Abstract
For those who have been critics of the Bretton Woods driven social policy agenda in the period from the 1980s till recently, the UNRISD report Combating Poverty and Inequality: Structural Change, Social Policy and Politics comes like a breath of fresh air blowing away all the old nostrums of ‘targeting’ and ‘leakages’ and ‘inclusion errors’, and reasserts the essential validity of the universalism argument, giving emphasis again to the essential role of the state in overseeing such a policy. It is fitting that whereas the controversial World Bank’s World Development Reports (WDRs) of 1990 and of 2000 dominated the international debate about world poverty and how to reduce it, the Bank left the stage clear in 2010 to in effect give space to UNRISD and also to the UN-DESA’s ‘Rethinking Poverty’ report.
That having been said, the problem with the UNRISD report, like most UN documents, is that it is trapped within a paradigm of advice to governments and is unreflective of its own part in the system of global social governance and the global debate about poverty alleviation within and between international organizations. It is also trapped within a methodological nationalism, seeing problems as located within countries requiring solutions to be found within them. It reinforces the current fashion, echoing the wish of many in the Global South to come out of aid dependency, by arguing that ‘a country’s social policy system [should be anchored] within domestic sources of financing’ (p. 228). There are of course sound reasons for giving emphasis to national fiscal policy and the need to build national social contracts, 1 but this focus on country policy and this non-engagement with other global players means the report is unable to address explicitly three key issues: (1) the continuing global contestation between agencies for the right to shape national social policy and for the content of that policy, which has come to a head in the context of the global economic crisis; (2) the unwillingness of national social policies to meet the social protection needs of an increasingly mobile global population, which will increase with the global climate change crisis inducing environmental migration; and (3) the consequential need to go beyond aid dependency not in the direction of reverting to only national funding but onwards in the direction of global public good funding.
Taking the issue of the continued inter-agency contestation in the context of economic crisis, I have reported elsewhere (Deacon, 2011b) that the 2008 economic crisis threw up at least three responses: the dominant and initial G20 response to throw money and authority at the IMF (and its safety nets) to enable countries to weather the storm; the subsequent UNCEB Board response (UNRISD, p. 140) to call for a social protection floor of universal access to cash transfers for pensioners and children, as well as access to basic health and education services,; and the marginalized voices of UNCTAD and UNRISD calling for a broader state-led developmental response to the crisis. The clout was and is with the IMF, and despite the IMF website makeover stressing that it would protect social protection as it forced countries into a rapid deficit reduction pro-cyclical policy, it has once again systematically pushed for a targeted approach to social policy protecting only the ‘most vulnerable’, which after all it proclaims unashamedly as its mission. Several studies of the post-crisis lending policy by the IMF confirm this point (CEPR, 2009; Lendvai and Stubbs; 2010; Molina-Gallart, 2009). Unless and until the IMF is reined in and subject to the much more sensible counter-cyclical global economic policies argued for by the UN’s (Stiglitz) Committee of Experts on the Global Economic Crisis (UN, 2009), then UNRISD whistles in the wind.
Regarding the issue of climate-change-induced migration, my point is that it will increase, as will migration from political unrest. Migrants are the last people on earth to be provided with targeted social assistance, let alone a universal social protection floor package by national(ist) governments out of the ‘public purse’ funded by national taxes. A recent review I undertook (Deacon, 2011a) of the extent to which cross-border migrants even within regions (in this case the EU and SADC) were able to access cash social assistance on the same terms as citizens concluded that:
. . . the role of social policy as the definer of who a state is or is not responsible for seems to be symbolically located around the concept of no access by outsiders to the public purse which in practice means only cash benefits. This applies to EU citizens exercising their legal rights as denizens to cross EU borders and live elsewhere at least for the first five years. It applies to South African asylum seekers who are otherwise regarded as having the same rights to public services as citizens and other residents.
This reinforces the reflections of Alexander Betts, a leading global migration expert who has argued:
At the moment, social contracts remain State-centric and ill-adapted to a transnational world. Education, health care, pensions and taxation systems remain rigidly fixed to particular States and territories. Over time, there will be a need to conceive of ways in which the provision of social services – such as those relating to taxation, government expenditure, pensions and qualifications – can be adapted to be mobile across international borders in a transnational world. (Betts, 2010: 12)
This leads to the third point that social policy analysts and social policy advocates have to shift from the exclusive focus on national fiscal policies meeting national social needs to embrace also the need to advance in the direction of financing global and regional public goods from global and regional sources of finance. It should not be necessary to have to make this point after 10 years of this journal! In terms of the global, the time has never been more propitious to advance the case for forms of taxes on transnational banking activities to fund social spending. The IMF favours a FAT tax on banks, the Committee of Experts to the leading group of countries favours a currency transaction tax. 2 The president of the G20 in 2011 is pushing the issue. Links must be made between this movement and the need to help poorer countries fund a social protection floor. The positive lessons of global funds for health and for education need to be applied to create a global social protection floor fund. If not, as the UK prime minister said in a typically nationalist way, defending the UK’s good record of increasing overseas aid, ‘their problems will visit our door’. In terms of regional funds for regional public goods, let me draw to your attention an argument put and received warmly at a meeting of SADC parliamentarians in 2011 that there is a ‘need to investigate the possibility of a tax on extractive industries to fund social transfers, preferably levied at regional level’. Regional sovereign funds to pay for social expenditures should not be off the agenda in a region which has a hugely mobile population.
In sum, the UNRISD report cannot be faulted in terms of its prescriptions for what should be done within countries to advance a progressive social policy. The report’s silence on the equally important policies needed at the regional and global levels and the associated global social governance reforms that are needed to enable them to be delivered is worrying.