Global social security policy

Abstract

In 2016, the World Bank and the International Labour Organization (ILO) launched the Global Partnership for Universal Social Protection to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, in short, USP2030 (Rutkowski and Ortiz, 2016), with a view to ensuring ‘full coverage of all people across the life cycle’. The USP2030 marks a new stage in the long struggle for protecting individuals against the vicissitudes of life. Social security is a response to the socioeconomic insecurities that people experience in modern society and capitalism, ensuing from industrialisation, marketisation, urbanisation, migration and individualisation. This chapter enquires: what is social security? How did the idea and practice of social security rise historically in the Global North and South? What are the key policies and institutional models of global social security? In what ways do international organisations (IOs) influence domestic policies? What issues are at the forefront of social security policies, with what contestations? And what are the new challenges faced by global social security policies? ‘Social security’ denotes welfare programmes, mainly income security and social services, but it is also an ideal, carrying visions of a good society (Kaufmann, 2012). Since the early 2010s, the term social protection has almost superseded the older term ‘social security’. In this chapter I mostly use the term ‘social security’, which is still in use, because the historical rise of social protection revolved around this term, and security, rather than protection, is a fundamental normative idea of modernity. The term ‘social protection’ has been defined in very different ways (see Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler, 2004, pp 3–4, for a discussion), sometimes equated with ‘social security’ (see, for example, UN, 2018, p 5), sometimes defined in a broader way, including labour rights and anti-discrimination.