and Bankmeet with the Global Unions leadership with smaller yearly thematicmeetings in between. Unions are seen to be more legitimate actors inthe policy process than was the case in the early 1990s.

The World Bank shifted from a position of antagonism toward orga-nized labor’s campaign on basic labor rights to being supportive at thedawn of the 21st century. In response to pressure from the US, theBank introduced an educational toolkit on core labor standards for itsstaff in the late 1990s (Anner and Caraway, 2010). In 2002–3, the Bankmoved from its formal policy of declaring its respect of three core laborstandards to embracing all four by including references to freedom ofassociation and collective bargaining. At this point, the Bank’s posi-tion was to promote them rhetorically, but not to have them linked toany conditionality. In September 2003, the World Bank’s private sectorlending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), announcedthat its loan recipients would soon have to abide by all the core laborstandards. In January 2004, the IFC made approval of a loan to a free


trade zone operator in Haiti, conditional upon the employer recognizingits workers’ rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining(ICFTU, 2004b).

The breakthrough on conditionality came in 2006 when the IFC’s Per-formance Standard 2: Labor and Working Conditions (PS2) stipulatedthat all borrowing companies had to ensure that their operations werein compliance with core labor standards (IFC, 2006). All IFC clients sub-sequent to the issuing of this standard were required to respect thesestandards as part of the condition of receiving financing. Concernsabout labor abuses in IFC clients can be addressed either by petitioningthe IFC Environmental and Social Development Department or by fil-ing a complaint with the IFC’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman. Tradeunions have reported positive results in countries and with firms thatare already sympathetic to labor, but inaction from previously hostilestates and firms (ITUC, 2011).

In 2007, the World Bank introduced labor standards into its Stan-dard Bidding Document for Procurement of Works (SBDW) as suggestedclauses for contractors bidding on projects. This initiative followed sev-eral years of negotiating with international trade unions and in thewake of scandalous labor conditions on several World Bank projectsin Chad, Cameroon, and Indonesia. The World Bank proposed that allmultilateral development banks integrate core labor standards into thegeneral conditions required for major construction projects. This ideawas accepted and the new harmonized contracts were adopted in June2010 (ITUC, 2011).

Simultaneous with, and in contradiction to, the advancement of corelabor standards at the IFC, another World Bank initiative recommendedthe dismantling of labor regulation in member states. The World Bankpublication Doing Business made its first appearance in late 2003 withthe mandate of identifying regulation that constrained business activ-ity (World Bank, 2003: viii). Drawing upon the advice of over 2,000‘judges, lawyers, accountants, credit registry representatives, businessconsultants and government officials’ (World Bank, 2003: vii), the Bankproduced a business-inspired neo-liberal list for deregulation. It quicklybecame the Bank’s most circulated publication.

The chapter on hiring and firing workers makes for interesting read-ing. While there is a nod to the importance of core labor standards inthe beginning, the main message of the chapter is that labor regulationoutside of these standards is a leading cause of poverty. Labor regula-tion from Portugal to Zimbabwe is seen to be too restrictive, out ofdate with modern business practices, contributing to unemployment,


restricting economic growth, and postponing research and development(World Bank, 2003: 29–39). The first report contained an employmentregulation index which ranked countries according to the degree towhich their regulatory environment facilitated the hiring and firingof workers and limited conditions of employment. The easier it is tofire and hire workers and the less legal protection for employmentconditions (working time, holidays, and so on), the better a countrywould score on the index. The problem, of course, is that one per-son’s labor market flexibility is another person’s precarious employment.Fostering system-wide precarious employment may not aid economicgrowth.

Labor unions attacked the index because it rewarded countries withpoor labor practices. A country which banned unions or barred womenfrom some occupations, such as Saudi Arabia, would rank very high interms of being an easy place to hire and fire workers, while a countrysuch as South Africa that was attempting to address a legacy of racial dis-crimination with affirmative action policies would rank poorly (Bakvis,2007). A deeper concern than the methodology of the index was thatthe neo-liberal policy advice on labor market deregulation advocatedby the report would make its way into World Bank and IMF lendingconditionality.

Trade unions argue that this is precisely what happened. Bank andFund officials used the employing workers indicator (EWI) to critiquenational regulation in a number of countries. Drawing upon reportsfrom its affiliates, the International Trade Union Confederation docu-mented instances in 23 countries where governments had been taken totask by Bank or IMF staff because of a poor ranking on the Doing BusinessEWI (Bakvis, 2006; ITUC, 2007).

Opposition to the EWI led the Bank to modify and limit its use(Kang, 2010). The Bank created a committee (Doing Business EmployingWorkers Indicator Consultative Group) to review its methodology. Theconsultative group was much broader than the original expertise thatwent into the Doing Business reports because it included labor lawyers,unions, civil society groups, and representatives from the ILO andOECD. The 2012 Doing Business report still contained data on employingworkers, but did not rank countries on this indicator, nor did it includethe indicator in the aggregate ‘ease of doing business’ indicator (WorldBank, 2011: 23). Moreover, the Bank issued guidance to its field staff,explaining that they should not use the Doing Business EWI for recom-mendations in Country Assistance Strategies, should decline requestsfor technical assistance based on the EWI, and not use the EWI as a


performance indicator or target when developing policy or loans (WorldBank, 2009).

Despite ongoing objections from labor, the 2013 Doing Business(World Bank, 2012) report continued the trend of praising countriesthat reduced protection for workers. In this case, the report applaudedreducing periods of dismissal notice and/or severance pay. This led tothe General Secretary of the ITUC calling for labor issues to be left outof the Doing Business reports altogether (ITUC, 2012a).

The IMF’s response to labor concerns has followed a different pathfrom the World Bank. Rhetorically, the IMF has been more sympatheticfrom an earlier date to core labor standards, but its conditionality pro-grams have not shown a similar sensitivity to labor interests. This canbe explained both by the nature of the IMF’s programs and a moreentrenched neo-liberal ideology. Rhetorically, the IMF signed on to corelabor standards faster and with more enthusiasm than the Bank. In thelate 1990s, IMF Director Michel Camdessus declared its support for corelabor standards. He also insisted during the East Asian financial crisisthat the governments of Indonesia and South Korea engage in tripartitenegotiations over structural adjustment loans (Hagen, 2003).

In terms of policy advice, however, the IMF continued to push labormarket deregulation wherever it could. A review of IMF conditionalityin the field of labor deregulation (as evidenced by letters of intent andloan contracts) between 1988 and 2000 has demonstrated that it is moststringent on weak states and less stringent on stronger states (Carawayet al., 2012). In those states where organized labor is relatively strong,labor market conditionality is weaker than in those countries whereorganized labor is relatively weak. In the language of the IFIs, the IMFimposes labor market conditionality not in those states where labor mar-kets are most rigid (where organized labor is strongest) but in those stateswhere labor is least able to defend its interests. This suggests that theIMF is committed to liberalizing labor markets and undermining laborpower, limited only by the strength of the labor movement in borrowingcountries.

The IMF continues to provide a wide range of advice on labor issuesand labor market policies. The European debt crisis has allowed it tobecome particularly active in Greece and Portugal. Within the generalprescriptions for structural adjustment, the Fund examines a numberof labor issues. The Fund highlights the problem of unemployment,particularly youth unemployment, and suggests some targeted socialprotection and active labor market initiatives (such as wage subsidies).However, depending upon the country, the Fund also recommends


reductions in minimum wages, lowering labor taxes (reducing socialsecurity contributions through wages), transformation of collective bar-gaining, privatization and deregulation of particular industries, andreduction of the public sector wage bill (IMF, 2012).

The IMF’s role of providing funds to governments in times of financialcrisis creates a distinct set of opportunities and constraints in dealingwith labor issues. During a crisis the IMF needs governments to agreeto structural adjustment terms and it requires some degree of socialacceptance of those terms so that a government’s promise to implementreforms is credible to financial markets. In these instances, organizedlabor is valued as a social partner because it can deliver the support ortemper the resistance of its members to structural reform. The Fund doesnot seek to directly antagonize labor by questioning the significanceof core labor standards. However, the Fund usually does require cutsto public expenditure, increased labor flexibility in terms of wages andemployment conditions, to restore competitiveness of member states.These later objectives can be accomplished through initiatives that maynot have an explicit labor focus but result in less secure employmentthrough privatizations and fiscal austerity. Thus the IMF presents twofaces toward labor: one acknowledges core labor standards and valueslabor as a strategic partner while the other works toward the implemen-tation of policies which weakens organized labor and reduces its shareof national income.

3.1 The SPF and the ILO’s catch-up strategy

The debate over the SPF initiative should be seen in the context of alonger term struggle to influence IFI policy by groups stressing broadersocial policy or social democratic solutions to development. Up tothis point, the chapter has argued both that the IMF and World Bankhave had a significant impact upon labor and labor conditions andthat they have moved from positions of antagonism to accommoda-tion. The neo-liberal positions of the 1980s and early 1990s gave wayto a more mixed approach in the late 1990s and 2000s. As the IFI’sexpanded their labor-targeted interventionism, the traditional interna-tional organization tasked with a labor mandate, the ILO, scrambled tostay relevant.

The ILO’s response to its marginalization was to launch initiatives toreclaim its position as a central institution on labor issues (Hughes andHaworth, 2011). One initiative occurred in 1998 when the ILO broughttogether 8 key conventions and packaged them into 4 core labor stan-dards through the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights


at Work. The Declaration bound all member states and required statesto report on their implementation. A second initiative was the creationof the ‘Decent Work’ agenda which stressed the importance of goodjobs for economic development. Decent work shifted the ILO’s focusto poor working conditions in developing countries and placed it morefirmly in the debates on development. A third initiative was the attemptto use the Declaration and the Decent Work agenda to engage otherinternational organizations about the role that labor conditions play indevelopment.

The ILO has used several methods to influence IFI policy. At the upperinstitutional level it engages with the leadership of the IMF and WorldBank about broad issues such as core labor standards. This has had somesuccess as demonstrated by the World Bank and IMF’s rhetorical com-mitment to core labor standards. At a more detailed policy level, the ILOcan provide advice and research on specific policy options or measures,such as the World Bank’s EWI. Within countries, the ILO can influencepolicy by providing support during the PSRP process. ILO teams canprovide briefings and research to civil society actors and governmentofficials offering advice on how decent work themes can be integratedinto PRSPs (Yui and Sanner, 2006).

Ideologically, the ILO challenges the IFIs’ myopic focus on unreg-ulated markets, because it suggests that macroeconomic stabilizationplans undertaken in the absence of proper labor market institutions riskfailure (ILO, 2004). It also disagrees with IFI policies which blame laborrigidity for unemployment. The ILO argues that ‘[r]ather than createrigidities, the labour institutions that are built upon the realisation ofthese fundamental principles and rights at work can be key to negotiat-ing flexibility’ (ILO, 2000). The ILO has also raised questions about theconsultative strategies adopted by the Bank and the Fund. For exam-ple, an ILO review of early PRSP consultations raised three concernsabout the degree and significance of civil society participation in the‘pro-poor’ IFI policies (ILO, 2002). First, insufficient attention was beinggiven to equity issues. Second, trade unions, ministries of labor, andeven employer’s organizations had difficulty participating in the pro-cess. Third, labor market issues, social protection, and other elements ofdecent work were often absent from poverty reduction policies.

The SPF initiative is the latest attempt to make the case for devel-opment strategies that incorporate redistribution and are labor friendlycompared to the market deregulation model. The SPF argument is thatpeople require a basic set of services and transfers in order to developthe skills and productivity needed for development. The global financial


crisis of 2008 highlighted both the dangers of unregulated markets andthe problems of inequality. This opened up space for advocates to makethe case that social policy is vital both for economic stabilization anddevelopment. Indeed, an impressive array of institutions from the UNto the G-20 and the EU have expressed support for the SPF concept.Successful implementation would mark a major shift in developmentstrategies and would herald a stark departure from the IMF and WorldBank’s problematic history of engagement with labor organizations.

Organized labor is fully supportive of the SPF, since a social floor withsteps toward building broader social programs would offer numerousbenefits (ITUC, 2012b). First, it would improve the living conditionsof many people that labor unions are presently unable to help. Sec-ond, it would implement broad economic strategies more supportiveof egalitarian development. Third, workers that enjoyed a minimumlevel of security would be more likely to engage in the formal econ-omy and participate in the activities and membership of organized labor.The unknown element is whether a strategy which runs counter to thestrong lingering element of neo-liberalism on labor matters at the IFIs islikely to be supported fully by those institutions.

4. Conclusion

Before moving on to some concluding thoughts it is necessary tooutline some of the limits of this chapter and identify areas for fur-ther research. One shortcoming is that the chapter has not explicitlyaddressed IFI policy with regard to the informal and agricultural sectors.IFI policies have considerable impact upon these sectors, but they arenot usually treated in a discussion of labor issues. In many developingcountries these sectors constitute the majority of the population, so ananalysis of IFIs and labor is incomplete without casting the net wider.Another caveat is that this chapter has not engaged in a systematicempirical survey of IFI policy agreements with member states. A moresystematic study would be needed to reach more definitive conclusions.

If it is the case that progressive global social policy requires a strength-ening of the middle and working classes around the world (Deacon andCohen, 2011), then the tug of war between labor and the IFIs overlabor standards and working conditions becomes significant for theevolution of global social policy. During the 1980s and 1990s, thestructural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the IMF had a neg-ative consequence on labor conditions in general and organized laborin particular. However, this chapter has argued that policy space for


strengthening labor standards and conditions has increased since thelate 1990s because of rhetorical and institutional changes at the IMFand the World Bank.

Both the Bank and the Fund now support core labor standards inpublic statements and in instructions to their field staff. The Bank hasmoved further to make core labor standards a condition for construc-tion project funding and financing delivered through its private sectorarm (IFC). The IMF stresses the importance of minimal safety nets andis aware of the potential of labor unrest to derail structural adjustment.On the other hand, elements of the Bank, such as the Doing Businessreports, as well as recent IMF lending continue to advance neo-liberalprescriptions of labor market liberalization and depressing wages.

The SPF initiative opens up a new front in the labor–IFI relation-ship. Advocates of a strong SPF hope that it is an initial step towardbroad universal social programs (Cichon, Behrendt and Wodsak, 2011).Traditional opponents of labor-friendly development policies such asthe IMF and World Bank are more likely to take a different view. Theirpreference is likely to be for limited, privatized, targeted programs whichserve as stop-gap measures rather than as a foundation of economic pol-icy. The struggle over ideas and policies continues over a new terrainthat is slightly more favorable to labor and a universal and egalitariansocial policy framework than was the case in the 1980s and 1990s.

Notes

1. The author would like to acknowledge the role of Bob Deacon in stimulatinghis original interest in global social policy and the editors of this volume fortheir helpful comments.

2. The World Bank and the Fund are very different institutions, but their rolesin facilitating market driven structural adjustment are comparable (O’Brien,R., Goetz, A.M., Scholte, J.A. and Williams, M. (2000) Contesting GlobalGovernance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Williams, M. (1994) InternationalEconomic Organizations and the Third World (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf)).

3. One notable exception was Britain’s 1976 IMF agreement which paved theway for labor unrest, defeat of the Labour Party, and the political victory ofthe neo-liberal Margaret Thatcher.

4. After initially agreeing with the SAPRI research project, the World Bankdistanced itself from the findings and their implications for policy reform.

5. This section is based on confidential interviews with World Bank and IMFofficials in October 2002.

6. Core labor standards have been identified by the ILO as key labor principleswhich give workers the opportunity to pursue other rights. Membership in theILO commits states to respect these rights. They are (i) freedom of association


and collective bargaining (ii) elimination of forced labor (iii) abolition of childlabor; and (iv) elimination of discrimination in employment.

7. Formerly the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

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IMF (2012) The IMF’s Advice on Labor Market Issues (Washington DC: IMF).ITUC (2007) The IFI’s use of Doing Business to Eliminate Workers’ Protection Analysis

of the 2008 Doing Business Report and New Country Evidence (Washington DC:ITUC).

ITUC (2011) Labour Standards in World Bank Group Lending Lessons Learned andNext Steps (Brussels: ITUC) (http://www.ituc-csi.org/labour-standards-in-world-bank.html, date accessed 25 September 2012).

ITUC (2012a) World Bank’s Doing Business 2013: Unfounded Claims aboutDeregulation (Brussels: ITUC) (http://www.ituc-csi.org/world-bank-s-doing-business-2013.html, date accessed 18 December 2012).

ITUC (2012b) Social Protection Floors Made Simple (Brussels: ITUC) (http://www.ituc-csi.org/social-protection-floor-made.html, date accessed 19 December2012).

Johnson, O. and Salop, J. (1980) ‘Distributional Aspects of Stabilization Programsin Developing Countries’, IMF Staff Papers, 27, 1–23.

Kang, S. (2010) ‘Labor and the Bank: Investigating the Politics of the World Bank’sEmploying Workers Index’, Journal of Workplace Rights, 14, 481–501.

Kreuger, A.O. (2004) ‘Heeding Hippocrates: The IMF and the Reform Pro-cess’, Address to Council on Foreign Relations (http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2004/112204.htm, date accessed 19 December 2012).


O’Brien, R., Goetz, A.M., Scholte, J.A. and Williams, M. (2000) ContestingGlobal Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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9Grasping the Social Impactof Global Social Policy: HowNeo-liberal Policies HaveInfluenced Social Actionin MoroccoShana Cohen

1. Introduction

Defending critiques that his work focuses too much on the role ofinstitutions in setting social policy, as opposed to social movementsor local non-state actors, Bob Deacon (2007: 190) comments that hehas examined what social movements ‘have to say about specific socialpolicies’ and ‘found them wanting in terms of specific national andtransnational social policies’. His own approach, he argues, is to be‘multi-actor, multi-sited, and multi-levelled’. He sees a role in the com-bined efforts of Northern country governments, international globalpolicy supporters (‘working in and between the spaces of often frozeninstitutions’ (2007: 190)), and South–South dialogs.

While recognizing the political sympathy of (often Marxist or leftist)critics, who call for the ‘multitude’ to mobilize while denigrating inter-national institutions as reproducing the power of elites, Deacon also askswho will enforce the rights and economic power these critics want forthe ‘masses’. He writes, after citing Hardt and Negri’s (2000) admissionthey had no models of organization but felt anyway they would comefrom the multitude (2000), ‘I insist again that while “waiting” for theposse to get its act together, we should seek to reform existing neoliberalglobal capitalism in a global reformist direction’ (Deacon, 2007: 191).

This chapter explores the possibility of developing a ‘middle ground’between the formulation of policy strategies among and within thenetwork of international institutions, consultants, international NGOs

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176 Grasping the Social Impact of Global Social Policy

(INGOs), and national aid agencies, and the concerns and mobilizationof those affected by these policies. Drawing on qualitative research con-ducted in Morocco from 2000–9 on public and charitable educational,health, and social services, the chapter addresses the gap between pol-icy strategies set by transnational actors and the practice of generatingsocial change. These strategies may call for reforms in public sector man-agement and push for accountability and the adoption of abstract ideasand models at a national and local level, but the implementation of bothhas unforeseen social consequences. The suggestion from the research inMorocco is to account for these consequences in reformulating policy,namely by integrating an understanding of the role of institutions inorganizing social relations and the significance of social communicationand cooperation to effective front-line service delivery.

Paolo Freire, a Marxist keen on thinking about practice, stressesthe power of dialog in bringing about radical social transformation.In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), he writes of ‘Women and men asbeings who cannot be truly human apart from communication, for theyare essentially communicative creatures. To impede communication isto reduce men to the status of “things” ’ (1968: 133). Freire argues thatmen and women should conceive of themselves as subjects within aprocess of liberation and humanization that happens in dialog, or in‘communion’, with others (1968: 133).

Investigating the politics of social action in contemporaryMorocco, this chapter analyzes how practitioners in public and charita-ble health, social, and educational services situate their own motivation,ambitions, and obligations to service users within the broader contextof public sector reform and the expansion of the charitable sector asa means to address need. The chapter suggests that under the influ-ence of neo-liberalism, policies since the early 1980s have instigated thesymbolic and material transformation of public institutions. From rep-resenting the means to social mobility, public institutions, along withcharities, now distribute scarce resources to specific marginalized groupsoften categorized according to international standards, for example,through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which identifyparticular populations (women, children) and specific issues (maternalcare, primary education, disease prevention) as priorities. The focus ofservice management in the public sector and increasingly, arguably, inNGOs has at the same time become more guided by economic theorytranslated into practice through New Public Management (NPM) (seeDunleavy et al., 2006; Osborne and Gaebler, 1993; Pollitt, 2007 for gen-eral descriptions of NPM) or other practice-based approaches that focus

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on balancing investment with output and impact (for example, LogicalFramework).1

This chapter suggests that one consequence of the transformationof institutions and their management has been the emergence of adynamic of combined resourcefulness that both challenges the domi-nant neo-liberal logic of global health, education, and social policies,implemented on a national level, and shows how policies can becomemore effective.

Within this resourcefulness, which takes place on the front-line ofservice delivery, the political meaning of practitioner responses differsaccording to generation. This generational distinction is important tounderstand how economic and social policy, and the institutions theyaffect, has consequences for the formation of individual identity, as indi-viduals assume the category of social status laid out in political discourseand associated institutional transformation. The combination of policiesaimed at modernization and the expansion of public services under-pinned the rise of a middle-income professional class. However, theexpansion of private health and education alongside the deteriorationin quality of public services over the past several decades have meantthat the public sector has come to represent the allocation of scarceresources and professionals must maneuver to utilize these resources ifthey want to address the overwhelming needs of low-income patientsand students.

The subsequent implication for policy formulation, as this chapterargues, is to account for, first, the capacity of global policy to influencethe constitution of identity and practice in the delivery of services actu-alizing policy goals and, second, in turn, how the politics of local socialaction can indicate principles and methods to be supported in globalsocial policy. In influencing the constitution of identity among practi-tioners away from belonging to a middle class beholden to nationalistconceptions of development toward self-reliance in accessing resources,policies have also provoked the rise of an alternative, figurativelyinverted, practice of turning to combined resourcefulness and resistanceagainst commodification to make services more effective.

The sociological importance of this practice may not be as much inits contribution to health or education but in its application withinenvironments where increasingly both younger generations of publicsector and NGO staff and service users face financial and social inse-curity, albeit at different levels. This insecurity is derived not only fromunemployment rates, non-contractual work, low wages, and lack of ben-efits,2 all more or less material causes, but also from the lack of political


and social commitment to social mobility and access to quality services.The mutual insecurity among ‘middle-class’ practitioners and marginal,low-income, groups challenges framing social relations on a hierarchi-cal and exploitative class basis (see Wright, 1985) while situating theacquisition of resources, both material and social, as a common threadof these relations.

The chapter first reviews briefly other critiques of global policy neg-ligence of the knowledge and input of alleged ‘beneficiaries’ and howinternational institutional responses, including integrating a discourseand methodology of empowerment and participation, have ended upsupporting a neo-liberal agenda. Using generational differences to illus-trate the social impact of neo-liberalism, the second section of thechapter shows how the transformation of the social role and impover-ishment of public institutions, along with the rise of non-governmentalorganizations, has separated out social action from class identity whileengendering new forms of social mobilization to provide quality ser-vices. Both have had consequences for the political meaning of socialaction and ultimately for the relevance of global policy in affectingsocial change.

The chapter concludes by suggesting that global social policies canbecome more effective in practice through accounting for the role ofinstitutions in connecting different socioeconomic groups around a col-lective aim. Global social policies should emphasize the relational andreflexive aspects of implementation, prioritizing dialog, coordination,and collaborative strategies within institutions and highlighting thesocial function of health, education, and social services.

In other words, building upon Deacon’s argument, policy has andshould take on greater agency in mobilization. This agency shouldnot be managed by administrators utilizing abstract models but rathershould incorporate front-line knowledge of how dialog and collectiveagency generate social change.

2. Neo-liberalism and participation in development

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and eventhe policies of international aid and development agencies have beenrepeatedly criticized for imposing abstract models in radically diverselocations (see Ferguson, 1994, for one of the most well-known critiques);privileging the knowledge of their own ‘experts’ over that of local stake-holders; generating a local self-interested professional class distant fromservice users while demotivating those staff still engaged with social

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action through results-based management (Green, 2000; Hammami,1995; Lazar, 2004; White, 1999); and ultimately, expending resourcesthat could be used more effectively elsewhere or through other meth-ods (Banks and Hulme, 2012; Lazar, 2010; Sternberg, 2010; Turner et al.,2012).

All of these critiques, regardless of field location or analytic focus(NGO management or social mobilization, for instance), point to theneed for more conceptual complexity in interpreting social action andmore nuance in understanding the relevance of social mobilization anddemands for policy (for instance, Lazar’s (2005) anthropological accountof how corruption is sustainable politically through the delivery ofpublic works in Bolivia).

From a more sociological perspective, several analysts of internationaldevelopment policy, including Deacon and Cohen (2011), have arguedfor the constitution and behavior of the ‘middle class’, particularly amiddle class invested in national development, to receive more atten-tion. However, they have done so across the backdrop of funding andmanagement practices that have undermined the sustainability of thisclass. For instance, the Department for International Development (UK)White Paper Making Governance Work for the Poor (2006) is supportive ofthe cultivation of a middle class through development policies because‘a growing middle class, more educated citizens, and a greater willing-ness by civil society and media to speak out’ (2006: 22). In other words,the middle class puts pressure on political leaders to improve the perfor-mance of the State. The White Paper cites business elites, trade unions,and professionals as particularly demanding of greater transparency inthe regulation and delivery of services. Yet, the White Paper also notesthat ‘[i]t is essential that international partners avoid doing things thatundermine a country’s capability’ (2006: 5), namely luring away fromthe public or local NGO sector competent staff who would participatein the pressure DfID wants on States. The White Paper cites as examplesAIDS projects that ‘have recruited professional staff from governmenthealth services which are already struggling to provide health care’ andthe practice in fragile states, such as Afghanistan, of ‘giving aid onlythrough non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or private contractors[which] can actually hold back the process of building the capability ofthe state’ (2006: 25).

Nancy Birdsall and Jeremy Gould make the same point that interna-tional aid organizations must stop recruiting public sector staff if theywant to further transparency and effectiveness in government adminis-tration. Birdsall writes that a consequence of aid can be the ‘diversion of


talented, educated citizens from government and from small businessesto work for donor and UN agencies and international NGOs, wheresalaries are higher and more secure’ (2007: 4).3 Gould, writing aboutAfrica, comments that the middle class of the post-Independence era, socritical to the development of the country, has now been ‘[s]educed byaccess to the dollar economy’ (2005:148). He (2005: 149) argues that themiddle class must return to its original post-colonial mission:

[T]he intellectual and entrepreneurial class must choose between aself-referential and parasitic post-developmentalism, and national(ist)development projects-enhancing domestic savings and productiveinvestment, improving the productivity of land and labor, buildingthe revenue base of the public economy.

Despite the qualitative aspirations for the middle class, Birdsall, Gould,and DfID reduce defining this class4 and its agency to material indica-tors and incentives (see also Milanovic and Yitzhaki, 2002).5 The DfIDWhite Paper argues that health and other agencies must have adequatestaffing and public sector services must receive more aid than charita-ble and private counterparts, which can lure capable employees throughhigher salaries and greater prestige (2006: 73). More importantly, yet notwell-considered, the policies involving professionals, bureaucrats, andentrepreneurs, presumably the ‘middle class’ that Birdsall and Gould areactually referring to, often deliberately aim to minimize public sectorgrowth and focus on management practices rather than staff experienceand collective agency. The elision of non-economic definitions of themiddle class in policy means that critiques by international agencies likethe World Bank of practices among staff in public health or educationmiss how much their own policies have undermined the role of insti-tutions, and thus frameworks for social relations and communication,in underpinning a middle class motivated to contribute to collectivewelfare.

Other scholars of development have pointed out how concepts like‘participation’, ‘governance’, and ‘empowerment’ (Cooke and Kothari,2001; Hickey, 2008; Hickey and Mohan, 2005), which are seeminglyintended to support qualitative input into development projects andbetter management to ensure better results for service users, end upreinforcing the overarching neo-liberal agenda of these policies. Hickeynotes that the identification of poverty reduction as an apolitical devel-opment policy (see Deacon et al., 2010, for Deacon’s own critique) has

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obscured ‘the wider pursuit of social justice’ and unequal power rela-tions while generating categories and methods of analysis that ‘makeit difficult to think rigorously about how politics relates to povertyand poverty reduction’ (Hickey, 2008: 356). Hickey and Mohan (2005)favor integrating participation into a larger political analysis foundedon a theoretical understanding of how participation, citizenship, insti-tutions, and socioeconomic relations are intertwined. They look to‘citizenship’ as a means to advance material welfare through expandingpolitical power, a linkage that requires alliances and respect for differ-ences as well as institutional transformation toward a more broad-based,rather than elitist, distribution of resources and capacity for debate anddialog.

Returning to Deacon’s criticism of ‘waiting for the posse to get its acttogether’, Hickey and Mohan shy away from positing a more elaborateframework for linking policy strategies and administration, project real-ization and service use, and social change. They (2005: 26) write, ‘[t]henature of strategy is such that it depends upon concrete openings andpossibilities found in “real” places so we cannot specify a priori by whomand in what ways such a politics will be realized’.

The remaining sections of this chapter suggest instead that a the-oretical analysis, based on qualitative research on front-line services,that connects policy, institutional transformation, social identity andrelations, and the politics of social change can indeed point to newdirections for policymaking at a global level that respond to andfacilitate ‘participation’. This connection is possible because of theuniversalization of management practices under transnational market-oriented policies, and likewise, the pervasiveness of similar language,from ‘empowerment’ to ‘rights-based development’, amongst NGOs andpractitioners in social action and front-line service delivery. Therefore, aswith Deacon, rather than situate a radical agenda in oppositional terms,or in the ‘concrete’ (or ‘multitude’), the suggestion here is to draw uponthe ‘concrete’ to influence conceptual frameworks because of the powerthese frameworks can have in improving and circumscribing individualand collective material and non-material quality of life.

3. Researching social action in Morocco

The qualitative research on front-line services upon which parts of thischapter is based consists of two different distinct pieces of research. Thefirst is linked to practice-based work with NGOs during repeated tripsto Casablanca and Rabat between 2003 and 2009. I conducted academic


research through interviews and ethnography while also teaching eval-uation and human resource management within the voluntary sector.The second part of the research was a funded stay in 2009 for thestudy of the role of the public and charitable sectors in promoting socialmobility and social solidarity.

The two periods of research largely consisted of qualitative interviews,often several times with the same person, and participant/observation inthe literal sense of being both a practitioner and an observer of NGO andpublic service management and delivery. I have worked as a practitionerwith NGOs in Morocco for almost a decade, teaching project design,management and evaluation and issues in human resources in the sec-tor. In all, I conducted approximately 40 interviews with public sectorprofessionals and NGO staff during the 2009 research, in addition toworking directly with NGOs concerning evaluation and project man-agement. I conducted the interviews in clinics, schools, hospital units,and NGO offices.

The research conducted in 2003–9 pursued questions raised in my dis-sertation research, conducted in 1995–7 and again in 2000. The earlierresearch explored the constitution of identity in relation to neo-liberaleconomic policies and expansion of globalization in Morocco. I sug-gested that global market integration had led to the decline of a modernmiddle class founded in the symbiotic rise of new opportunities forsocial mobility brought on by education and the expansion of the Stateand public administration and identification with nationalism. The newglobal middle class, emerging with the liberalization of the economyand the rise of unemployment and economic insecurity, lacked thesame physical and temporal foundation for the constitution of iden-tity. Instead, they are constituted as subjects in a liminal space betweencitizenship in a nation-state and the insecurity and placelessness ofglobalization (Cohen, 2004).

The more recent research on social action, specifically on the front-line of service delivery in hospitals, schools, clinics, and NGO-basedprojects, explores how urban, educated men and women identify thepolitical significance and existential meaning of assisting low-income,marginalized social groups. Through studying identity in social action,the research also investigates the ideas and methods of maintainingsocial solidarity that staff engaged in service delivery propagate in theirdaily work. The comparison between different generations of profession-als and front-line staff allows for developing an understanding of theinfluence of neo-liberalism, whether through privatization, rising eco-nomic insecurity, or management practices, on identity formation and

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behavior in relation both to low-income groups and the state. This par-ticular analytic approach, to compare generations as a way of gaugingthe impact of neo-liberalism, has arguably been insufficiently utilizedin policy literature, allowing for assumptions about the social conse-quences of both the welfare state and nationalist economic policy andglobal market capitalism.

4. Liberalization, global trends in social policy,and social change

Critiquing generational change amongst corporate executives, SimonCaulkin, writing in The Guardian, argues that over the past 20 yearsboards and managers have ‘run companies as top-down dictatorships,pursue growth by merger, destroy teamwork with runaway incen-tives, attack employment rights and conditions, outsource customerservice, treat their stakeholders as resources to be exploited, and refusewider responsibilities to society.’ They do so because

management in the 1980s was subject to an ideological hijack byChicago economics that put at the heart of governance a reduc-tive ‘economic man’ view of human nature needing to be bribed orwhipped to do their exclusive job of maximising shareholder returns.Embedded in the codes, these assumptions now have the status ofunchallenged truths.

(Caulkin, 2012)

Richard Sennett makes the same argument in Together (2011). He shows,through interviews conducted with back office staff working in financein New York City, that these managers were neither interested in thecraft of their industry or in the lives and morale of their employ-ees. Bluntly put, they were interested in making money for themselvesand their investors. This management approach became incorporatedinternationally into public sector management practices, primarily NPMwhich enforced administrative control over employee labor by measur-ing productivity against quantifiable output and excluding any mentionof social relations, for instance communication between staff and man-agement, except in relation to greater economic efficiency. The primaryfocus of human resource management across sectors has likewise beenimproving training to increase participation numbers and quantifiableoutcomes and decreasing absence (see below).


In Morocco, recent reforms of public education and health have incor-porated the logic that investment in infrastructure, participation/access,professional training, decentralization, and new management proce-dures focusing on results and efficiency will boost human capital andthus economic competitiveness. This market orientation as well asthe narrative that public institutions distribute resources is evident inthe World Bank description of the EEP launched for 2009–12. Thedescription states,

[t]he fundamental guiding principle of the EEP places the student atthe heart of the education and training system. In this context, thisEducation Development Policy Loan (EDPL) would support the Gov-ernment in its efforts to improve the accumulation of human capitalthrough the implementation of policies and measures designed to:(i) achieve universal basic education; (ii) improve system perfor-mance (teaching, management and stewardship); and (iii) improvemobilisation and utilisation of resources. The project will supportessential policy measures and actions while reinforcing results-basedapproaches.

In addition, the EDPL follows the broader orientation of the CountryPartnership Strategy (CPS, 2010–13), which claims as strategic objectives‘Enhancing growth, competitiveness and employment’ and ‘Improvingservice delivery to citizens’.6

Specifically, the Ministry of Health stated as its policy goal for2008–12, ‘[r]efocusing the role of the Minister of Health on finance, reg-ulation, planning, control, and social security’ (Ministère de la Santé,Royaume du Maroc, Plan d’Action, 2008–12: 41).7 The two mentions ofpersonnel consist of improving the infrastructure of teaching hospitalsand fighting corruption among staff.8 Likewise, the plan for reformingpublic education in Morocco (2009–12) set goals to make basic, sec-ondary, and post-secondary education more available and to improvethe quality of teaching. The more specific goals included raising par-ticipation rates in schools, particularly for girls, increasing trainingfor teachers, improving infrastructure and building more schools, andeconomizing through sub-contracting and sharing equipment.9

Another more recent education project, conducted in cooperationwith the Canadian government and called Pagesm (2011–15), is aimed atsupporting management of public education at a local level and further-ing decentralization of authority. The purpose of better management inall of these reforms, it should be said, is not only financial accountability

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but also controlling human resources, so that doctors, nurses and otherstaff coordinate use of equipment, hours of work, and so on.

In 2012, both the Ministers of Education and Health took the dra-matic and unpopular step, for professionals, of banning supplementalwork in the private sector (the capacity to implement it is another issueand largely unknown). Though understandable in light of the frequentcomplaints of absent personnel in the public sector, government jus-tifications for the decision reflect this logic of punition and assertingauthority as yielding better results for patients and students. The Min-ister of Health, El Houssein El Ouardi, explained the decision regardingmedical personnel in a newspaper interview, stating:

We know that the moment has come for cleaning up the publichealth sector and to correct this unsustainable anarchy that nowreigns there. There is no doubt: the public health sector in Moroccohas a long way to go to catch up. The decision we have taken is emi-nently political. Because we are no longer able to accept this degradedand catastrophic situation in which the public hospitals have foundthemselves for years. This is a situation where doctors in the sectorpass the majority of their time in private clinics to the detriment ofpublic health. This is intolerable.

The Minister added that the deficit of staff, or 7,000 doctors and 9,000nurses, plus 2,000 doctors and nurses at the age of retirement, meantthat the sector could not afford extensive absence of professional staff.‘If we don’t do anything, I don’t see how we can assure a minimumpublic service to our citizens in need of treatment.’ Asked about the lowconfidence the public possesses for the sector, El Ouardi responded,

[i]t is true that public hospitals lack material, appropriate and func-tioning equipment, but their operations normally depend first andabove all on men and women. The first step is that doctors and nursesreturn to the hospitals and we address afterwards the rest. Change, inmy view, is made in steps.

(27 February 2012)10

Yet, echoing Sennett’s critiques above, neglect of the substantive ‘craft’in delivering health, education, and social services, contribute to thenegative trends of absenteeism, poor performance, and corruption asmuch as poor working conditions and salaries. For example, an olderteacher in Sale, the twin city of Rabat, who had founded a well-known


program for deaf students at a mainstream school, complained that hehad been transferred to a primary school without any investigation intohis circumstances. He rushed over most afternoons to supervise, leavinghis regular job. His absenteeism was thus not due to income incen-tives or lack of status, but rather disrespect by the authorities for hisachievements and his own desires.11

Another teacher explained that she refused to participate in the latestteachers’ strike. In her early fifties, from a family of leftist politicians,she longed for the State to raise the level of professionalism and restorerespect to the institution. She said,

the problem in teaching is not just material. I stopped going on strikebecause the unions only talk about money. There is no mention ofpedagogy. We must take more interest in our craft. For sure, the con-ditions in schools are not good. There are too many students per class.But we need to improve our image and that can be done throughdemonstrating that we care about teaching.

She did remark, however, that,

the business in teaching today is in the private sector, and not justin schools but in any kind of training course. You see teachers driv-ing expensive cars whereas in the past, they worked to buy a house.We have one teacher of physics who is known for not showing upbecause he is teaching in the private sector and when he does showup he tells his students he is tired and has no desire to teach.

She then joked, ‘[t]eachers return to their regular jobs in the publicsector to have a rest.’

In the NGO sector, access to funding without highlighting ‘craft’ haspossibly engendered opportunism and weak sustainability of projects,or in other words, lack of coherent and cohesive efforts and initiative inaddressing a particular issue. In the research, NGOs repeatedly chasedcontracts without focusing on a specific area of expertise and droppedthe area of work once the contract expired. The president of a commu-nity organization in Sale who once worked in public administration inthe city spoke of how he would keep in regular contact with his formercolleagues in order to maintain the visibility of the NGO and ultimatelysecure funding. ‘If a week goes by and they haven’t contacted me,’ henoted, ‘I call them.’

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More importantly, staff recognized that numeric outputs representedthe primary evidence they had to demonstrate to prove the project’svalue and these figures often meant little more than the number of peo-ple showing up to an event. For instance, the director of a tuberculosisawareness project, who also worked as the director of a public respira-tory clinic, stated openly that they had reported in the project proposalthat they would attract 90 participants to their sessions and that is thefigure they put down in the final report. The point is not whether ornot this figure was accurate, but that it, even in the mind of the projectdirector, did little to demonstrate impact. It was closer to accounting.

Beyond reducing staff experience and clouding motivation, policystrategies and administration have undermined the social role of publicinstitutions as conveyers of social mobility, both for the professionalsworking for them and the students, patients, and other beneficiaries.Explaining how objects, individuals, and other entities possess ‘statusfunctions’, the philosopher John Searle writes,

a status function [ . . . ] is a function that is performed by an object(s),person(s), or other sort of entity(ies) and which can only be per-formed in virtue of the fact that the community in which thefunction is performed assigns a certain status to the object, person,or entity in question, and the function is performed in virtue of thecollective acceptance or recognition of the object, person, or entityas having that status.

(2010: 94)

The status function of public institutions and the ‘middle class’ sodependent upon them, and the state in general, was to symbolizeprogress in development. The formation of a middle class through stateinvestment was intended to represent ‘progress’ and those joining themiddle class or aspiring to it affirmed this representation.

Today, liberalization has altered the role of public institutions tobecome service providers for the poor, or those unable to afford privateeducation or health care, and granted a stronger role to NGOs, oftenwith the explicit aim of ‘embedding’ them in development discourseand policy strategies (Tvedt, 2002). Comparative analysis between gen-erations of practitioners indicates how much the transformation of thesocial role of institutions has influenced one’s identity as a practitionerand likewise the political meaning of assisting marginalized groups.Even if some practices, such as mobilizing resources like medicine orbooks to improve services, were sometimes the same, individuals from


older generations framed their own motivation and the relevance oftheir actions in different ways from younger colleagues.

For instance, in the research, reform plans were widely criticized byrespondents regardless of generation because they ignored the socialdimension of public services. As one teacher put it in discussing the EEP:‘They [the Ministry] haven’t talked about the fact that most of the stu-dents in State schools are poor.’ Practitioners across generations workedto mobilize resources to support service users. This particular teacher, aswell as others I interviewed, collected clothing and school materials togive to low-income students. Younger nurses and doctors, led by olderdoctors, worked with NGOs, patients, and friends to equip units andensure that patients had access to medication.

Yet, for older teachers or doctors, service for others tended to berelated to their own career trajectories, which in turn depended on theexpansion and strength of the State. For example, unlike many of hiscolleagues, the head of a gastroenterology ward in Rabat elected not totake voluntary retirement in 2005. From an ‘ordinary’ family and depen-dent on bursaries to make it through medical school, he explained that,‘I was not interested in taking the DVD (Depart Voluntaire Daba, thenickname for the program in mixed French and Arabic) because I ama doctor. Since I was little, I have been fascinated by the doctors whoworked in Sub-Saharan Africa. I practice medicine as a vocation.’ Headded:

Me, I could not work in the private sector. When I practice medicine,I see a patient who has need of me to cure him. I cannot profit fromthat. He does everything to come to see me – he gathers moneyfrom his family, friends to come to be treated. I cannot profit fromthat; I have to practice my trade [ . . . ] I have done some replacementwork but I was not at ease with it. In the private sector, they view apatient as a client who pays. When they see a patient, they see howmuch this person can pay them. If the person can pay everything,then the patient receives good treatment until the end. If he doesn’thave the means, he pays what he can and then the doctor sends himto the public sector.

The head of a pediatric unit at another, neighboring teaching hospital,who came from an elite, well-known family, explained her choice notto take retirement as down to her belief in the obligation of the modernState to care for its citizens and, more personally, her desire to resistthe administration, which was focused on financial accountability (she

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did retire in 2012 out of frustration). ‘Public health is a right but theState just wants to turn it into charity, the last resort for the poor.’ Shethought her supervisors wanted ‘to increase the number of patients forthe budget without reflecting on the quality of work. How are we goingto treat all of these people? Do we have the means to treat them?’

She also believed that public health reform had meant getting rid ofdoctors12 while adding managers and clerical staff

who spend their time on computer games and painting their nails.Doctors never meet except to talk about money, which is all theadministrators care about [ . . . ] The administration, like the State,wants social stability. They send us babies born prematurely whoweigh one and a half kilos and need equipment and treatments thatwe just don’t have. Rather than speak frankly with the parents aboutthe lack of resources available, they [the administration] prefer tohave the children go ahead and die in the hospital. As long as thepeople don’t revolt, they won’t change.

Her self-assessment was that she and her colleagues ‘did their job in spiteof increasingly difficult working conditions, where human and materialresources are reduced to the extreme. We also have difficult relationswith the administration.’ She did note, ‘it is always satisfying when wecan note positive results in an adverse context. Sometimes these resultseven seem miraculous.’

In contrast, the gastro-enterologist felt the administration could notbe held responsible for the shortage of resources in a particular unit; thatin fact the head should be responsible. ‘The administration is far away.Why should they care about the needs of a particular unit?’ he asked.The gastro-enterologist depended on contacts and patients to secureequipment like computers and medication that the hospital refused topay for in order to raise the quality of care, which his interns and res-idents insisted was competitive with the private sector. The unit headgave an example he was particularly proud of, or locating a medicationfor the fiberscope.

There is a procedure we do here with a fiberscope that requiresmedication. This medication does not exist in Morocco. I made theadministration aware of this but they said they need a laboratory toproduce it. But a laboratory won’t want to invest in this medicationwithout a sufficient clientele. That is the private sector. Doctors inthe private sector don’t care if the patient lives or dies, all they want


is money. For this medication, I asked some people to bring it fromEurope. I wrote a prescription saying we needed this medication andthese people sent it back here through their parents and others. I thenconstructed a bank, collecting medication to use later. I asked patientsto buy ten and give five to the hospital. Patients, believing I had savedtheir lives, said ‘if you want more, I can do more.’ Through this, I builta reserve of medication.

For her part, the pediatrician founded an NGO supporting children withType A Diabetes and their families. She ran weekly classes to instructfamilies how to care for children who needed to manage diabetes as alifelong condition.13 Another pediatric unit I visited had been equippedlargely through American donations brought in by the retired head.

In contrast to self-situation within a topology of social trajectories andinstitutions, younger generations described public sector and charitablework as a means to an end, whether to support individual ambitions orneeds or to do social good. A young man working for a community orga-nization in central Morocco told me, ‘I volunteer here because I don’thave a job. When I have a job, I will leave.’ The director of an umbrellaorganization for voluntary action complained, ‘this sector used to be ledby social activists. Today, we have employees who come at 9 and leaveat 5.’ Women doctors in the public sector often explicitly acknowledgedthat the hours of state employment made managing a family life easier.One doctor explained that she had to work those hours because her hus-band, also a doctor, had to work long hours in order to ‘pay the bills’ ofa private practice.

For those younger practitioners focused on mobilizing resources toimprove service quality, service for others oppressed by economic andother complex conditions reflected the realization of transnationalprinciples, whether from Islam or notions of human rights, and theweakness or failures of the state. Their assistance to service users wasa statement of non-participation in or subversion of trends caused bythe inadequacy of the state, namely unemployment, limited democra-tization, decline of public institutions, and the commercialization ofhealth and education, segregating quality according to income groupand networks (who could facilitate access to exclusive schools).

The unemployed community worker also commented, ‘it [his work]gives me a chance to do something because I don’t want to be involvedin politics.’14 The manager of the NGO-based project with disabledchildren, funded originally by Handicap International and based inSale, went further by distinguishing quality social service from both

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politics and the public administration. Though the organization wasfounded by Mehdi ben Barka, one of the most famous political figuresof the post-colonial period, the manager had never participated in partypolitics because ‘there were too many problems.’ ‘It is better to beengaged socially,’ he stated. His preference was to continue to work onprojects involved in education. ‘We do a better job of reporting than thegovernment and we hold meetings, we write reports, we are committed.’

In addition to bettering government committees and managers, socialaction for the younger generations of public sector and NGO staffbecame meaningful through translating their skills into visible, imme-diate impact. Zygmunt Bauman (2012) points to this combination ofimmediacy and universality in the aims and methods of social protestsin an era of globalization. He writes that ‘[h]ands too short to med-dle with things in global space are just long enough (or at least seemto be long enough) to embrace the locality and press it close to one’sbreast, while (hopefully) kicking off the intruders and false pretenders’(Bauman, 2012: 16). Bauman (2012: 16) also writes that protestors arespurred on by ‘[t]he knowledge that the governments in the form inwhich they have been squeezed by the “global forces” are not theprotection against instability but instability’s principal cause [ . . . ]’.

In the research, protest by younger generations took the form ofignoring the administration or working in spite of their dictates. Forexample, a nurse in the gastro-enterology ward explained that she some-times ran scans outside of authorized use for patients unable to pay feesbecause she prioritized their poverty over the financial interests of theadministration.

The social services here are negligible. We need a social worker foreach ward. But there aren’t any. Why not? Everyone comes to Rabatfrom throughout the country. Do you know how much it costs fortransport? The patient needs to be heard. There are patients who havebeen abandoned by their families because of money problems or con-flicts within the family. You do the work even with the constraints infront of you. The patient has nothing to do with the salary. You areobliged to do the work necessary. This is a patient who perhaps camefrom far away. He is far from his family. You have to make up for that.And you have to be responsible at the same time for the material sideof things, sterilization, and so on.

The nurse was lucky, though, to have a supportive unit head and cul-ture of engagement with patients. In contrast, after the retirement of


the head of the pediatric unit that had been equipped through theassistance of US NGOs, the hospital administration decided to restricttreatment in the unit to minor injuries. The decision led to the equip-ment in the pediatric unit falling into disuse and the staff becomingincreasingly demoralized. The new unit head explained that the hos-pital had limited services because it was catering to (well-connected)female doctors who wanted both to avoid standard residencies in oftendistant and ill-equipped regional hospitals and to work fixed hours inorder to maintain a family life.

The unit head was critical not only of the under-use of facilities, butalso of her colleagues’ attitude of treating medicine as a ‘day job’. Shehad encouraged other doctors to strike as a protest against managementand when that failed, tried to transfer.

It is in places like Ouejda [Eastern Morocco], where I did my res-idency, that you learn how to be a doctor. You learn because youhave to do everything. I could have stayed in Rabat but I chose to goto a regional hospital. You know you won’t have the equipment forproper treatment but you do what you can.

Critiquing a critique of capitalism as the destroyer of particular identi-ties, Žižek (2011: 285–286) responds,

The standard complaint about how global capitalism corrodes anddestroys particular lifeworlds should be countered by the claim thatsuch lifeworlds are invariably based on some form of dominationand oppression, that to a greater or lesser extent they conceal hid-den antagonisms, and that any emerging emancipatory universalitytherein is the universality of those who have no ‘proper place’within their particular world, a universality that forms the lateral linkbetween the excluded in each lifeworld.

Though Žižek is perhaps hoping for the mobilization Deacon decidesnot to wait for in his book, like Bauman, he has a point in citing pat-terns of domination and oppression and signification of liberty fromthem across different groups, nationalities, and so on. Regardless ofprofession, education, and gender, younger generations’ associated ful-fillment with denying marginalization due to unemployment, low pay,and poor working conditions, all reflective of international policies andnational and local politics, by engaging in social action offering imme-diate or proximate results. Their sense of inclusion was from using

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‘exit’ (Hirschman, 1970); from respecting or following state authority,political parties, and commercialization and the rules of the market,to express ‘voice’. Dissent was expressed through manipulating scarceresources into effective services, as with the disgruntled pediatricianspeaking highly of regional hospitals, or more philosophically as thematerial realization of transcendent values, whether connected to Islamand/or human rights. For instance, the gastro-enterology nurse com-mented: ‘It is only humanity as a motivation here. It is only the humaneside and our religion that pushes us to do the work that we have here.’The younger doctors working alongside her cited the basic ‘human right’of health as a motivation and justification.

The ‘lateral link’ Žižek cited in mobilization reflects the modern pro-cess of class formation eroded through neo-liberal policies. In Morocco,exploiting scarce resources for the realization of local change andabstract principles is a relational process, a collaborative effort pushedforward through layers of relationships and identification with the sit-uation of others. For instance, the man working with education-basedNGO projects had participated in the activities of the organization whenhe was younger and when he grew too old to participate, decided to vol-unteer. He earned a living working for an agency distributing media but‘I have time.’ He explained, ‘I have been with the organization for manyyears so I have contributed to its evolution. When we received the fund-ing, we decided Hicham [a colleague] would become full-time. He didn’thave work and was also very engaged. I will take a job in the future.’

It is in supporting social relations, and a narrative of cooperation andshared effort and benefit, where global social policies can play a role inboth improving front-line services and re-working institutions so thatthey address the economic insecurity, lack of job opportunities, andpolitical alienation from the State amongst both ‘middle class’ practi-tioners and service users oppressed by poverty and other conditions.If the implementation of global policy is framed as relational or betweenthe individuals delivering and using services, then issues of job creation,working conditions and experience, education and training, interactionbetween teachers and students, patients and doctors, or staff in NGOsand their beneficiaries, all become part of funding streams, develop-ment goals, and particular initiatives, from literacy classes to postnatalcare. As I suggest in the conclusion, policies like the Global Social Floor(Deacon and Cohen, 2011) should be conceived in relation to socialactors and the relationships they have between them, for example,between the economic position of low-level bureaucrats administeringa program of basic income and impoverished urban or rural families.


5. Conclusion: Integrating social analysis into global policy

This paper has argued for a new approach to devising global healthand social policies that relies on developing an understanding of howpolicies can influence, and have influenced, the social identity and prac-tices of practitioners working on front-line service delivery. Such anapproach would acknowledge the practical need for locally trained per-sonnel to achieve global and national policy objectives and the broadernecessity for collective participation in social change. It would also indi-cate the weaknesses of policies and management approaches orientedtoward neo-liberalism in raising the quality of service delivery. The busi-ness principles underlying the implementation process of global policieshave pushed collective mobilization into a sphere of resistance and inde-pendence rather than the agency for national development so desiredby development thinkers and organizations (see Deacon et al., 2010;UNCTAD, 2009).

Global health, education, and social policies are the appropriate sitefor linking social identity and social relations with advancement in indi-vidual quality of life because policy can link institutions with narrativesof collective progress. The issue is to maintain democratic reflexivity ata transnational level while attempting to integrate social relations withsocial intervention. For his part, Deacon (2010: 1) critiques the relega-tion of social policy ‘in the context of development’ ‘to a residual safetynet approach’. He calls for rebuilding a developmental welfare state anduniversal approach that includes the middle class in service provisionand, critically, for the prominence of regional and international actorsin setting the policy agenda.

In his recent work, Deacon highlights the contribution theregionalization of social policy can make to equity and democratization,not only through re-distribution mechanisms but also the strength-ening of regional institutions that enforce regulations and provide anarena to push for social rights and engage in knowledge sharing (Deaconet al., 2010). He and his co-authors also note that civil society, namely‘middle class’ professional groups and representative organizations andinstitutions must be behind the policies. They write,

[s]trong political will at the highest levels and strong adherence bycivil society at the basis are very much needed in order to buildsuccessfully regional integration with a social dimension. The actualrole played by regional organizations, beyond the declarations and

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intentions, depend on overcoming the limited technical and humanresource capacity available.

(Deacon et al., 2012: 366)

Though referring explicitly to Africa here, the authors stress in reviewingtrends in regional social policy in Latin America that bureaucrats, intel-lectuals, and salaried workers must see their interest in regionalization,again reinforcing the importance of non-elites and institutions infurthering a policy agenda.

I am suggesting in this chapter that though reference to the par-ticipation and support of organizations and institutions like unions,universities, public administrations, and other institutions and orga-nizations is important for understanding how progressive policies canbe successful, the use of abstract categories in policy analysis missesthe profundity of social impact and the capacity of policy to alter thesocial nature of these very institutions as well as professional groups.Deacon and his co-authors cite Manuel Riesco, who in his chapteron ‘Regional Social Policies in Latin America: Binding Material for aYoung Giant’ argues that regional integration in Latin America willnot succeed if it fails to ‘seduce the region’s emerging, overwhelminglymassive, social force: the new urban salaried middle classes’ (Deaconet al., 2012: 366). The problem with this kind of analysis is that itseparates out a policy process from the constitution of these middleclasses.

The current economic and social insecurity of younger generations ofprofessional school and university graduates in places like Morocco (andelsewhere) has blurred their ‘status function’, as they can still be respon-sible for teaching, medical treatment, or volunteering locally, but theconnection of this task to their social identity and relations with oth-ers is unclear. Younger generations of practitioners in Morocco alreadyin some instances identify their work as realizing transnational princi-ples promoting human dignity, human rights, and the value of assistingothers. Global social policies can refer to these principles in managingsocial relations within front-line services but also integrate them intomore ambitious strategies to promote job creation, cooperation, and thedevelopment of ‘craft’ in health, education, and social service provision.The latter would rely upon a narrative of the social role of institutionsworking in these areas as promoting individual rights, collective ben-efits, and importantly, cooperation to maximize shared resources. Thisfocus would also connect global social policies like the Global Social


Floor (Deacon, 2013; Deacon and Cohen, 2011), which supports a basicincome, with other policies in a frame of social change.

To avoid abstract ideas becoming universal models, even if the dis-course within policy strategies is explicitly not related to economiccompetitiveness, that serve funding agencies and governments ratheror more than local populations, policy administration and evaluationwould account for a range of elements reflecting participation andrecognition of individual perceptions and needs. These could includejob satisfaction, types of and results from communication with ser-vice users, and methods used to address the complexity of service userneeds induced by poverty. The point is that abstract methods allow bothfor shared benefit, between practitioner and service user as well as thelarger community, and singularity, or individual recognition of value ina specific act. This singularity resembles philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s(2003: 1950) analysis of enunciation, referencing in turn French linguistEmile Benveniste. Here enunciation is the most unique, most material,and most immediate evocation of the subject while remaining generic,open, and elusive in its omnipresence in speech. Front-line delivery ofservices should evoke unique interpretations of fulfillment and satis-faction from participants while realizing abstract organization of socialrelations and in turn, goals for improving health, education, and socialsupport.

Notes

1. See http://www.unodc.org/documents/human-trafficking/Toolkit-files/08-58296_tool_10-3.pdf for a clear explanation of Logical Framework, which thisdocument describes as ‘a tool for improving the planning, implementation,management, monitoring and evaluation of projects. The log frame is a wayof structuring the main elements in a project and highlighting the logicallinkages between them.’

2. The Jadaliyya website offers social snapshots into Maghrebi countries, listingunemployment figures alongside comparative military and health expendi-tures. Morocco’s figures are listed as the following: Population 32,309,239;GDP $163 billion; Unemployment 9.2 percent; Youth Unemployment (ages15–24) 21.9 percent; Military Expenditures 5 percent of GDP (World Rank:16); Health Expenditures 5.5 percent of GDP (World Rank: 128) (http://maghreb.jadaliyya.com).

3. Birdsall (2006: 4) offers as an example the Ministry of Finance in post-TalibanAfghanistan, which struggled to

keep talented staff at salaries of $100 a month who could earn $1000(or more) a month working for the UN, the World Bank, or USAID. Thepressure to leave government was all the higher because the presence of

Shana Cohen 197

so many external actors led to increases in housing and other costs inpostwar Kabul.

4. See http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2012/05/oops-economists-in-confused-search-for-the-middle-class-in-the-developing-world-2.php

5. See also http://www.voxeu.org/article/new-measure-global-middle-class foran argument by Dadush and Ali that car purchases can represent the middleclass. They write,

[t]here’s a better way to measure the middle class. Cars are big-ticketitems that indicate the ability and willingness to purchase many othernonessential goods [ . . . ] After correcting for household size, measuringcar ownership suggests that the middle class in developing G20 countriesis in the range of 550 million to 600 million people – about 50% largerthan the number arrived at using the Milanovic-Yitzhaki definition.

6. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:22608186∼pagePK:64257043piPK: 437376∼theSitePK:4607,00.html?cid=3001_6

7. The more specific policy aims included support for regionalization of care,computerization of records, establishing a partnership with the private andnon-profit sectors, making the presentation and administration of paper-work easier for patients, making hospital space easier to navigate and medi-cation more readily available onsite, and clarifying standards and improvingoversight for hospital care and medication.

8. In order to gain more knowledge of corruption in public health, the Min-istry of Health decided to coordinate a study with the office of TransparencyInternational in Morocco. The Plan cites this study, reporting that 80 percentof households in the research claimed that corruption in public health wasvery common and 40 percent of respondents who had been in contact withpersonnel in public hospitals, or 23 percent of total respondents, had madesome kind of illicit payment. Half of these households had paid between20 et 100 dh and 8 percent claimed to have paid between 100 and 500 dh(4 percent more than 500 dh). More than half who had made a payment haddone so on a regular basis and overwhelmingly (74 percent) to nurses. ThePlan also mentions that absenteeism, perhaps due to concurrent work in theprivate sector, is also a problem but undocumented. (2009: 32) (Ministere duSante, Plan 2009–12; the Transparency International report was published in2006).

9. Banque Africaine de Développement, 2009, «Appui de Program d’Urgence del’éducation nationale», pp. vi–vii.

10. http://www.pharmaciemapress.com/page/actualite/actualite-generale/actualites-hopitaux/el-houssein-el-ouardi-la-sante-publique-au-maroc-a-un-enorme-retard-a-rattraper.html

11. In fact, a study on teacher and health worker absenteeism in six develop-ing countries (Chaudhury et al., 2006) found that higher status teachers,as well as doctors, were absent more than less powerful staff members,potentially because of less fear of monitoring and sanctions. The authorsreported, ‘[w]orking conditions can affect incentives to attend school, evenwhere receipt of salary is independent of attendance and hence provides nosuch incentive’. They listed potable water, transport and roads as positively


correlated with attendance while housing provision appeared to discourageabsence. Training did not discourage absence, though degrees in educationamongst teachers and origin in the community generally did. However,the paper falls back into conventional World Bank suggestions (several ofthe authors work at development banks), such as promoting school choiceto encourage better practice, financial incentives to work in rural areas,decentralization of school control, and increased monitoring of absence, butthe data indicates the need for greater qualitative analysis on the effect ofimprovements in the working environment, space for individual initiative,and educating local residents, whether to push for better services or to workin service delivery, on attendance and performance. Looking also at front-line services, but from the perspective of motivation rather than absence,the OXFAM report on public health, Blind Optimism (2009), praises healthworkers for working ‘very long hours for minimal financial reward, moti-vated by their desire to help the sick. The fact that men and women stillundergo years of training in order to enter public service in conditions ofextreme under-funding is testimony to the importance of the public serviceethos.’ ‘Blind Optimism,’ Oxfam Briefing Paper, February 2009, p. 31.

12. The Health Plan mentions an evaluation conducted in 2000 on public healthstaff working in the private sector as well, even in contravention of the con-tract they have signed not to do so or for only a limited number of hoursif they are university faculty working at teaching hospitals. The study couldnot offer precise numbers but did cite estimates of about 50 percent of pri-vate clinic personnel coming from the public sector. This figure would havechanged after the voluntary retirement policy was offered in 2005, when anumber of experienced doctors elected to leave the public sector and opena private practice. The pediatrician involved in diabetes care told me thatit was just her and a colleague with established political connections whostayed in her unit. All the other doctors decided to leave, some because theywanted more money, some who wanted to retire, and the rest because theydid not want to be left with the extra burden of care caused by staff depar-ture (without replacement). (Plan d’action santé, 2008–12 – Réconcilier lecitoyen avec son système de santé, p. 32).

13. She retired out of frustration with the administration but still works withchildren who have Type A Diabetes.

14. On the other hand, the turnover in the NGO sector means that organi-zations often do not acquire a depth in human resources. A trustee of anorganization running pre-schools for low-income children was just as bluntwhen assessing the role of volunteers in the sector: ‘They are not dependable.The may not come or the NGO may depend on the creativity and initiativeof one person and if they are unemployed and find a job, the associationdisappears.’

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10Toward a Transformative GlobalSocial Policy?Bob Deacon

1. Introduction

When an event was organized for me on 10 July 2014 to mark my retire-ment from academic life, not just from Sheffield University from whereI had retired some years earlier, I was overwhelmed to be presented witha bound copy of drafts of all the chapters, except mine, which now makeup this book. My insistence that I was retiring completely from academiclife to take up a new life of engagement with the transition politics ofmy adopted town of Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire in the UK was thereforeput to the test. The book, I was told, needed a final chapter!

Once I read the chapters I had no hesitation in accepting this obli-gation. I am truly honored and pleased to have been presented witha set of such thoughtful contributions from some of my closest andlongest lasting academic colleagues: chronologically, Fiona Williams,Ian Gough, Paul Stubbs, Meri Koivusalo, Robert O’Brien, Huck-Ju Kwon,Nicola Yeates, Asun St.Clair, Vicki Lawson, and some of my most recentcollaborators, Shana Cohen and Alexandra Kaasch. Together these chap-ters not only present a validation of what I have written over the yearsbut also demand a response to questions that I have not adequatelyaddressed.

2. Global social policy – between contestation andcooperation

What I take from these contributions is that my insistence that globalprocesses and actors are important in social policy analysis is nowaccepted. My analysis that there is a contestation of social policy ideaswithin and between international organizations (IOs) is reflected in the

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202 Toward a Transformative Global Social Policy?

contributions, especially of Robert O’Brien, Meri Koivusalo, Ian Gough,and Asun St.Clair and Victoria Lawson. Had Alexandra Kaasch con-tributed her own chapter, she would have cautioned that I overstatethe case and that where there is continued contestation between globalagencies it is increasingly about claims of the agencies’ professionalcompetence more than about policy content (Kaasch, 2013). Had PaulStubbs done the same, he would have cautioned that IOs, as we knewthem, have been superseded by complex processes of global policy-making in the flexible, multi-actored, policy spaces opened up betweenorganizations (Stubbs and Wedel, forthcoming).

The question of whether or not there is greater policy synergy nowbetween the World Bank and the International Labor Organization(ILO) on labor rights’ issues is addressed by Robert O’Brien (Chapter 8).He traces the issue historically and notes the distinction between the1980–2002 period of ‘antagonism’ and the 2000–10 period of ‘accom-modation’. This leads him to ask what will now emerge from the presentperiod in relation to the World Bank and the International MonetaryFund’s (IMF) attitude to the ILO-driven policy of the Social Protec-tion Floor (SPF), agreed to by the International Labor Conference inJune 2012. While organized labor is fully supportive, he argues, it isless clear if the international financial institutions (IFIs) will agree onanything that runs counter to neo-liberal conceptions of labor mat-ters. Indeed, in my recent book on the SPF (Deacon, 2013), I pointto a potentially new period (beginning in 2012) of active cooperation,at least between the World Bank and the ILO, on social protection.One expression of that is that they jointly chair the new Social Protec-tion Inter-Agency Co-operation Board (SPIAC-B). However, the WorldBank’s real commitment to working to the same agenda with the ILOon the SPF has to be questioned because of its competing SPARCSinitiative – a suggested framework for assessing social protection systems(first muted in February 2013). Although the World Bank proposed thecooperation with and participation of many agencies, SPARCS wouldbe under the overall leadership and secretariat of the World Bank. Thiscan be read as a challenge to the shared chairing of the SPIAC-B. A lotdepends on the new Director of the ILO’s Social Protection Department(renamed from the Social Security Department) Isabel Ortiz (previouslyof UNDESA and UNICEF), and how she and Arup Banjeri (Head of theWorld Bank’s Social Protection and Labor Division) relate – a furtherdemonstration of my argument that global social policy-making is heav-ily influenced by individual players within and around IOs (Deacon,2013).

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3. Extending global social policy concepts – from3Rs to 5Rs?

Reading the contributions to this book, it seems that ‘the three Rs ofglobal social policy’ has turned out to be a singularly useful concept,used or referred to here in different ways by almost all authors. I hadargued that social policy, whether at national or global level, couldbe conceptualized as combining three mechanisms. Firstly, of redis-tribution from richer to poorer or from those without to those withchildren, and so on. Secondly, of regulation such that companies andother private actors behave more socially responsibly. Thirdly, certainsocial rights are prescribed for any jurisdiction. A progressive globalsocial policy would ensure a greater degree of trans-national redistribu-tion, more effective trans-national social regulation, and more effectivemechanisms to ensure the realization of international social rights.

Meri Koivusalo’s contribution (Chapter 4) challenges my idealisticoptimism with the very important argument that the 3Rs in practicehave become hollowed out of any radical social reformist content.Global Redistribution has become only specific funds (for example, theGlobal Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria) to purchase mag-ical bullet medical intervention rather than introducing global taxes tofinance preventive public health services. Global Regulation has becomeself-regulation and ‘smart regulation’ which is far removed from policiesabout global social and labor standards. The effort to facilitate intellec-tual property rights is much stronger than realizing the universal rightto health.

Another way of engaging with the concept of the 3Rs is reflected inthe chapters by Ian Gough (Chapter 6), and Asun St. Clair and VictoriaLawson (Chapter 7) – in effect, they want to add Resource Consciousnessas an element. This means that global social policy research and practicehave to take account of the planet’s ecological crisis and natural resourcedepletion. This is a serious challenge to my work, as it implies that thereis a real possibility that a technological innovative fix to the greenhousegas emission and consequent climate change disaster cannot be madeto work, that green growth will not fix it, and that we therefore haveto contemplate ‘a truly sustainable social policy that [ . . . ] embrace[s] awide range of “social reproduction” and “eco-maintenance” functions’(Gough, this volume). What is needed, therefore, is ‘a “transformativesocial policy” to promote new patterns of production, consumption andinvestment, change producer and consumer behavior while improvingwell-being, and ensuring a fairer distribution of power and resources’


(Gough, this volume, with reference to Cook et al. (2012)). In otherwords, we may need to face a scenario where not only do we rejecta global social policy of growth and trickle down – articulated byAsun St. Clair and Vicky Lawson as rejecting the ‘ “dominant povertyknowledge” (DPK) as a widespread discourse that sees the reduction ofpoverty as contingent upon unending growth and consumption’– butwhere we also need to reject a global social policy merely constituted ofthe 3Rs. A transformative global social policy would need to contem-plate global redistribution in a no-growth future where natural resourceconservation (of water, food, and land) becomes a key underpinningelement of that policy. This creates concern (shared by Ian Gough andmyself) about the vagueness of the emerging dominant post-2015 globaldevelopment discourse surrounding the ‘sustainable development goals’as a way of moving beyond the Millennium Development Goals.1 How-ever, it is important to note that Asun St. Clair and Vicky Lawson, bothheavily involved with the climate change COP discussions, argue thatglobal social policy as redistribution, regulation, and rights is importantfor tackling ‘climate change as a question of human security addressingboth socio-economic and environmental vulnerabilities’ (St. Clair andLawrence, this volume).

Shana Cohen, as Paul Stubbs and Alexandra Kaasch put it in theopening chapter, ‘helps to envision a radical, relational and reflexiveglobal social policy complementing Deacon’s own 3Rs of rights, redis-tribution and regulation’. What she argues goes to the very heart ofmy own articulated political strategy. In a fine, detailed textual argu-ment with the concluding chapter of my 2007 book, and with some ofmy other writings, she takes issue with my position. There I reviewedtwo political responses to the neo-liberal globalization project by thoseconcerned with its social consequences. First was the market-drivenequalization position (Desai, 2005) which argued we would all even-tually be working to the same labor and social standards by virtue ofa global leveling-out process, especially if free labor movement waspermitted. The second was Hardt and Negri’s (2004) variant of theMarxist revolutionary alternative strategy which eschewed detailed pol-icy formulation and strategy building in favor of waiting for the massesto erupt. Instead, I argued for a third position, that ‘while “wait-ing” for the posse to get its act together, we should seek to reformexisting neo-liberal global capitalism in a global reformist direction’(Deacon, 2007: 191).2 I argued for an alliance of those working inand alongside IOs and progressive global policy advocacy coalitions

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often ‘working in and between the spaces of often frozen institutions’(Deacon, 2007: 190) to articulate a social reformist set of global poli-cies. Shana Cohen’s concern is that the alternative was framed in termsonly of constructing an abstract set of global policy goals and princi-ples. If pushed I have answered that kind of criticism with the ‘scissors’response: progressive global principles from above combined with socialpressures within countries from below put a double pressure upon gov-ernments reluctant to meet social needs. I never suggested the jobcould be done at the global level alone or was merely a technical issue.In that sense Cichon’s recent assessment of ‘his’ SPF policy reflects mythinking:

These (international) organizations have carried the ball as far asthey could [ . . . ]. The global consensus on the Social Protection Floorprovides moral guidance and legitimacy, as well as a political shieldfor national demands. The global community of nations has decidedthat everyone should enjoy a minimum of social protection and thatsocieties should gradually build higher levels of social security on thebasis of strong principles. And it has decided so unanimously [ . . . ]

(Cichon, 2013, emphasis added)

Within this context, Shana Cohen ‘explores the possibility of devel-oping a “middle ground” between the formulation of policy strategiesamongst and within the network of international institutions, consul-tants, INGOs, and national aid agencies and the concerns and mobi-lization of those affected by these policies’ (Cohen, Chapter 9, thisvolume). This echoes the critique of Yeates (Chapter 2, this volume)that I do not focus enough on the role of transnational social move-ments in global social change, but Cohen takes it further by developinga persuasive argument for a global social policy political strategy whichprioritizes direct engagement by IOs and others, not with governments,but with people affected by global neo-liberal change so as to close‘the gap between policy strategies set by transnational actors and thepractice of generating social change’ (Cohen, this volume). She quotesBauman sympathetically, arguing that protestors are spurred on by ‘[t]heknowledge that the governments in the form in which they have beensqueezed by the “global forces” are not the protection against instabil-ity but instability’s principal cause [ . . . ]’ (Bauman, 2012: 16). She basesher case on the response she observed in Morocco by front-line healthand social service professionals, NGOs, and users faced with the damage


inflicted by Public Sector Management principles and other aspects ofneo-liberalism. She argues:

[i]t is in supporting social relations, and a narrative of cooperationand shared effort and benefit, where global social policies can play arole in both improving frontline services and re-working institutionsso that they address the economic insecurity, lack of job opportu-nities, and political alienation from the State amongst both ‘middleclass’ practitioners and service users oppressed by poverty and otherconditions.

Concretely she argues that ‘policies like the Global Social Floor shouldbe conceived in relation to social actors and the relationships they havebetween them, for example, between the economic position of low-levelbureaucrats administering a program of basic income and impoverishedurban or rural families’ (Cohen, this volume). This interestingly takesme right back to the radical politics of the 1970 Case Con days referredto in Chapter 1, and to the conceptualization of socialist social pol-icy I articulated in 1983: ‘[t]he overriding distinguishing feature of thefuture communist social policy [ . . . ] is the embodiment within welfarepolicy and provision of a new set of social relations [ . . . ] of “recipro-cal cooperation” ’ (Deacon, 1983: 42). Or again; ‘socialist social policy[ . . . ] has central to it the transformation of the social relationship ofwelfare’ (Deacon, 1983: 234). Indeed, challenging the paternalistic prac-tices and hierarchical social relations that were then so often exhibitedin the welfare state and reflecting the ‘in and against the state’ radicalpolitics of the time (London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 1980),I suggested, in terms which are now echoed by Shana Cohen, that in thefuture there should be a ‘new set of social relations [ . . . ] the relation-ships between users and providers, producers and consumers, helpersand helped, administrators and receivers would be transformed beyondrecognition’ (Deacon, 1983: 42).

Certainly, the suggested R of ‘relational’ fits nicely with FionaWilliams’ concern that we have a global care crisis as well as a globaleco and financial crisis to address. In terms of the care gap in mywork, Fiona Williams (Chapter 5, this volume) is of course right. It isno coincidence that in my acknowledgements in my retirement lecturedelivered in Sheffield in July 2013, I thanked Fiona for the child careof our children, excusing myself that that was in the 1970s, although itis clear that, even today, academic households often maintain a rathergendered division of labor. The concern about (national) social policy

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resulting from the working out of conflicts of interests based on class,gender, and ethnicity in the context of capitalism, patriarchy, and impe-rialism through the associated mobilizations of these interests and thediscourse employed by them around work, family, and nation (Williams,1989) did find, if perhaps crudely, its way into my books published in1997 and 2007. I found such interest conflicts and associated discoursesreflected at the global level (Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 55;Deacon, 2007: 21). For example, the World Bank versus ILO contestreflected in part the contest of class interests and associated discourses.The global gender debates found certain global actors on one side oranother although, of course, in quite nuanced ways, with, for example,the World Bank buying into a gendered development analysis and sup-porting the empowerment of women in a development context. Thelegacy of imperialism shaped in part the UN and its G77 versus theG7/8 and the IMF conflicts. My work on what I called the North–SouthImpasse in progressive global policy dialogs (Deacon, 2001: 69, 2007:187) acknowledged this global post-colonial tension too. I did not how-ever follow fully my own prescription that it was now the turn of theGlobal South to fashion a different set of global social policies exceptinsofar as I put the case for and began to work on diverse regional socialpolicies. Recent work by Lendvai and Stubbs (2009), used by both ofus recently (Deacon and Stubbs, 2013), might provide us with a way ofhandling more complexly the post-colonial issues still shaping the pol-itics of global social policy. Certainly, returning to the attempts I madeto inject the three dimensions of class, gender, and race into a globalsocial policy analysis, I never tangled with issues of intersectionalityand multiple oppressions. Here the forthcoming work of Fiona Williams(forthcoming) will be important.

Interestingly, Fiona’s comparative care research led her to the globalcare chain and to her sharp and succinct reflection in her chapterof the five dynamics involved in the political economy of care: thetransnational movement of health and care labor, the transnationaldynamics of care commitments as migrants, the transnational move-ment of care capital (private markets in health and social care), and therole of transnational and international political actors (global care pol-icy discourses, and transnational social movements). This is, in effect,a pleasing working out, based on substantial empirical research in onesocial policy field, of the five impacts that I argued globalization had onthe making and content of social policy. These impacts were summa-rized as globalization (a) setting welfare states in competition with eachother, (b) bringing new (international) players into the making of social


policy, (c) raising the issues with which social policy is concerned to asupranational level, (d) creating a global private market in social provi-sion, and (e) encouraging ‘a global movement of peoples that challengesterritorial-based structures and assumptions of welfare obligation andentitlement’ (Deacon, 2007: 9–10).

Perhaps then, we need to refer to 5Rs (although this loses its connec-tion with the original 3Rs – known to generations of UK school childrenas the basics of Reading, (w)Riting, and (a)Rithmetic) – with globalsocial policy consisting of global policies for Redistribution, Regulation,Rights, Resource (conservation), and Relationality.

4. The relevance of global social policy

Despite the obvious interest and expansion of global perspectives withinsocial policy analysis, questions about if and how global social policymatters are frequently raised, also in the contributions to this book.

Responding to the criticism of my alleged ignorance about the impactof global social policy prescriptions on national social policy, Huck-juKwon (Chapter 3) finds that they are mediated through countriesdiversely. In my latest work on the Global Social Protection Floor (Dea-con, 2013) for which future impacts can only be guessed and myattempts, with Paul Stubbs, to theorize global social policy change (Dea-con and Stubbs, 2013), I have indeed focused purely on how policy atthe global level is made. However, the criticism of neglecting the actualinfluence of global social policy on national social policy-making isironic given that my stumbling empirically upon the role of global socialpolicy actors influencing post-communist social policy (the foundationof the 1997 book) precisely described and analyzed how the World Bank,the ILO, other UN agencies impacted differently upon the three coun-tries studied because of the different strategies open to and pursued bythe agencies in the three different national contexts. Thus, in Hungary,the World Bank and IMF were able to ‘call the shots’ (Deacon withHulse and Stubbs, 1997: 104), because they found willing partners insidethe country, and the ILO failed to. In Bulgaria, the strength of tripar-tism within the governing process ‘created a level playing field betweenthe Bank and ILO’ (Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 109), and inthe Ukraine, the Bank failed to engage with any national actor while theILO and UNDP talked to the state socialist Labour Ministry and blockedany reforms (Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 119). More generally,I concluded, ‘[g]overnments, and social and trade union movements,can and do make a difference and welcome or block advice coming from

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different organizations’ (Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 151). Fur-ther empirical and conceptual work of the kind suggested by Huck-juKwon and others is needed to explicate the connections between socialpolicy-making at the global level and at the national.

Yeates (Chapter 2, this volume, and Yeates, 2001) draws attention towhat is perceived to be a lack of interest in my work on transnationalsocial movements and the ways in which these shape developmentsat the global and regional level. My focus is said to be too much onglobal or intergovernmental institutions and their internal processesand not enough on how IOs’ policies and regional policies might beshaped by such actors from below. In terms of theoretical exposition,quite central to my writings has been the concept of ‘complex mul-tilateralism’ (O’Brien et al., 2000) within which inter-state processesare complemented by the direct engagement between the relativelyautonomous secretariats of IOs and transnational labor, women’s andenvironmental movements. In Global Social Policy and Governance (Dea-con, 2007), in reviewing the social policy of international non-stateactors, I examine the contribution to global policy discourses of inter-national trade unions, the global women’s movement, and what I referto as the ‘emergence of ethnic and religious-based claims to welfare’(Deacon, 2007: 104). In World-Regional Social Policy and Global Gover-nance (Deacon, Macovei, Van Langenhove and Yeates, 2010), there is achapter on ‘Regional Social Policy from below’ and one on ‘RegionalSocial Policy from above’, although it is true I jointly authored the sec-ond and not the first! Depending on the particular set of questionsposed within the broad field of global social policy analysis, particu-lar researchers are likely to focus on one or other set of transnationalactors. With my own starting point being the search for global actorsshaping post-communist social policy, a focus upon formal intergovern-mental organizations was empirically bound to follow, leading to themapping of IOs’ social policies. Other approaches in other contexts areequally valid if the empirics lead one there. This point is returned towhen we consider Shana Cohen’s contribution, which challenges meon the political strategy to realize a progressive global social policy.

5. The future of a progressive global social policy

The turn to regional social policy was perhaps a stepping stone to afuture global social policy or a change of course and retreat from anyprospect of a progressive global social policy. It reflected the North–South3 impasse: the seeming impossibility at the turn of the century


of progressive social policy analysts reaching a consensus across theequator. Structural adjustment cast its long shadow. Progressives in theGlobal North talking of global standards were EU protectionists in dis-guise. Robert O’Brien (2008) had long argued, however, that regionalismprovided no shield from the destructive forces of neo-liberal globaliza-tion. Nonetheless some of us continued to believe and hope that theEU’s proclaimed social market economy could provide a model (albeitbehind protective doors) of a regulated capitalism with elements ofthe 3Rs. Like others I argued (Deacon, 1999) that the EU could alsoplay a role globally in making the case for such policies elsewhere andglobally. This was despite also acknowledging how little the EU haddone to secure a socially regulated post-communist capitalism (Dea-con with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997) and how ineffective it continued tobe in influencing other global social agendas in a progressive direction(Torbie, 2009). I am still doing so today. I am writing this in Pretoria,having spent the last three days here, wearing for the last time my‘UNECSO Chair in Regional Integration, Migration and the Free Move-ment of Peoples’ hat at a SADC–ILO–IOM4 technical meeting discussinghow SADC might turn into reality its new Draft Labor Migration ActionPlan 2013–15, which includes the aspiration that migrant workers mov-ing with SADC might have ‘access to social benefits and health and(a) continuum of care across borders’ (SADC, 2013). Of course, the EUis a model here even as UK’s Cameron tries, as I write (August, 2013) todestroy it.

Within this context Nicola Yeates chastises me for not paying enoughattention to ALBA and for not seeing this as a model of a socialist formof cooperation among nations. My defense on technical grounds wouldbe that, on the one hand, the study referred to was of regional associ-ations of countries and their policies. ALBA as an agreement betweenlike-minded countries without such a common secretariat or policy-making process fell outside our purview and, on the other hand, theaccount she quotes was jointly authored with the other authors con-strained by UNDESA sensitivities. Substantively however I am not sure.Of course, the reduction in poverty in Venezuela and elsewhere, thesharing between countries, including Cuba, of health personnel, andthe challenge posed to US interests in the region are to be applauded.Perhaps, it is precisely the sharply critical approach I developed to thestate socialist ‘achievements’ of the former Eastern Europe in ‘my earlywritings on socialist social policy’ (Yeates, this volume) that led to thiscaution. That experience of actually existing state socialism was neg-ative in a number of ways, not least the economic ineffectiveness of

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top-down central planning and the unequal or often oppressive socialrelations of welfare embodied in social provision. Returning to the ques-tion about the value of the ‘turn’ to regional social policy, it is importantto restate the limitations of this strategy. In many parts of the globethe strategy is, for now, inappropriate as no effective regional group-ings of countries exist or have much hope of existing, such as in theMiddle East. In others, such as in Africa, the aspirations toward regionalsocial policies exceed the institutional capacity to deliver. In others suchas China, unless that is conceived of as its own region, the conceptdoes not work. Equally important is the shift in ‘global’ social pol-icy practice toward the South–South dialogs on social policy and theincreased role of Southern donors in shaping national social policies inothers Southern states. Rebecca Surender and Robert Walker (2013: 253)conclude, ‘South-South cooperation is here to stay. These new develop-ments will undoubtedly have significant consequences [ . . . ] for existinginternational development institutions and global social policy debates.’

Or is it still the case that progressive social policies at the global levelsuch as the SPF will make a difference? My reflection upon this now isto note that in the 2007 book I did call for a set of principles whichshould guide the practice of the epistemic communities and associatedpractitioners working, as I put it, reflecting the terms of the 1983 bookat a global level ‘in and against and in between the international organi-zations’ (Deacon, 2007: 179). I also suggested in the 2013 book that theSPF had provided us with a set of such principles: ‘a significant legacy ofthe story told in this book is the establishment of a global set of socialpolicy principles which will endure and can guide the disparate actors oftoday and tomorrow’ (Deacon, 2013: 184). The missing element in thismore recent writing is indeed how those working in IOs, INGOs and AidAgencies working with such progressive principles might engage with ser-vice providers and service users in a shared politics of radical social change.Can such a radical global development politics be fashioned? One prob-lem identified by Paul Stubbs and I (Deacon and Stubbs, 2007) is thatthe very processes of consultancy-driven international development hascaptured and de-radicalized a whole generation in many countries thatmight otherwise have played such a radical role. Not only have gov-ernments become agencies for the realization of neo-liberal goals, asCohen and Baumann identified, but so have many of those who wouldhave been activists in an earlier era been bought off by and bought intothe existing form of development politics. Shana Cohen would suggestthat her experiences in Morocco provide a counter to this and that thepossibilities of a radical engagement across the international agency,


front-line service delivery, and user experience exists. This is a fruitfulterrain for future research, analysis, and practice.

There is one aspect of this radical political process issue that hasattracted my concern in the context of the ILO’s SPF and that is theshortcomings of the tripartite ILO organization at global, regional,national, and local levels. I argued that if the ILO is indeed to become aprogressive global agency working in the interests of residents and notjust workers as implied by the SPF, then it has to rethink the constitu-tion which presently excludes any representation of SPF users and oftenonly reluctantly permits their attendance at policy-making gatherings.I suggested

the reality of social partner dialogues and mechanisms in manycountries and regional associations is far more complex than sug-gested by the formal tripartite structure recently reaffirmed withinthe ILO. The ITUC, and hence ACTRAV within the ILO needs to finda more effective way of working alongside and with ‘representativesof beneficiaries’ who will increasingly be residents and not workers.

(Deacon, 2013: 162)

My recent experience at the SADC–ILO–IOM regional meeting inJohannesburg reinforced these concerns. What should have been a dis-cussion of the social protection of migrants as they move across regionalborders became a discussion of the portability of social security benefitsof organized workers as they cross borders. When someone suggestedthat migrants themselves needed to be consulted, the response was‘that any Tom, Dick, or Harry’ could set themselves up as a migrantorganization.

5.1 . . . or is the progressive potential elsewhere?

Let me end with a more general reflection upon the prospects for aprogressive ‘global social policy’, even of the existing 3Rs kind, the crit-icisms of the absence of a focus on the care issue and climate issues,and the criticisms of its existing political strategy notwithstanding.Global social policy and the formulation of the reformist 3Rs versionof it arose within a particular time and place. Not only I but oth-ers too (Patomaki, 1998) were articulating the case for a global socialreformist politics in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall andin the context of an emerging global neo-liberal hegemony. A debatecould be had within international agencies and global policy circles ofthe time between defenders of a European socially regulated versus a

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US unregulated form of global capitalism. The case for global standardscould be put. There was a progressive alliance among a large numberof Northern governments in terms of their development policy towardthe South. To counter the Davos Summit and the hegemony of eco-nomics, there was the Social Summit. All of that has changed. The riseof the South both in terms of civil society activists and in terms ofgovernment interests created the North–South impasse in global policyformulation within the UN. The undemocratic injection of the narrowMDGs into the situation eroded some of the earlier UN Copenhagengains. The fact that the ILO was able to develop its new SPF policydespite this global fragmentation was exceptional (Deacon, 2013) andwas carried partly because much of Latin America helped cement whatwas left of the earlier progressive alliance. In general, the space for pro-gressive social policy agendas within the UN has reduced. The increasedrole of China and India within international fora, including the newG20, has muddied the global social policy-making waters. The rise ofan Islamic globalization changes the terms of debate too. Even pre-viously hallowed UN Human Rights declarations and conventions arecontested. In my retirement lecture delivered in July 2013, I assertedthat the high moment of a ‘northern-driven social reformist’ globalsocial policy had passed. Now the BRICS (certainly China and India)by and large are not engaging enthusiastically in GSP debates and wantno reduction of sovereignty. Perhaps, it was the case that Global SocialReformism was a Northern leftist un-reflexive delusion rooted in a cul-turally specific time and place. It might be that given the abject failureto regulate and tax global capital, the high moment of regionalism witha social dimension may have passed too, the tentative moves to raising aTobin tax in some European countries notwithstanding. It might be thatprogressive global social reformers in the North need to be even moreaware that it will be events led by social movements in Latin America,parts of Africa, the Middle East, China, and India that will shape therenewed preconditions for a future different ‘progressive’ global socialpolicy which might accommodate diverse paths toward the realizationof human well-being. In that context, I asserted that perhaps the ILO’s2012 Social Protection Floors can frame the future of a global social pol-icy which can also be culturally relative and permit diverse modes ofneed satisfaction in a way that the ILO’s 1919 workerist social securityparadigm did not.

The impact of the decades of market-driven globalization in terms ofever-widening inequalities between and within countries, while makingthe case for redistribution even more evident, has made its achievement


even less likely. The escape of the better-off global middle class intoglobal private markets and away from taxation jurisdictions and indeedany sense of an obligation toward national social contracts led to the fur-ther reduction of resources for public expenditure. The global financialcrisis of 2008 is far from over and continues to erode public institutionsnationally, regionally, and globally. Add to these woes the care crisis andthe ecological crisis and talk of a social reformist politics seems fanciful.While I was convinced in 1992 of my argument quoted in the openingchapter, ‘for all practical political purposes any further talk of a post cap-italist society built in the image of a socialist utopia was dead. All thatremained for now was to struggle for a social democratic form of cap-italism’, now I have no such conviction. I am not suggesting a returnto state socialism! I am suggesting that the economic and ecological cri-sis of contemporary global capitalism requires a more profound set ofpolicy alternatives than the 3Rs and a more profound change at global,regional, and national levels of the governance of the commons thanis provided for now. The point about natural resource maintenance andcollective access to it becomes central in the era of private and nationalland grabbing. I no longer know what is required to be done andby whom. I sense, in common with a new generation of eco-radicals,that we aspirant globalists need to also re-root ourselves in forms ofresistance to crisis-ridden growth-driven consumerist global capitalismwhich builds innovative local forms of transformative social arrange-ments. Resistance at every scale becomes even more important andthe conceptualization of how the local, national, regional, and globalpolitics of resistance can reinforce each other becomes paramount.

You may say I have been talking to too many of the ex-hippies whoinhabited my adopted Hebden Bridge after its de-industrialization! Seri-ously, there is a link from this local testing ground and the emergingtransformative global social policy (Cook et al., 2012), discussed byGough in his chapter. Hebden Bridge, like a number of other towns inthe UK and across Europe and elsewhere, regards itself as a ‘transitiontown’, in transition to a zero growth, ecologically sustainable localizedeconomy.5 It has its Archimedes screw attached to an old mill to gen-erate electricity. It has its community small-scale wind turbines to heatvillages nearby. It has its guerilla gardeners who plant for public con-sumption fruit and vegetables in open spaces. It has its organic foodworkers cooperative, its bread-making workers cooperative, its coopera-tively owned and managed pub, and its council-run cinema. The highstreet is fully occupied with local traders except for a chemist chain.

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Is this a safe nirvana to retreat to in my retirement or a beacon ofhope for the future? Here in South Africa, where I am writing, thereare the improved shacks each with a solar panel on its roof, heatingthe water in the boiler. There is the participatory budget process inPorto Allegre (Novy and Leubolt, 2005). There is the cooperative exam-ple of Mondragan (Altuna-Gabilondo, 2013), and others. There is hope!Within all of these examples a common thread is the important ele-ment of changing the relations between providers and users of servicesas emphasized by Cohen (this volume). In ending on this note I returnto the beginning of the intellectual and political journey I have taken.It is, for example, Eric Olin Wright (2010) in Envisioning Real Utopiaswho writes now of emancipatory alternatives to existing institutionsbecoming the possibility of a movement beyond capitalism and statesocialism.

Notes

1. http://www.post2015hlp.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/UN-Report.pdf2. Support for the critical position I took toward Hardt and Negri can be found

in this extract from an interview with the radical democratic theorist ChantalMouffe:

The power of capitalism is not going to disappear because we have a multi-tude of self-organizing outside the existing institutions. We need to engagewith those institutions in order to transform them profoundly. I saw a fewyears ago a film called Was tun? (What is to be done). It was about the anti-globalization movement and the role of Hardt and Negri’s strategy. At theend of the film they asked them ‘what should we do?’ And Negri answered‘wait and be patient’ and Hardt answered ‘follow your desire.’ That’s theirstrategy. They believe that there is some kind of law of history that isnecessarily going to lead to ‘absolute democracy’. It’s very similar to thetraditional Marxist view that capitalism is its own gravedigger but I don’tthink that’s the case. Capitalism is not going to disappear simply by usbeing patient and waiting, we need to engage with it, and that is the strat-egy of agonistic engagement. It’s not a total revolution, that’s not possible,it’s ‘a war of position’ in order to transform the existing institutions.

http://www.citsee.eu/interview/vibrant-democracy-needs-agonistic-confrontation-interview-chantal-mouffe

3. The use of the term ‘South’ to refer to developing countries collectively is partof the shorthand of international relations. Obviously, it obscures the increas-ingly important facts of the divisions within the South and the significance ofemerging inequalities in the North.

4. Southern African Development Community, International Labour Organization,International Organization of Migration.

5. http://www.transitionnetwork.org/initiatives/hebden-bridge


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Index

access to medicines, 30, 66–9, 142actors, 6–7, 17–18, 23–4, 36–40,

46–53, 62, 97–9, 110–13, 161,176, 201, 207–9

business actors, 5, 113, 115,118–19, 179

civil society actors, see under civilsociety

non-state actors, 20–1, 111, 175, 209transnational actors, see under

transnationaladvocacy coalition, 6–7, 53, 204Africa, 26, 28, 31, 180, 188, 215agency, 6, 138, 178, 180

development (aid) agencies, 36, 140,144, 176, 194

donor agencies, 36, 52–3global agencies, 36, 49–51, 202, 212human agency, 6, 140international agencies, 45–61, 99,

180, 211–12international financial agencies, see

international financialinstitutions

political agency, 6social agencies, 4, 17, 25UN agencies, 27–8, 52, 153,

180, 208aid, 22, 112, 140, 178–80America

Latin/South America, 156–60, 195anti-racist, 2, 85Asia, 44, 89, 156, 161

East Asia, 44–64, 167austerity, 79–81, 101, 168, 217

basic services, 30, 153biodiversity, 110, 134, 145breadwinner, 88, 96Bretton Woods institutions/system,

18, 24, 111, 117business sector, 74, 77–8

Cambodia, 46, 50–3, 61campaign, 19–20, 37, 68, 120, 164capability, 45, 51capitalism, 3, 6–8, 34–5, 86–7, 111–13,

118–19, 127–8, 140, 142, 144,148, 162, 152, 192, 204, 210,213–15

capital, 79, 81, 141, 156, 158, 213care, 85–107

care capital, 97, 207care regime, 92, 96care worker, 87–96, 99ethics of care, 85, 102global care chain, 86, 94, 102, 207

child labor, 30, 159citizenship, 4, 101, 128, 181–2

citizenship rights, 32, 88, 99civil society, 20, 32, 162–3, 169, 179

civil society actors, 21, 27, 119, 159,194, 213

civil society organizations (CSOs),32–3, 58, 154, 164

climate change, 108–30, 134–52,203–4

collective care, 95colonialism

colonial relations, 89post-colonial, 88, 180, 191, 207

commercialization, 32–4, 66, 77–80,144, 190, 193

commercial markets/sector, 30,72, 77

commodification, 87, 93, 97, 109,119, 177

commons, 214communicable diseases, 30community-based organizations, 21comparative analysis, 2, 5–6, 79, 80,

85, 187, 207conditional cash transfer (CCT), 55–6conditionality, 24, 48, 57, 62, 111,

155–67

218

Index 219

contestation, 17, 29–36, 38, 110–11,201–2

convergence, 23, 89–99coordination, 23, 30, 37–8core labor standards, 6, 24, 33, 100,

112, 153, 159, 164–5, 167–71, 203crisis

Asian economic crisis, 44, 46, 48,53, 54, 57, 58, 60, 62, 156,161–2, 167

care crisis, 85–107, 206, 214debt crisis, 156ecological/environmental crisis,

134, 203, 214, 149food crisis, 46, 50, 52global economic and financial crisis,

24, 39, 47, 48, 52, 53, 54, 56,58, 74–7, 86–7, 113, 143, 153,167, 170, 214

Latin American debt crisis, 35Critical Social Policy, 2, 85cross-border governance, see under

governance

debt, 96debt cancellation/relief, 5, 111–12,

162–3debt crisis, see crisis

democracy, 21, 23, 32, 37, 39, 40, 55,146, 160, 190, 194, 213

developing countries, 22, 39, 45, 47–9,66–8, 86, 88, 95, 114–15, 120,135, 141, 159–60, 164, 169–70

developmentalism, 23, 32, 39, 180development studies, 5, 143, 146–7diffusion, 20discourse, 7, 29, 91, 97, 109, 112–13,

124–6, 129, 139, 149, 177, 187,196, 204, 207, 209

East Asia, see Asiaecology, 87, 102economic growth, 20, 44–5, 74–8,

126–7, 139, 143–7, 154–8, 162–3,166, 183–4, 204, 214

de-growth/zero-growth, 129, 146,204, 214

green growth, 118, 122–4,127–9, 203

economic management, 45, 109economies of scale, 22, 26, 30, 97eco-social policy, 127–8education, 23, 26, 30–6, 51–60, 79, 97,

98, 126, 128, 145, 153, 163, 164,176, 177–96

environmentenvironmental crisis, see crisisenvironmental goals, 125environmental governance,

117, 119environmentalism, 117, 127, 146environmental/eco-state, 109, 122,

128, 147environmental justice, 6environmental policy/regulation,

72–4, 109, 115, 128, 130, 145environmental rights, 138environmental sustainability, 87,

109, 124, 126, 139, 163global environment movement,

109, 209multilateral environmental

agreements, 24epistemic community, 6, 44, 211ethnic groups/minorities, 90, 112ethnography, 14, 182Europe

European social model, 33European Union (EU), 18, 28–9,

32–3, 67, 69–79, 89, 90, 95, 97,98, 111, 114, 117, 160, 170, 210

exclusion, 30, 148, 155external influence, 6, 22, 46, 50–1, 53,

57, 95, 141, 155, 169,175–200, 208

feminism, 87financial crisis, see crisisfinancialization, 76, 119for-profit sector, 90–2

GASPP, 3, 65, 81global fora, 22, 25global funds, 6, 203global institutions, 7, 14, 20, 23, 24,

26, 30, 35, 37, 39–40, 46, 48,65–6, 76, 121, 136–7, 142, 154,175, 194–5, 205, 209, 211

220 Index

globalization, 4–6, 17–20, 25, 36–7,79, 110, 114, 136, 145, 182, 191,207, 210, 213

alter-globalization movement, 24anti-globalization movement,

79, 215Global North/South, see North–Southglobal/regional/transnational social

movement, 7, 11, 21, 25, 98, 111,115, 119, 175, 205, 207, 209, 213

global (social) public good, 112, 122global social reformism, 8, 213global social rights, 5–7, 18, 21, 26,

28–9, 33, 38, 65–84, 100, 110,112, 136–8, 141, 146, 148, 194,203–4, 208

labor/employment rights, 30,160–1, 164–5, 183, 202

right to food, 137right to health, 203right to social security, 100transnational rights, see under

transnationaluniversal rights, 45, 49, 203

governancecross-border (social) governance,

17–18global economic governance, 24,

28, 39, 111global environmental governance,

109–10, 117, 119global governance, 19, 35, 65–6,

108–33, 138, 214global governance of climate

change, 109, 113–19, 121global health governance, see global

health policyglobal social governance, 4, 7, 23,

37–9, 65, 110–12, 121–2, 137multi-level governance, 20, 214regional (social) governance, 17–43supra-national governance, 23

G7/8, 111, 207G20, 28, 213

harmonization, 25, 30, 72–4health, 23, 27, 30, 34, 37, 51, 56, 66,

110, 125, 135, 153, 163EU health policies/systems, 77–8

global health policy, 65–84, 194health care, 17, 33, 53, 76, 80, 93,

97, 99, 145, 179health care financing/spending,

76–7, 80health care labor, 36, 96, 207health care privatization, 72health-care reform, 75–6, 184, 189health impacts, 73–4health inequalities, 77health partnership, 29health policy, 30, 36, 65–84health regulations, 26, 66, 112health systems, 38, 66–7, 70, 77–9health workers, 26, 36, 94–9, 210HIV/AIDS, 29, 67–70public health (services), 33, 40, 54,

66, 68, 72, 74–5, 77–9, 86, 100,128, 176, 179, 185, 203

right to health, 66–8, 189, 193, 203user fees/charges, 75

human development, 21, 38, 45, 51,56, 58, 60–2, 109, 112, 120,122–3, 126–7, 129

human rights, 26, 30, 32, 40, 67–8,98–100, 112–13, 138, 190,193, 195

human security, 136, 138–9, 143, 204

ideas, 7, 20, 45–51, 61–2, 98, 109, 113,140, 147, 154, 171, 176, 182,196, 201

ideology, 7, 17, 29, 38, 96, 112, 167IFI (international financial

institutions), 52, 76, 153–74, 202IMF, 17, 48, 57, 62, 75–6, 85, 111,

125, 153–74, 178, 202, 207–8World Bank, 7, 17, 25–8, 36, 38, 45,

50, 52, 53, 75–6, 100, 111, 117,144, 153–74, 178, 180, 184,202, 207–8

Independence movements, 19, 25individualization, 2, 74–7, 80, 85, 93,

102, 140, 144Indonesia, 53–7, 88, 162, 165, 167Industrial Revolution, 108, 113inequality and inequity, 6, 21, 30,

36–9, 40, 93, 95, 97, 100, 112–13,

Index 221

121, 126–7, 134, 139, 145–6, 149,158, 160, 169–70, 194

international cooperation, 17–43, 70,100, 201–2, 206, 210

integration, 17–43, 79, 182, 194, 195intellectual property rights, 66, 68–9,

142, 203interdependence, 101–2interests, 7, 22, 24, 26, 32–3, 36, 38,

65–84, 86, 110–11, 113, 117–19,121–2, 154–5, 159, 161, 167, 207,210, 212–13

International Labor Organization(ILO), 4, 17, 25, 27, 45, 47, 98,100, 111–12, 129, 136–7, 153,155, 159, 164, 166, 168–70, 202,207–8, 210, 212–13

international organization (IO), 3–4,7, 19, 23, 45, 54, 97–8, 100, 153,155, 168–9, 201, 205, 211

international/transnational politicaleconomy, 5, 33, 35, 86, 96, 99,148–9, 207

intersectionality, 99, 207

knowledge, 18, 61, 80, 115, 122,134–52, 155, 163, 178, 191, 194,204–5

Korea (South), 57–61, 77, 90, 95, 118,161–2, 167

labor market, 30, 57, 60, 79, 88, 92–3,98, 153–74

labor mobility, 23, 30–7labor regulation, see regulationlabor rights, 30, 160–1, 164, 202lesson/policy learning, 29–31, 46–8,

57, 61–2

marketization, 2, 77–9, 87, 95,100–1, 117

global/world market, 6, 48, 79, 96,182–3

market failure, 141market mechanisms, 91, 140

MDGs (Millennium DevelopmentGoals), 51–2, 112, 126, 176,204, 213

middle-class, 93, 136, 140–1,175–200, 214

migrant care workers, 26, 36, 85–107,207, 210

migration, 25–6, 36, 85–107, 212labor migration, 36, 38migration policy, 38

methodological nationalism, 5modernity, 144mutuality, 101

nation state, 5, 94, 111, 113, 182neo-liberal(ism), 6, 8, 20, 23, 35, 38,

44–7, 112–13, 119, 140, 148,154–60, 165–71, 175–200, 202–6,210–12

New Public Management (NPM), 72,176, 183

non-governmental organizations(NGO)/actors, 23, 25, 68, 80, 98,111, 115, 119, 158, 175–200

non-state actors, 20–1, 111, 175, 209normative, 88, 113, 137North–South, 18, 28, 114, 207,

209, 213Global North, 23, 88, 147, 210Global South, 4, 23–4, 48, 142, 144,

147, 207nurses, 26–7, 36, 93–4, 99, 185, 188,

191, 193

OECD, 47–8, 60–2, 72, 98, 111, 118,124, 155, 166

One UN, 25organized labor, 153–74, 202

pensions, 96, 124, 157pension discourse, 7pension policy, 76, 160pension reform, 7, 76, 155, 160

pharmaceuticals, 26, 78pharmaceutical industry, 70–1, 78pharmaceutical legislation, 30pharmaceutical policy, 68–70, 78

philanthropy, 111Polanyi, 87, 100, 109, 144policy entrepreneurs, 53, 61, 180policy experts, 47, 55, 61, 109, 178

222 Index

policy instruments, 45, 47–9, 55–6,61–2, 118, 120

policy recommendations, 7, 47–50,74, 99, 147, 164, 166

policy transfer, 46, 49, 62post-colonial(ism), 88, 180, 191, 207post-communist, 85, 208–10poverty, 54, 58, 75, 88, 134–52, 160

anti-poverty measures, 98Critical Poverty Studies, 136, 146poverty alleviation, 25, 30poverty reduction, 25, 112, 122,

126, 139–48, 162–3, 169, 180–1,204, 210

power, 24, 35–6, 39, 45–8, 61, 70,79–80, 111, 127, 135, 137, 140–1,148, 155, 161, 167, 175–6,181, 203

prescriptions, 48, 161, 167, 171, 208private foundations, 70privatization, 71–2, 77, 155, 157, 161,

164, 168, 182private markets, 90–1, 97, 207–8, 214public good, see global (social) public

good

race to the bottom, 6redistribution, 4–7, 17–18, 26, 29–38,

65–84, 110, 112, 120–1, 128,136–7, 140–2, 146, 148, 158, 169,203–4, 208, 213

reformist, 3, 7–8, 24, 175, 203–5,212–14

regional governance, see governanceregionalism, 4, 8, 17–43, 210, 213regionalization, 17–43, 194–5regularization, 99regulation

labour, 26, 165social, 5–7, 17–18, 29, 32–3, 38,

65–84, 110–12, 119, 122, 137,148, 194, 203–4, 208

resistance, 23, 154, 160–1, 164, 168,177, 194, 214

scale, 5–6, 8, 19–20, 23, 36, 99, 148social assistance, 44, 46, 51, 54, 58, 79Social Charter, 30, 32, 35social compact, 140

social cohesion, 21, 140, 149social contract, 214social democratic, 3, 35, 95, 113, 118,

154, 159, 168, 214social development, 25, 38–9, 51, 98,

109, 122, 147social (in)justice, 3, 36–7, 40, 85–107,

109–10, 113–14, 122–4, 126, 129,135–6, 141, 149, 181

social insurance, 22, 57–8, 79social investment, 29, 60, 62, 97–8,

125, 128socialism, 2, 19, 34, 38, 85, 210,

214–15socialization of globalization, 17–43social mobility, 176, 178, 182, 187social policy problem, 96social policy reform, 60social protection, 26, 28, 44, 45,

46–61, 62, 96, 98–100, 125, 128,135–42, 146–8, 154, 159, 167,169, 202, 206

Social Protection Floor, 8, 27, 129,136, 137, 147, 153, 202,205–6, 213

social protection system, 135, 202social regulation, see regulation

labor regulation, 26, 165remittances, 97social relations, 85, 140–3, 147–9, 176,

178, 180, 183, 193–6, 206, 211social reproduction, 23, 87, 128, 203social risk, 76, 88, 108, 128social security, 5, 78, 122, 168, 184,

205, 212social security portability, 25, 30,

33, 95social security system, 94, 100social standards, 22, 39, 204social work, 2, 85

radical/revolutionary social workers,1, 85

social workers, 191solidarity, 21, 34, 40, 87, 101, 149, 182

solidarity economy, 30South–South, 18, 28, 39, 175, 211standard-setting, 30structural adjustment

programs/policies, 5, 48, 57, 96,

Index 223

143, 155, 157–61, 167–8,170–1, 210

structure, 6, 19–20, 25–7, 37, 109, 111,113, 129, 159, 208, 212

sub-national, 5supra-national(ization), 3, 5–7, 17, 23,

66, 110, 208sustainability, 87, 101–2, 109, 122–4,

126, 139, 146–7, 163, 179, 186

tax(ation), 22, 37, 58, 69, 76–80, 91–4,112, 124–5, 203, 214

carbon taxes, 119, 124financial transaction taxes, 76,

79–80labor taxes, 168tax avoidance, 78, 80tax exemption, 22tax haven, 69, 78–9, 80Tobin tax, 213

3 Rs (redistribution, regulation,rights), 5–6, 67, 112–13, 203–8,210–14

tobacco control, 66, 68, 72trade agreements, 20, 24, 33, 39,

67–71, 76, 143trade union, 159, 160, 162–9, 179,

208–9global union, 164

transboundary, 110, 135, 143transfer, see policy transfertransformative global social

policy/transformation, 1–16, 32,34, 49, 56, 61, 74, 128, 130,134–52, 160, 168, 176–8, 181, 187

transnationaltransnational actors, 176, 205,

207, 208transnational alliances, 20–1, 32

transnational campaigns, 39transnational corporation, 24transnational levels/scales, 5, 194transnational migration, 94transnational (social) movement,

205, 207, 209transnational political economy, 86,

96–9transnational principles, 190, 195transnational rights, 122transnational social policies, 17,

37, 175transnational/multinational

corporations, 24, 71–2, 111, 155corporate social responsibility, 118

universality, 194universal access/coverage, 66, 74–5,

78–80, 127universal rights, see global social

rightsuniversal social policies, 140, 171universal social programs, 171universal social standards, 39universal welfare state, see welfare

state

war of position, 46, 215Washington Consensus, 156water, 27, 40, 127, 134–5, 145,

153, 204welfare state, 2, 5, 44, 46, 48, 57, 58,

59, 60, 61, 62, 77, 85–6, 88–9,95–6, 99, 109, 112, 126, 128, 138,147, 183, 194, 206–7

universal welfare state, 46, 59–62well-being, 97, 101–2, 110, 127–30,

146, 203, 213world-region(s), 18–21