Abstract
AbstractThis chapter is the introduction to the volume on social protection in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. The Introduction outlines an ideational and historical approach to social protection in the Global South to contribute to a theory of “social policy in development contexts”, which is a desideratum. The Introduction also provides basic data on the four countries (Brazil, India, China, and South Africa) and summaries of all the chapters in the book. Three research gaps are identified: scarcity of historical research; scant attention to ideas and instead a dominant focus on interests; and insufficient use of historical sources. This volume contributes to filling these gaps through a historical, idea-centred, and source-based approach. A multi-layered model of social ideas—the “onion skin model”—is developed that has the “social question” as its pivot.
Highlights
Some writers even question the possible spread of formal social protection programmes in the South on cultural grounds (Rieger and Leibfried 2004; Walker and Wong 1996)
What ideas and institutional models of public welfare are developing in the Global South?
“If we want to know where to go, we have to know where we came from” (Kaufmann 2012: 1). This volume investigates the evolution of social protection ideas and policies in four key middle- income countries—Brazil, China, India, and South Africa—from the 1920s to the present day
Summary
The centres of gravity in the world are shifting. Some of the countries formerly referred to as developing or Third World countries are emerging as global players in terms of their share of the global economy, world population, and international political power. All pioneered social cash transfer programmes (Barrientos 2013; Leisering 2019), and the Indian Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has received much attention in the global development community These recent developments have been much discussed in global political and scholarly arenas, but the early history of social policy in the Global South is only beginning to be researched—unlike the evolution of the Northern welfare state, which scholars have comprehensively analysed both in empirical and theoretical terms (comparative studies include Rimlinger 1971; Flora and Heidenheimer 1981; Alber 1982; Lindert 2004a, b). The ideational and cultural strand of welfare state research is part of the pluralist Weberian- Durkheimian tradition, which conceives of social policy as a response to broad processes of modernisation rather than merely a response to capitalism, as assumed in the Marxist and political economy traditions It is the “subtle interplay of loyalties which characterize people’s notions of welfare obligation and entitlement” (Pinker 1979: 10), and allegiance to the state is only one of several nested socio-spatial loyalties, which include family, local community, and international community
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