beyond the social protection paradigm: social policy in africa's development

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This article was downloaded by: [Temple University Libraries] On: 16 November 2014, At: 06:30 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcjd20 Beyond the social protection paradigm: social policy in Africa's development Jimi O. Adesina a a Department of Anthropology and Sociology , University of the Western Cape , Cape Town , South Africa Published online: 01 Mar 2012. To cite this article: Jimi O. Adesina (2011) Beyond the social protection paradigm: social policy in Africa's development, Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement, 32:4, 454-470, DOI: 10.1080/02255189.2011.647441 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2011.647441 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

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Page 1: Beyond the social protection paradigm: social policy in Africa's development

This article was downloaded by: [Temple University Libraries]On: 16 November 2014, At: 06:30Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Canadian Journal of DevelopmentStudies / Revue canadienne d'études dudéveloppementPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcjd20

Beyond the social protection paradigm:social policy in Africa's developmentJimi O. Adesina aa Department of Anthropology and Sociology , University of theWestern Cape , Cape Town , South AfricaPublished online: 01 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Jimi O. Adesina (2011) Beyond the social protection paradigm: social policy inAfrica's development, Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études dudéveloppement, 32:4, 454-470, DOI: 10.1080/02255189.2011.647441

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2011.647441

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Beyond the social protection paradigm: social policy in Africa's development

Beyond the social protection paradigm: social policy in Africa’sdevelopment

Jimi O. Adesina∗

Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACT The experience of sub-Saharan Africa with social development in the periodbetween 1981 and 2005 has been grim, indeed. Over the period, policy focus has turnedfrom a wider vision of social policy to narrow social protection concerns. This is what werefer to as the social protection paradigm (SPP). We offer an assessment of the paradigm. Inits place, we offer an alternative vision encapsulated in the idea of transformative socialpolicy, stressing the multiple roles of social policy and its wider vision of society. Socialpolicy, in the context of meeting Africa’s development challenges, must embrace thesemultiple roles, framed by the norms of equality and social solidarity.

Keywords: transformative social policy; social protection; Africa; social solidarity; cash transfer

RESUME L’experience du developpement social de l’Afrique subsaharienne entre 1981 et2005 etait sombre. Pendant ce periode, l’attention de la politique a tourne d’une vision ausens large de la politique sociale a une plus etroite qui concerne la protection sociale.Ceci s’appelle le paradigme de la protection sociale. Nous offrons une evaluation duparadigme. A la place, nous proposons une vision alternative qui contient l’idee d’unepolitique sociale transitive, et qui met l’accent sur les roles multiples de la politique socialeet une vision au sens large de la societe. La politique sociale, dans le contexte des besoinsde developpement de l’Afrique, doit adopter ces roles nombreux, encadres par la visionacceptee de l’egalite et de la solidarite sociale.

Introduction

Since the late 1980s, policy attention has focused on social protection instruments to mitigate theimpact of adjustment: the so-called social dimensions of adjustment issues. In recent years, thefocus has turned to cash transfer (conditional and non-conditional) as the policy instrument ofchoice for addressing poverty and ‘vulnerability’. The Conditional Cash Transfer scheme, forinstance, has been celebrated by Birdsall as being “as close as one can come to a magic bulletin development” (2004 cited Braine 2006). With the objective, among others, to “correct formarket failures associated with non-internalised positive externalities”, conditional cash transferprogrammes have sought “to create incentives for individuals to adjust their behaviour towardsmatching the social optimum” (de Janvry and Sadoulet 2004). Cash transfers have generallybeen viewed positively by the ‘donor community’ as the policy instrument of choice: they aremarket-compliant, efficient in resource allocation and targeting, and suited to budget supportprogrammes (Dani 2008, Holmqvist 2009).

ISSN 0225-5189 print/ISSN 2158-9100 online

# 2011 Canadian Association for the Study of International Development (CASID)http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2011.647441

http://www.tandfonline.com

∗Email: [email protected]

Canadian Journal of Development StudiesRevue canadienne d’etudes du developpementVol. 32, No. 4, December 2011, 454–470

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Much of this is linked to the idea that such a policy option offers a more efficient purpose anda measurable impact of budget support instruments. In parallel with this, there has been effortamong international non-governmental and multilateral organisations to use internal fiscal instru-ments in order to raise the funds for such social protection mechanisms. The argument is thatbetween 0.5 and 2.7 per cent of national GDP would be enough to fund such cash transfers,focused and it would seem to suggest that the absence of such instruments as child supportgrants, family cash transfers or old age pension schemes is largely due to a lack of politicalwill. These ideas of social protection involve a retreat into a narrow vision of social policy.

The social protection agenda, as Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler (2007, p. 1) note, “comeswith a fresh array of conceptual frameworks, analytical tools, empirical evidence, nationalpolicy processes, heavyweight agencies and big names in development studies aligned behindit”. Much of this, we will show, is due to aggressive policy merchandising. The near hegemonicposition of social protection as the preferred policy instrument of choice is such that to argueagainst it must be either an act of madness or something worse.

Underlying the social protection paradigm (SPP) is a set of problematic assumptions, norms,and policy practices. First is the problematic nature of policy transfers and of learning. Second isthe disconnection between social and economic policy, the almost universal focus on chronicpoverty (the ‘ultra-poor’) and vulnerability, and a preference for means testing and targeting.Third is the normative underpinning of the SPP, which is wedded to the neoliberal market trans-actional logic. The economic paradigm is largely unchallenged and its role in promoting vulner-ability as a basis for social protection remains, for the most part, un-investigated. The result is areduced vision of social policy.

The core argument in this paper is that social policy involves a much broader vision. Itincludes multitasking for achieving multiple objectives such as production, protection, redistribu-tion, reproduction (UNRISD 2006), and social cohesion or nation building (Adesina 2007, 2009).For African countries, meeting the challenge of inclusive development requires a fundamentaldeparture from the prevailing SPP and a return to a wider vision of society. This vision shouldembed social policy within a wider development strategy that is grounded in norms of equalityand solidarity. Transformative Social Policy (UNRISD 2006, Adesina 2007, 2009, Mkandawire2007) takes us beyond the narrow focus of social policy and the excessive emphasis on destitu-tion, vulnerability, and short-term risk analysis. Not only does transformative social policy requirethe multitasking of social policy, it also requires viewing social and economic policies as a com-bined, holistic process.

For our purpose, we define social policy as “collective public efforts aimed at affecting andprotecting the social well-being of people within a given territory” (Adesina 2009, p. 38).There is more to social policy than what the state does. Further, social policy goes beyond “guar-anteeing a minimum level of social well-being through social insurance, unemployment insur-ance, old age pension, or pro-natalist social provisioning”; it also includes publicly mediatedor guaranteed access to education, healthcare, employment, housing, and so on (Adesina2009). Economic policy, on the other hand, refers to public efforts directed at the functioningof the economy through the use of fiscal and monetary instruments. Although distinct, socialand economic policies overlap, and are interdependent. As Mkandawire argued:

Social policy [involves] collective interventions to directly affect social welfare, social institutions andsocial relations. It is concerned with the redistributive effects of economic policy, the protection ofpeople from the vagaries of the market and the changing circumstances of age, the enhancement ofthe productive potential of members of society, and the reconciliation of the burden of reproductionwith that of other social tasks. Successful societies have given social policies all these tasks, althoughthe weighting of tasks has varied among countries and, within each country, from period to period.(2011, pp. 150–151)

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Social protection: mapping the paradigm

The role of “travelling ideas” in policy advice is widely acknowledged (Toye 1991, Garba 2007).More than a benign exchange among intellectuals and policymakers or a medium for policy learn-ing, ideas may serve the function of seizing control of the policy terrain, undermining policylearning, generating policy atrophy in the host local context, distorting local realities, and under-mining long-term sustainable development. The new SPP represents such an instance of travellingideas. The UK Department for International Development (DFID) has devoted considerableenergy and resources to pushing its policy agenda on ‘social transfers’ as the preferred policyinstrument (see Hickey et al. 2008). The World Bank has devoted considerable efforts andresources to merchandising its ‘social risk management’ (SRM) framework (Devereux andSabates-Wheeler 2004). With aid sometimes being made conditional on the adoption of the par-ticular donor’s policy instrument of choice, this is not a domain of benign policy influence. Alesson of the past 30 years for African countries is that ‘donor harmonisation’ can all too oftenbecome a policy pincer move, limiting policymaking autonomy at the local or national level(Adesina 2003, 2006, Hickey et al. 2008, p. 8; UNRISD 2010). The earlier version of this “trap-per’s game” (Adesina 2003) occurred in the 1980s and involved the Paris and London Clubdemanding compliance with Bretton Wood institutions’ ‘stabilization and liberalization’ packagesas a pre-condition for debt negotiation and rescheduling. By the 1990s the approach took the formof a range of conditions for debt negotiation and new loans. The case of Mozambique demon-strates the current version of the same process: ‘donor coordination’ using budget support asleverage. As UNRISD (2010) noted in its flagship report:

General budget support was intended to increase national ownership and limit the role of donors.However, in reality it has meant an increase in donor involvement, with the entire policy processthrown open to donor influence. Communication between donors and recipients at all levels of gov-ernment is conducted on a daily basis. This has given donors the ability to influence policy fromwithin. (2010, p. 291)1

Social protection discourses: unity in diversity

The march of the SPP has been long. In this section, we engage with the different manifestationsof the social protection discourse and policy regime and identify the differences and commonal-ities among the different strands of the discourse.

The Social Dimensions of Adjustment (SDA) programme was launched in 1987, ostensibly asa multi-agency programme housed in the World Bank. This was in response to the mounting evi-dence of the severe social cost of the orthodox structural adjustment programme (see Jolly andGiovanni 1984, Cornia et al. 1987, 1988, Stewart 1991). Rather than a fundamental rethink ofthe policy instrument and the ontological foundations of structural adjustment, SDA involvedthe use of ‘safety nets’ to address the ‘social costs’ of adjustment. A defining principle was thestrict targeting of those considered to be in dire poverty – a common thread in the differentstrands of the SPP. As one variety of ‘safety net’ approach replaced another – from HighlyIndebted Poor Country (HIPC) programme to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) –there was little to demonstrate that the tide of severe impoverishment was turning. Between1981 and 2005, in sub-Saharan Africa, an additional 176 million people fell into destitution,bringing the total to 388 million people (UNDESA 2009, p. 16).

The SRM framework was supposed to mark a shift in the Bank’s discourse and understanding ofvulnerability and thinking around social protection, which Holzmann and Jørgensen (2000, p. 2)announced, “is back on the international agenda”. Behind the SRM lies the idea “that all individ-uals, households and communities are vulnerable to multiple risks” from diverse (environmentaland ‘man-made’) sources although much of the latter could easily fall into the realm of force

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majeure. Poverty is understood in terms of vulnerability to these shocks. A good SRM framework isone that “effectively and efficiently handle[s] risk in its various forms” (Holzmann and Jørgensen2000, p. 6); it would need to reduce vulnerability and smoothen consumption (World Bank 2001a,pp. 9–11). It would combine “labour market interventions, social insurance. . . and safety nets,under a unifying scheme” (Holzmann and Jørgensen 2000, p. 9). Its result would be to enhancewelfare and equity, and promote economic development. While there is an interaction betweenSRM, social protection, and redistribution, the three are nonetheless distinct (Holzmann and Jør-gensen 2000, p. 17, World Bank 2001a, p. 10). The SRM framework would become the premisefor the Bank’s understanding of how to ‘mainstream social protection’ within its PRSP programme.

The SRM approach was meant to transcend the problems associated with the ‘traditional’thinking of social protection. Holzmann and Jørgensen (2000, p. 2) highlighted four such pro-blems. The most important for the current discussion is that “the traditional definition [ofsocial protection] over-emphasizes the role of the public sector”. In place of the old ideas, Holz-mann and Jørgensen (2000, pp. 3–9) defined social protection “as public interventions to (1)assist individuals, households, and communities better manage risk, and (2) provide support tothe critically poor” (italics are mine). Three domains for social risk management were identified:the informal/family, market, and the public; better understood as a mix of risk managementoptions and social provisioning. Much of the weight for social risk management is placed onmarket-based instruments and provisioning. Market-based instruments will include personalhealth, accident and disability insurance, ‘old-age annuities’, financial market investment, bor-rowing from financial institutions, and microfinance (Holzmann and Jørgensen 2000, p. 17). InEsping-Andersen’s (1999) terms, these would be the ‘good risks’ (as against ‘bad risks’).

The public dimension involves two components. The first concerns policy making and thefacilitation of “market-based financial institutions” for risk management and provisioning(Holzmann and Jorgensen 2000, p. 18). The second component kicks in “when informal ormarket-based RM [risk management] arrangements do not exist, break down or are dysfunc-tional” (Holzmann and Jorgensen 2000, p. 15). This could be in the form of “mandated(social) insurance programs” or “social assistance (for example, providing means-tested transfersin cash and in kind), subvention of basic goods and services, and public works programme”(Holzmann and Jorgensen, pp. 16–17). The functions allotted to the ‘public’ are widely under-stood within the Social Policy literature as fundamentally residual, rooted in the Poor Lawliberal approach to social provisioning (Titmuss 1958, Esping-Andersen 1990, 1999). TheSRM remains locked within the neoliberal market transaction logic and allocation of ‘badrisks’ to the ‘public’. It stands in sharp contrast to the socialisation of risk and an expandedvision of an encompassing welfare regime (Korpi and Palme 1998, Adesina 2010). For Holzmannand Jørgensen (2000, p. 20) “sound macroeconomic policy, sound financial markets, enforcementof property rights, respect of basic labour rights, and growth-oriented policies are the first andbest ingredients for dealing with risk and enhancing welfare” (italics are mine). For Holzmannand Jørgensen (2000, p. 20) “the support of the critically poor is a main objective of SP”(italics are mine). A redistributive tasking of social policy, using fiscal instruments or publicgoods provisioning would be considered “largely outside SRM and SP” (emphasis is my own)(Holzmann and Jorgensen 2000, p. 20). For a transformative social policy approach, the redistri-butive task is fundamental – involving the use of multiple policy instruments (see Figure 2 later).While the SRM is often presented as a departure from the earlier restrictive focus on safety nets(Holzmann and Jørgensen 2000, Holzmann and Kozel 2007) for managing ‘bad risks’ (WorldBank 2001b, p. 20, Alderman 2000) the underlying logic remains the same.

The work of Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler (2004) was a self-declared effort to transcend theSRM and other preceding framings of social protection. Against these, they set their idea of“transformative social protection”. For the authors, social protection covers:

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All public and private initiatives that provide income or consumption transfers to the poor, protect thevulnerable against livelihood risks, and enhance the social status and rights of the marginalised; withthe overall objective of reducing the economic and social vulnerability of poor, vulnerable and mar-ginalised groups. (2004, p. iii, 9)

Their point of departure occurred at three levels: (i) problem identification, (ii) problem prioritisa-tion, and (iii) social protection providers. SRM and other framings of social protection are charac-terised by a questionable process of problem identification because they entail an excessivelyrestrictive and economistic reading of the causes of vulnerability. The difficulty with this approachis that it is concerned with low income and living standards, or with decline in income and liveli-hood as a result of vulnerability to external shock. Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler argued that it wasimportant to target both. The issue of providers, they argued, tended to be quite amorphous (suppo-sedly involving the public and public action). By contrast, they favoured a broader set of providers:private, community, and public (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler 2004, p. 4). The transformativesocial protection agenda, they argued, takes us beyond the “deserving poor” focus of earlierideas of social protection. Rather than expenditure smoothening social protection, they argued,we should go beyond “economic protection” and be truly “social”:

Other forms of ‘social protection’ would address distinct problems of ‘social vulnerability’, notnecessarily through resource transfers, but through delivery of social services, and through measuresto modify and regulate behaviour towards socially vulnerable groups. (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler 2004, p. 9)

Unlike other approaches that are focused on constructing safety nets and addressing vulnerabilityex-post, the approach offered by Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler (2004) was concerned with vul-nerability ex-ante, and with “a broader conceptualisation of vulnerability than economic riskalone” (Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux 2007, p. 23). Protection from vulnerability requiresthat the structural causative factors that are deeply “embedded in the sociopolitical context” ofsociety be addressed. Nonetheless, their approach shares the defining elements of the SPP: exces-sive focus on “the socially vulnerable”, and a refusal to engage the neoliberal economic frame-work as vulnerability-inducing. Social vulnerability (and its social justice discourse) isrestricted to endogenous cultural and inter-subjective practices and regulations. Self-consciously,the Devereux–Sabates-Wheeler approach locates itself within the ‘social exclusion’ literature(Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux 2007, p. 24).

A broader survey of the literature suggests that much of the discourse sits between the oldsafety net and SRM discourse, and that of ‘transformative social protection’. Apart from beingwedded to “chronic poverty”, the instrument of choice for reaching the potential recipients is tar-geting (Hickey et al. 2008, Devereux and Cipryk 2009, Devereux et al. 2010). The policy roll out(pilot schemes) reveals the preponderance of this limited understanding of social protection:chronic poverty-centric, highly ponderous and restrictive targeting mechanisms that are largelydonor funded and donor driven, with international NGOs as delivery service providers. Nationalinstitutions may be drawn into implementation, but often by targeting lower units of governmentdepartments (Hickey et al. 2008). Relative to the rest of the civil service, the beneficiary units andtheir officials become well-resourced and embedded in the donor driven schemes. The result is thesubversion of coherent policymaking, institutional learning, and knowledge building within thepublic service. It is not uncommon for different international NGOs and donors to implementdifferent and fragmented programmes within different units of the same department and operatingin different policy structures.

The ‘near hegemony’ of ‘social transfer’ schemes is partly in response to the problem of aidfatigue and the need for donors to justify their existence and their use of resources administered to

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their home audience. Budget support instruments to fund social transfers, or schemes directlyimplemented or contracted by the donor agency, would seem to give a new impetus to the justi-fication for additional aid flow in the context of severe aid dependency abroad and aid fatigue athome (see Dani 2008, Holmqvist 2009). The focus on the ‘recipient countries’ has involvedaggressive policy merchandising. Of the various bilateral agencies pushing the SPP, the UKDFID has been self-consciously the “lead donor”. The DFID agenda has been to secure policyinfluence through the provision of expert technical assistance, the studies that it commissions,the study tours that it facilitates and also through the knowledge that its advisors possess ofST/SP. This capacity has allowed DFID directly to influence debates over ST/SP in ways thathave increased the number of beneficiaries who benefit from ST/SP schemes (for example, Ethio-pia) and persuaded government officials to adopt social transfer pilot projects (for exampleZambia) (Hickey et al. 2008, p. 7).

Along the line, the effort has been made to promote a number of the pilot cases (Ethiopia andZambia, in particular) ‘as an African success story’. Apparently, doing so is supposed to removethe donor scent on the schemes. This agenda works more with middle-level officials in linedepartments. Hickey et al. (2008) and Devereux et al. (2010) have recorded how less successfulthis policy merchandising is with “more powerful political and policy actors”. The captive audi-ence seems to be the “weak policy actors” (Hickey et al. 2008, p. 8).2 The explanation for thefailure to penetrate the more powerful policymakers is absence of ‘political will’; policymakers‘who just don’t get it’.

The social protection paradigm: a critique

The SPP reflects the ideational crisis at the heart of the dominant international, multilateral, bilat-eral or ‘development community’ in the wake of what seems to be the hegemonic power of neo-liberal orthodoxy. It also begs the question of how one should respond to the existential crisis itcreated (Adesina 2010). We highlighted earlier the three main features of the social protection dis-course: (i) excessive focus on the ultra-poor, (ii) the preference for means testing and targeting,and (iii) the disconnection between the ‘social’ and the broader economic aspects of developmentpolicy making. The ‘social’ almost invariably functions as the flipside of the ‘economic’ in thebroader neoliberal discourse.

The focus on chronic poverty has often involved a superficial consideration, if not a benignneglect, of inequality. All these come from the classical Poor Law mores and its resurrection inneoliberal thinking. However, high levels of inequality, such as those witnessed globally andwithin sub-Saharan Africa, are not only detrimental to building an inclusive society, they alsoviolate the ethical basis of successful social policy regimes.

Significantly, it is the neoliberal policy regime that has exacerbated national and globalinequality and the vulnerability that the social protection paradigm claims that it wishes to fix:an economic policy regime that “maladjusted” African economies (Mkandawire 2005). Paradoxi-cally, it is during this period that the mantra of ‘pro-poor’ growth came to dominate the globalpolicy agenda and became deployed by the same global and local institutions responsible forengineering the subversion of inclusivity. As Titmuss (1964, p. 33) noted nearly five decadesago, those who protest against such disparity do not do so “because of envy; they do so because. . .[such inequalities] are fundamentally immoral”. Such levels of inequality are socially detrimental.In the South African context, public debate on the scourge of violent crime proceeds with see-mingly little effort on the part of ‘public intellectuals’ to connect the violence with the shockinglevel of socio-economic inequality. The neglect of inequality and the failure to challenge the neo-liberal underpinnings of social vulnerability are part of a residual social protection approach(Esping-Andersen and Korpi 1987).

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This brings us to the question of evidence. Devereux and Cipryk (2009, p. 20) have argued thatevidence in support of the positive impact of cash transfer schemes in Africa “is accumulatingrapidly”. Much of the evidence is aimed at influencing policy and scholarly debates and at persuad-ing policymakers to adopt the favoured policy instrument: the mantra of the so-called ‘evidence-based’ policymaking. The problems with the ‘evidence’ are, however, many. First, impact assess-ments are funded by the same agency, which has interest in showing the efficacy of the schemes. It isdifficult to separate hard data-informed research from consultancy-driven interpretation of data, insupport of an a priori assumption that the instrument is effective. The result is that the evidence pro-duced is often thin and suspect. An interesting case is the website (http://www.socialtransfersevidence.org/), which seeks to showcase ‘evidence’ supporting social transfers. Ithighlights findings from the Kalomo Project3 which claimed that “the ownership of chickensincreased by 15% points among beneficiaries”. It is further claimed that “asset ownership increasedfrom 4.2 assets at the baseline to 5.2 at the time of evaluation” (2004). In the case of the SouthAfrican Child Support Grant, a featured study argued that “7.6% of beneficiaries spent aminimum of one hour in the previous week collecting water, as opposed to 7.3% of non-benefici-aries” and the difference for Africans was 8 per cent for beneficiaries, against 9.5 per cent for non-beneficiaries (Social Transfers Evidence 2010; Case et al. 2005). How these are supposed to be thebasis for persuading policymakers is difficult to say. Apart from the fact that in the absence of moreinformation on the sampling procedure used, a 0.3 per cent or even 1.5 per cent variation between‘experimental’ and control group may be statistically meaningless.

Underscoring these gestures to demonstrate the ‘economic value’ or ‘asset-building’ impact ofsocial transfer is a discourse wedded to the neoliberal framework and the ‘deserving poor’ logic ofthe initial selection of beneficiaries. If chicken ownership did not increase among recipients,would they still be unworthy of the effort to mitigate their poverty? Similarly, the attribution ofa 3 per cent increase in school enrolment as evidence that the cash transfer scheme works stretchesthe imagination of the floor of evidence below which we cannot go (GTZ 2007). What is missingis any discussion of the wider social and economic dynamics which reversed the impressive initialpost-independence rise in school enrolment in Zambia, and whether or not cash transfers are alegitimate policy instrument for increasing childhood education. The ‘economic’ justificationfor humiliating policy instruments betrays the lack of commitment, from the start, to equalityand social solidarity.

The pilot cash transfer scheme in Kalomo, Zambia is a widely celebrated example (Schubert2004, Wilman et al. 2007). Important as it is for those in desperate need, the depth, coverage, ade-quacy, and sustainability of such a project should concern anyone interested in a long-term devel-opment agenda. The scheme transferred US $10 per household monthly. Schubert (2004) reporteda total household coverage of 1,027, and an average household size of 3.75 members. This trans-lates into an average cash transfer of a little under 9 cents per person, per day or 7.45 per cent ofthe widely used international threshold for destitution! Although a pilot scheme, the eligibilitycriteria are quite restrictive. The coverage of those considered ‘food poor’ was 20 and 33 percent for those classified as living in ‘critical poverty’. This claim of success becomes surrealwhen set against the scale of the national challenges that Zambia faces. Official national datasuggests that some 66 per cent of the population live below the national poverty line. Twentyfive per cent of primary school age cohort is not in school, rising to 33 per cent for the secondaryschool age cohort. Nearly 50 per cent of children under the age of five are stunted; and here wehave not mentioned the devastating levels of HIV/AIDS (Barrientos et al. 2005).

Quite troubling is the nature of the relationship between funding, advocacy, and production of‘evidence’. In other contexts, this would be immediately understood as a conflict of interest. Con-sultants are employed, who themselves have pecuniary interests in delivering ‘evidence’ for thecommissioning body; which itself needs to justify its continuing funding from a donor

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organisation; which needs ‘evidence’ confirming its raison d’etre; which may itself be as muchabout personal careers and pecuniary interest as it is about commitment to social justice! If thiswere a discussion of the African state and political elite the epithet of ‘neo-patrimonialism’would have featured repeatedly.

Single-issue advocacy and policy blinkers

In much of the advocacy around cash transfer schemes or ‘basic social protection’ package, it isgenerally argued that the instruments are “demonstrably affordable” even within current fiscalspace (ILO 2008, Diethier et al. 2010). Non-adoption of the ‘social protection’ instrument is gen-erally considered a problem of absent political will. The problem with single issue focus, and theattendant absence of holistic development engagement, is best demonstrated by two cases.

The first concerns International Labour Office’s Decent Work Pilot Programme in Ghana (ILO2006). While it claims that poverty remains the most pressing single issue in Ghana, that farmersin Ghana represent by far the most affected group, that informal sector operatives are becoming ‘adistant second’, the scoping study “came out in favour of a focus on the informal economybecause the ILO no longer has a current programme and expertise on rural development. . . buta comparative advantage over other actors concerning the informal economy” (ILO 2006,p. 33). Apparently, if Ghana requires policy advice for the portion of its population that is recog-nised as being most vulnerable, it would have to ask another organisation which might haveexpertise in agrarian issues, but not in education or in infrastructure development. Developmentissues are rarely so neatly compartmentalised.

The second (relating to the affordability argument) has been repeatedly canvassed by theILO with regards to a comprehensive social security agenda. While there is recognition thatfiscal space is an important consideration, the conclusion, however, is that the ‘basic social pro-tection’ package that it recommends is ‘demonstrably affordable’ even within current fiscalspace (ILO 2008). Here, however, we will focus on HelpAge International (2006). The organ-isation has argued persistently that universal old age pension is affordable, costing no more than2.7 per cent of the GDP of a country. In 2006, HelpAge International argued that “a new surveyof non-contributory social pension schemes shows that pensions are affordable in low andmiddle income countries” (2006, p. 3). Two-thirds of the countries covered in the survey had“a social pension” system costing no more than 1 per cent of their GDP (HelpAge International2006).

Single issue advocacy faces a deep-rooted problem: analytical and policy blinkers regardingwhy affordability is much more than a simple question of the share of GDP that their favouritesocial protection instruments will cost. The problem with paradigms is not so much that theyshift; it is that they are blinkers. Those whose raison d’etre is about policy singularity all toooften fall into the trap of reducing policy making to their advocacy concerns. Advancing the well-being of children and old persons remains a fundamental principle of a policy framework; it is atthe core of a social commitment to solidarity and equality. The problem is that neither equality norsocial solidarity is central to contemporary social protection advocacy.

While a focused engagement with a policy issue has its values, it does so in the context of (1)its ideational or normative grounding and (2) its connection with other levers of policymaking.The problem is that, in the real world in which African policymakers operate (like any other)solely focusing on one policy lever does not (and should not) make sense. To use a well-wornphrase in development studies, intersectional linkages and cross-thematic framings are centralto policy coherence and positive outcomes. Effective social protection of children and theelderly due to vulnerability, poverty or destitution, works not in segmented and isolated deploy-ment of policy instruments, but in a wider vision of the equality and solidarity, grounded in econ-omic and social policy thinking, and broader policy instruments. In the context of severe aid-

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dependence, in which official aid accounts for between 38 per cent (Ghana) and 771 per cent(Liberia) of government expenditure (see Figure 1), it would seem obvious that policy advocatesshould comprehend the incredulity of a minister of finance or a country’s president who is told allshe needs is another 2.5 per cent of her country’s GDP to implement a universal pension scheme.

Yet, as Figure 1 shows, chronic aid dependence was not always the case with Africancountries. The dramatic rise since the 1980s is not simply a question of profligacy; it is rootedin a new global policy environment that succeeded simultaneously in eroding the fiscal base ofthe state, shrinking the productive base of the economies, subverting economic growth, andengineering massive social dislocation. In most cases, it reversed the social development gainsof the pre-1980 era (Chang and Grabel 2004, Mkandawire 2005, Adesina et al. 2006; Adesina2007). A defining characteristic of the social protection paradigm is the refusal to challengethe economic instruments and philosophy that generated the crisis that it wishes to fix. The nar-rowing of ideational vision (Adesina 2010) is derived from aversion, as are the policy instrumentsoften recommended – the focus on ‘extreme’ vulnerability or the poor, targeting, and the discon-necting of social policy and economic policy. The persistent effort to show that social policyinstruments can contribute to growth or activate economic activities, without confronting themarket transactional logic of neoliberalism, reflects the ideational concession to neoliberalismand not its negation. If we cannot show evidence that universal child or old age allowance con-tributes to ‘asset-building’ or improved school enrolment or a 15 per cent increase in chickenownership, would eradicating child or old age poverty be a less deserving moral imperative ofsociety? How to achieve this may be a different story.

In the context of aid dependence, the erosion of the economic base of the countries, andmassive impoverishment (Adesina 2006, 2007), the argument about affordability misses thepoint about the levers of effective poverty reduction. Focusing on redistribution with little engage-ment with the growth side is neither good policymaking nor good advocacy. Beyond the issue offinancing are disagreements of an ideational/ideological nature. Rather than a case of “frustration

Figure 1. Aid dependence in Africa.Source: Financial Times, 2 June 2010.

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[which] seems to relate to the difficulty of getting to grips with the new and complex terminologyof the social protection agenda” (Barrientos et al. 2005, p. 30), the objection by some Africanpolicymakers is based on the appropriateness of the instruments. A Zambian official – whowas active on one of the government panels working on social protection responses – was insis-tent that where “poverty is deeply embedded and chronic [as in Zambia], it is not about shocksand SRM is not necessarily the best way to approach it” (Barrientos et al. 2005, p. 30 fn. 17).

While redistribution (even those that do not make stigma a criterion of benefit) may work in acontext in which poverty is transient or the burden of 5 to 10 per cent of the population, societiesin which 50 per cent or more are poor have to make raising the productive capacity of society apriority in their anti-poverty strategy (Adesina 2006, 2007, 2009). From the policy side, effectivesocial protection mechanisms must combine economic development (growth with structuraltransformation of the economy) with vast improvements in social and political development out-comes. The most powerful instruments in achieving protection against economic shocks do notstart off as ‘social protection’ instruments. Attention to education, as a key instrument in asocial policy regime that delivers long-term ‘social protection’, is one of the more obviousgaps in the SPP. In the first two decades of post-independence Africa, universal and publiclyfunded education and healthcare were the most effective social policy instruments that simul-taneously met the objectives of growth and social protection (Adesina 2007, 2009). A lessonthat contemporary African policymakers can learn from the policy pioneers of the late 1950sand the 1960s about public investment in education is that there are positive linkages betweenpublic spending on education and economic growth. The idea that what Africa needs is thelowest common denominator of basic education (as prescribed within the Millennium Develop-ment Goals) is not only contrary to the lesson of history, but also makes little policy sense pre-cisely at the time in human history when high cognitive skills and education have becomecentral to the functioning of an economy and global competitiveness.

Similarly, in many African countries, production support for farmers, cooperatives forresource-pooling, price stabilising, and marketing instruments were vital in order to guaranteerural livelihoods and to generate the social funds that played the same role pension funds didin Finland (Kangas 2006). Malawi’s agriculture turn-around is a useful lesson in the multi-tasking of social policy (Sapkota 2007). Instruments that appear to be production-focused,such as farm subsidy and the marketing boards, can dramatically increase production, raise

Figure 2. Transformative social policy: norms, function, instruments and outcomes.

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household income, and smoothen consumption of farming households. The net effect is protec-tion from vulnerability, on a sustainable basis and without the indignity of means or needs testing.The farming subsidy in Malawi is a medicine the neoliberal policy doctors prohibited. Indeed, in2001, based upon a report commissioned by the European Union, the IMF had forced the govern-ment of Malawi to sell off its grain reserve. It left the country vulnerable when the next cycle ofdrought hit the region (Adesina 2006). The “2002/03 humanitarian crisis” that Devereux et al.(2010, p. 1) mentioned as the trigger for emergency relief work and cash transfer schemes wasa result of the policy failure instigated by the same ‘development community’ (2010).4

Furthermore, there is no historical evidence that framing social protection in poor-centricterms leads to successful policy outcomes in poverty reduction, much less in poverty eradication;this is the message of Korpi and Palme (1998). Furthermore, as they reminded us, the more wefocus on poverty, the less likely we are to be successful in reducing poverty. Making the poordependent on the generosity of the rich creates a zero-sum outcome. Non-universal social provi-sioning tends to produce resentment among those whose taxes fund the benefits or social grants(cash transfers) to the poor. At the international level, it manifests as ‘donor fatigue’; at nationallevel as the vilification of ‘welfare dependency’. Paradoxically, in each of the primary Europeansocial policy regimes (Beveridgean, Bismarckian, or Nordic) successful outcomes involved com-bining economic and social policy; the production and protection tasking of social policy.

The claim to redistribution in liberal social policy has a long history, but “the stigmata of thepoor law test, moral judgments by people about other people and their behaviour, were a conditionof redistribution” (Titmuss 1965, p. 15). The extent to which these might be an affront to the socialnorms of the solidarity of the communities that these social protection regimes are supposed to‘help’ was gleaned by Devereux et al. (2010, p. 5): “it is not uncommon for direct recipientsto share their transfers within communities, reflecting a preference for wider distribution thanis stipulated by targeting criteria – even at the cost of lower benefits to themselves”. Ratherthan an appreciation for how this is a result of the norms of solidarity which sustains the commu-nities, such altruism is often considered a ‘leakage’ or a Type II error. That the ‘development com-munity’ is doing fundamental harm to the norm (the glue) that holds their target communitiestogether has received little or no introspection. Targeting instruments occurs “by operating puni-tive tests of discrimination; by strengthening conceptions of approved and disapproved dependen-cies; and by a damaging assault on the recipients of welfare in terms of their sense of self-respectand self-determination” (Titmuss 1965, p. 15). The contractors, donors, and international NGOofficials, who claim to be driven by the norm of social justice, have eagerly assumed the rolesof ‘public assistance relieving officers’ in Africa, even though their own countries repudiatedsuch a method decades ago.

A return to wider vision

A starting point is the recognition that successful efforts at building socially inclusive develop-mental agenda have always depended on visionary agenda setting and that social policy has mul-tiple functions. A primary motivation for this paper and an objection to the prevailing ‘socialprotection paradigm’ is the tendency to reduce social policy to social protection. Doing so alsoreduces the goal of social protection to simply cash transfers. Successful economic and socialdevelopment efforts derive from visionary agenda setting that embraces a wide vision ofsociety with a long-term vision. While it is true that successful cases depend on the use of ‘evi-dence’ (scholarly studies, impact assessment, and so on), this is often at the service of the vision-ary agenda, not the reverse. Indeed, in many of the successful cases, the initial ‘evidence’ was thatthey should not – and could not – do what we hail them for doing now (see Myrdal 1960, 2005a,b).5 In the more successful cases, a visionary agenda was grounded in the norms of equality and

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social solidarity. They embrace the idea of the ‘good society’ or of a ‘better life for all’. The sharedvision combines the agency of those previously disadvantaged with the buy-in of other segmentsof society. The initial coalescing of social forces is sustained by the norms of “encompassingsocial policy” (Korpi and Palme 1998), which rest on universal access, supplemented by targetedinstruments to protect the vulnerable, among other things. Thus, universal coverage not onlyenhanced social and political commitment, but it also made reforming the system and the recoveryfrom the crisis easier and faster (Kangas and Palme 2005). It is useful to reiterate that social policyinstruments are not about ‘public goods’, at least not in Samuelson’s sense of the “collective con-sumption of goods” (1954, p. 387). Rather they are social and economic commons because theyinvolve the idea of a collective, common good (not ‘goods’). Equity, rather than ‘non-excludabil-ity’ or ‘non-rivalry’, is the determinate condition for access, and access may be structured on thebasis of the gravity of need rather than presentation of demand.

Poverty reduction, in countries with high poverty levels, requires a return to holistic develop-ment thinking; it requires a return to the wider vision of development and social policy. It is thiswider vision that is encapsulated in the idea of “transformative social policy” (UNRISD 2006,Adesina 2007, Mkandawire 2007).6 Figure 2 (above) sets out the link between the ideational (nor-mative) grounding of this conception of social policy, its multiple functions and diversity ofpolicy instruments, and the development outcomes that it achieves. Central to our idea of trans-formative social policy is its grounding in the norms of equality and social solidarity. Universalmembership and coverage in provisioning are outcomes of such a normative commitment. Socialpolicy framed by these norms serves many functions: production, protection, reproduction, redis-tribution, and social cohesion or nation-building. The transformative social policy instrumentsrange from education to healthcare, agrarian reform, child care, old age care, and to fiscal instru-ments. The development outcomes feed not only social and economic development (growth withstructural transformation), but also political development. The outcomes, themselves, go on toreinforce and deepen the normative framework of the social policy regime.

Central to the model is the inherent link between social policy and economic policy which isbound by the shared norms of equality and solidarity. The interconnection is central to a variety ofsocial policy regimes: the ‘Bismarckian’, the ‘Beveridgean’, the ‘Nordic’, and the ‘Nationalist’models (Adesina 2009). The 1942 Beveridge Report, sets out as the second of its three principles,the idea that “social insurance should be treated as one part only of a comprehensive policy ofsocial progress”. The link in the Beveridgean model is in his second report in 1944, concernedwith full employment. The 1944 report was “more than a sequel” and argued that “maintenanceof employment is wanted for its own sake and not simply to make a Plan for Social Security workmore easily” (Beveridge 1944, p. 18). These are two sides of the same coin in vanquishing whatBeveridge referred to as the “five giants on the road to reconstruction: Want, Disease, Ignorance,Squalor and Idleness” (Beveridge 1942). The Bismarckian model was more directly driven by theimperatives of industrialisation, nation-building, and weaning the working class off revolutionaryideas. Similarly, the ‘Nationalist model’ (Adesina 2009) was driven by the assumption that inde-pendence was the initial step on the long road to post-colonial reconstruction, with the objectivesof rapid economic development and the defeat of “the trinity of ignorance, poverty and disease”(Mkandawire 2006). The Nordic model also combines economic development and social policy.Its capacity to combine production with dignity was possible because the functioning of thelabour market was grounded in the normative framework that bound economic and social pol-icies. The outcomes have been relatively low levels of inequality and poverty and better socialdevelopment outcomes in health, education and international competitiveness. As Mkandawire(2007) noted, transformative social policy enhances labour market efficiency and innovation.

Transformative social policy relates not only to the economy or protection from destitution,but to the transformation of social relations as well. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the

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area of gender relations and equality. We can cite the child care policy that derives from this; afundamental difference between the British and Nordic social landscape is in the investment inearly child care support and education where in the latter, universal coverage is grounded inthe norms of equality and solidarity. The result is vastly different gender profile: releasingwomen to enter into the labour market and fostering the dual-earner family model. Socialpolicy regimes grounded in solidarity and norms of equality are much better at producingsocial cohesion and inclusivity.

Finally, social policy for a wider vision of social and economic development agenda setting isnot simply something that ‘the state does’. The current tendency to define social policy in theseterms does not square with the historical roots of social policy in Europe or the diversity of thepolicymaking bodies, financing, and provisioning mechanisms. It is more useful to see socialpolicy as multifaceted, with diverse delivery mechanisms, within and outside the state. Thestate–community partnership in setting the social policy agenda, and then delivering and moni-toring it, is not only about fiscal sustainability in low-income countries, but also about communitybuy-in and ownership. In building inclusive societies, such ownership facilitates what AmartyaSen (2009) refers to as public reasoning. What this calls for is a fundamental rethink of howwe define and shape the social policy agenda specifically, and the development agenda morebroadly.

Conclusion

The problem that this paper has been concerned with is not ‘social protection’ per se; it is imposs-ible to conceive of social policy without its protection tasking. Rather, the concern has been withthe problematic nature of the prevailing SPP, central to which is the narrow vision of social policy,a refusal to engage with (or confront) the neoliberal analytical and policy regime, and the perfunc-tory attention (if at all) to inequality. What is being sold to developing countries (and Africancountries more so) is the more regressive version of liberal social policy regime, within a meth-odological framework (Myrdal 1978) that isolates the problem of vulnerability from the broader,systemic processes that in a ‘cumulative causative’ process created what is being treated: extremepoverty and vulnerability. The dualist social policy regime allocates social risks differently: ‘goodrisks’ are allocated to the market and ‘bad risks’ to the public domain. Much of the latter is basedon Poor Law norms.

Equally important is that the above has happened in a context of reversal of the mode ofengagement between the global North and the global South. Whereas in the 1960s and the1970s, northern scholars and activists engaged with Africa (specifically and the global South,broadly), on the basis of an acknowledged agency of Africans, the post-1980s has seen thereverse: the denial and stifling of African agency. ‘Organic’ scholarship and activism has givenway to entrepreneurialism. The line between scholarship and activism, on the one hand, and entre-preneurial research and consultancy, on the other hand is blurred. Where ‘research’ is funded byagencies with a stake in the policy instruments being investigated, and the investigators returnwith verdicts that celebrate or twig at the edges of the instruments, we face a crisis of academicintegrity. The effect has been the narrowing of the vision of development.

As Gunnar Myrdal (1978, p. 782) reminds us, “The poor do not need a little more money. . .What the poor do need are radical institutional reforms on a scale far outside the field enclosed byreasoning about growth and redistribution accounted for in terms of money.” Underpinning suchradical reform is precisely what is absent from the prevailing neoliberal project and the SPP. It is areform agenda that requires a fundamental reversal of the market transactional logic that hasdriven public policy in the last three decades and to which social palliatives of cash transfers rep-resent a cop-out to a regime of inequality and structural poverty that has grown and deepened in

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the African context. A starting point is a return to the wider vision of development grounded in thenorms of equality and social solidarity. ‘Transformative social policy’ offers the conceptual toolsand the policy parameters for such return to a wider vision for enhancing human capabilities anddevelopment.

AcknowledgmentsI would like to express my appreciation to several people from whom I have benefitted in the original writingof this paper or subsequent revisions: Thandika Mkandawire, a veritable mwalimu, Illechong Yi, AdebayoOlukoshi, Kola Omomowo, Michael Neocosmos, Arjan de Haan and Sarah Cook. I also acknowledge thecomments from participants at the Dakar session of the preparatory workshop for the European report ondevelopment 2010, where the original and larger report was presented. Finally, I wish to thank the two anon-ymous reviewers for their comments – in matters on which I agree or disagree. The usual disclaimer applies.

Biographical NoteJimi O. Adesina is a professor of sociology at the University of the Western Cape, where he directs theTransformative Social Policy Programme. He is Professorial Research Associate at the Nordic Africa Insti-tute. Uppsala, Sweden. Between 2003 and 2005 he was an external research coordinator at the UN ResearchInstitute for Social Development (Geneva), where he coordinated the Africa segment of the institute’s globalresearch programme, ‘Social Policy in a Development Context’.

Notes1. See de Renzio and Hanlon (2008), Batley (2005), Hodges and Tibana (2004), for sources.2. This targeting of ‘weak’ actors on the African landscape is not limited to the field of social policy.

DFID’s recent foray into the field of social science research support in Africa involved a self-consciousdecision to side-step Africa’s oldest and longest surviving social science research council, CODESRIA(Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) – founded in 1973, with headquar-ters in Dakar, Senegal and flourishing – and to create a competing, new organisation based on the sameclientele-oriented approach in which UK researchers and institutions take control of ‘capacity building’in the field of Africa’s social sciences. The assumption seems to be that such ‘capacity building’ com-petence is absent on the continent, yet quite a number of the used research capacity-building methods inuse today were developed by CODESRIA and are still being used by the organisation. The parallel withthe effort to impose a particular vision of social policy on African policymakers is instructive.

3. The Kalomo Project was a pilot cash transfer scheme launched in 2004 by the German development aidagency, Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ). It draws its name from theKalomo District of Zambia, where the scheme was piloted.

4. Devereux et al. (2010) did this without linking to the policy regime that precipitated the humanitariancrisis and made no attempt to confront this in either their diagnosis or prognosis.

5. In this section, we draw on Adesina (2010).6. See also, Arjan de Haan’s Reclaiming Social Policy (2007). The definition of social policy underpinning

our concept of transformative social policy was given earlier in the opening pages of this paper (Adesina2007 and Mkandawire 2011).

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