This paper draws on a series of regional studies to provide an overview of the current field of social protection. It suggests that social protection needs to move beyond risk management and safety nets to support productive or developmental trajectories out of poverty that can strengthen citizenship rights and claims to security. Innovative, more developmental social protection approaches adapted to particular contexts are emerging around the world. However, greater attention should be paid to the political economy of redistributive policies, the challenge of financing such policies, and their implications for the social contract between state and citizens. The state has a key role in coordinating inclusive social protection provision.
Social protection in low-income countries has largely focused on expanding minimal and patchy provision in situations of resource scarcity, weak institutional capacity and often limited political support. While many of these countries had imitated the social security systems of Western countries in the middle decades of the 20th century, the predominance and persistence of subsistence agriculture and informal employment meant that coverage remained minimal. Improved social protection mechanisms that are more appropriate to the income levels and conditions of different countries now appear to be emerging in all regions, although with variation in coverage and effectiveness.
There is a growing understanding that social protection needs to address directly the needs of the vulnerable and excluded. The dominant risk management approach attempts to reduce risks or insure against their impacts, preferably through the market. However, vulnerability to shocks often relates to exclusion – in particular, the location, social identity and political powerlessness of marginalised people. Many of these groups are without the means to participate in market-based mechanisms, and often the market fails to provide. Informal social support networks are too weak to fill the resulting gap over the long term.
- In lower-income countries, formal social protection developed reflecting a Western focus on people in formal employment, and therefore these mechanisms excluded the majority of people.
- New approaches advocate social protection as a right rather than a reactive form of relief. These emphasise longer-term developmental objectives which aim to reduce the impact of shocks, enhance people’s ability to cope with their aftermath, and to prevent shocks and destitution in the first place.
- While donor approaches to social protection show considerable overlap, there are important divergences, notably around the World Bank’s decision not to recognise basic social security as a human right.
Innovations in the design and type of social protection programme appear to have the potential to increase coverage and foster longer-term developmental outcomes. Social protection interventions have: promoted investments in children’s human capital and capabilities; increased the productivity of household livelihood efforts; contributed to a sense of inclusion and citizenship; mobilised the poor around entitlement claims; and impacted the local economy. However, social protection can only foster development if the required resources and political will are present, and if institutional arrangements – particularly the role of the state – are made to work for the poor. Greater focus is required on the political and institutional contexts within which social protection approaches and instruments need to be embedded.
- Varied political systems can give rise to effective social protection, but politics, political regimes and political interests play an important role in shaping the distribution, content and boundaries of social protection.
- In turn, social protection has political reverberations. In fact, the absence of social protection can be more costly in both political and economic terms than its presence.
- Evidence on affordability suggests that the main constraint on social protection is not lack of financial resources, but of political will.
- More attention should be given to the possible link between revenue source and equity outcomes.
- Raising taxation and other government revenues in poor countries in order to fund social protection is important but difficult. Therefore, an appropriate and sustainable financing ‘mix’ needs to draw on different sources (including aid, government revenues, private, community and household resources) while recognising the constraints and incentives of each.
- Institutional arrangements for social protection need to be adapted to contextual features including the nature of a country’s economy and forms of vulnerability; the level of economic development, formal employment and related social protection systems; the capacity of the state; and the nature of the political system.
- A citizen-centred approach to social protection is needed. The motivation for expanding coverage is likely to be strengthened if it is understood that inclusion in the public provision of social protection – and the terms of that inclusion – affects the identity and practice of citizenship.
