Abstract
This article is concerned with how social processes and social provision are conceptualised and measured in societies in order to offer guidance on how to improve developmental progress. Significant advances have been made in developing multidimensional measures of development, but they provide little guidance to governments on how to build sustainable societies. We argue for the need to develop a theoretically informed social and policy framework that permits the foundations for building decent societies to be put in place by governments. In our view the recently developed Decent Society Model provides such a framework. Our example is the assessment of government provision, by function, within fourteen countries of East and Southern Africa. The context is the current debates about socially inclusive development, but we argue that it is necessary to range more widely, as social processes of different kinds are multiply interrelated. Social inclusion is recognised by governments as well as international agencies, including the World Bank and the United Nations, as not only an ethical imperative but smart economics; socially inclusive societies are more stable and have greater potential for economic growth. Societies that can develop sustainably need not only to be inclusive, however, but to provide economic security for all, to be socially cohesive and to empower citizens so that as individuals and communities they can take control over their own lives.
Highlights
The focus of this article is how societies need to understand themselves - what conceptual framework should be used - in order to improve the quality of life for their residents
It concentrates on fourteen countries of East and South Africa for which the information which we require is available. They show sufficiently substantial problems to make social change a necessity for them and sufficient variation to demonstrate both difference and similarity. They exemplify different approaches to government, and some of them have a governmental style which implicitly draws on the model that we are advocating here, characterising social processes and what needs to be done to make a decent society in similar ways to ours
& None of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa appear in the top group, which is filled mostly by North America, Western Europe and Australasia
Summary
The focus of this article is how societies need to understand themselves - what conceptual framework should be used - in order to improve the quality of life for their residents This is not an ‘academic’ issue in the pejorative sense of being a way for outsiders to classify and analyse specimens. To talk sensibly about this at finite length we have had to limit what the article covers It concentrates on fourteen countries of East and South Africa for which the information which we require is available. They show sufficiently substantial problems to make social change a necessity for them and sufficient variation to demonstrate both difference and similarity. We try to keep in mind, that processes of inclusion are only part of the complex of social relations and should not be regarded as whole answer
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