Conceptualising the Politics of Social Protection in Africa

Abstract

In his study of the New Poor Laws in nineteenth-century England, Karl Polanyi (2001) was centrally preoccupied with the forms of politics that surrounded this initiative, particularly the nature of the parliamentary process that led to Speenhamland being overturned, the new labelling of the poor that this involved, and the impact of such programmes on popular struggles and agency. However, politics has not been accorded a significant role in thinking and policy-making around social protection in Sub-Saharan Africa. The dominance of economics in this field has encouraged a more technocratic focus on social protection, thus overlooking the key role of politics and political economy in raising and shaping this agenda (Niles, 1999: 3; Casamatta et al., 2000: 342). Explanations for the relative paucity of social protection systems and programmes in poor countries tend to suggest that the key problem is simply a lack of financial and administrative capacity. For example, a recent World Bank study focusing on institutional issues in social protection programmes framed the role of national politics in this process as purely contextual, to be examined only ‘for the sake of completeness’ (Mathauer, 2004: 16). However, there is growing evidence that politics plays a more central role in shaping social protection initiatives than has hitherto been recognised.