The politics of social protection: what do we get from a ‘social contract’ approach?

Abstract

Abstract There have been growing calls to reframe the politics of poverty reduction and of social protection in particular, in terms of extending the ‘social contract’ to the poorest groups. This is often understood as relocating social protection within a broader project politics of rights and justice as opposed to patronage. However, such calls belie the serious differences that exist between different strands of social contract and between the forms of social protection that might emerge from these different approaches. The experience in Africa suggests that contractual approaches may take regressive as well as progressive forms. It seems unlikely that international development agencies could promote progressive social contracts around social protection without significant reforms to the way in which aid currently works.

Résumé Il y a dernièrement des appels croissants de définir les politiques de la réduction de pauvreté et de la protection sociale en particulier pour étendre le ‘contrat social’ aux groupes les plus pauvres. Souvent cela veut dire le déplacement de la protection sociale dans les politiques de droits et justice au lieu de parrainage. Cependant, des demandes comme cela contredit les différences sérieuses qui existent entre les éléments différents du contrat social et entre les formes de protection sociale qui peuvent ressortir de cela. L'expérience de la protection sociale en Afrique suggère que les approches contractuelles peuvent prendre des formes régressives autant que progressistes. Il semble peu probable que les agences internationales de développement peuvent promouvoir des contrats sociaux progressistes pour la protection sociale sans des réformes importantes au fonctionnement actuel de l'aide.

Keywords:

• social contract
• social protection
• politics
• Africa

Notes

For Freeman (2007, p. 18, footnote 2) this includes but is not the same as an approach founded on the human rights of individuals. Here, ‘right’ refers to “Rawls's sense of principles of right”, which “works from an ideal based notion of persons and society”. According to Rawls, “rights, duties and goals are but elements of such idealized conceptions”.

Following Berlin (1969), ‘negative’ rights refer to the rights of people to be protected from overt sources of harm (for example, security), whereas ‘positive’ rights refer to those broader set of goods and capacities that people require to flourish as human beings in a fuller sense.

In South Africa, for example, and “in spite of an undoubted commitment to a rather extreme set of neo-liberal macro-economic policies”, the country “has a large and apparently expanding system of social assistance, anchored by a state-supplied old-age pension” (Ferguson 2007, p. 76).

This and the next paragraph draw directly from a comparative research project on “the politics of what works”, which was co-ordinated by this author and synthesised in Hickey (2007) and Hickey (2009). Further details on the politics of social pensions in Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa can be found in Pelham (2007).

This might be particularly the case in Africa, where it has been noted that a particularly social conception of the individual tends to hold sway, as captured in the concept of ubuntu (a notion that might provide a more appropriate basis for thinking through the moral basis for a ‘good society’ than Western notions of contractualism).