Social policy in developing countries: a post-colonial critique and participatory inquiry

Abstract

This chapter resonates with the main tenet of this edited collection book, seeking to examine first hand what social policy formulations may look like as told from the perspective of the Global South. Mainstream social policy discourses have focused on post-war welfare provision in rich industrialised countries (Baldock et al, 2011). Economic development was identified as a key driver for welfare state emergence in wealthy countries (Flora and Heidenheimer, 1981). Welfare typology classifications (Esping-Anderson,1990), though criticised for scope and lack of attention to gender (Daly and Rake, 2003), have become established frameworks by which welfare states can be studied in comparative perspective. Original typologies have expanded to include Southern models of welfare (Martin, 1996), transition economies in Eastern Europe (Myant and Drahokoupil, 2011) and, to a very limited extent, Eastern social policy and ‘Tiger economies’ (Haggard and Kaufman, 2008). Despite this, I argue that current social policy literature has not grappled sufficiently in terms of world views with the nature of social reality (ontology) or the theories around investigating social reality (epistemology) of developing country contexts. At best social policy initiatives only become visible when developing countries play ‘catch up’ and achieve rapid economic development, thereby abiding by the criteria for state based welfare. By drawing on emerging social policy literature from the Global South (Mares and Carnes, 2009; Razavi et al, 2004; Surrender and Walker, 2013), this chapter challenges taken-for-granted assumptions around what social policy is, and how it can be understood in developing world contexts. Post-colonial frameworks (Bhabha, 1994; Spivak, 1999) are used as an alternate lens through which we can reimagine social policy from a participatory perspective.