Introduction
The twentieth century witnessed a major restructuring of the global economy with profound implications for the lives, livelihoods and life chances of people across the world. It began with an international division of labour and pattern of trade that was largely shaped by colonial interests, with the poorer countries producing and exporting primary commodities to the rich while the latter specialised in the production and export of manufactured goods. The period after the Second World War saw high rates of economic growth and full employment in the advanced industrialised countries. It also saw the strengthening of state-provided social protection for the majority of workers in these countries, giving rise to different varieties of the welfare state (Esping-Anderson 1990).
Developing countries sought to ācatch upā through strategies of import-substitution industrialisation, building up their manufacturing capacity behind protective barriers. Many had inherited weak and highly restricted systems of social protection from the colonial era that were intended for a small proportion of workers in the formal sector. While efforts were made to expand these measures to the wider population, the results were very uneven. In most countries, social security measures remained restricted to the small, male-dominated section of the workforce employed in the formal state and private sector. Large numbers of men, and the vast majority of women, were confined to unpaid family labour or to making a living in the informal economy with virtually no statutory benefits and largely invisible in official statistics.
Since the 1970s, a combination of factors have set in train processes of growing integration of the worldās economies and the intensified flow of goods, services, people and ideas across national boundaries. These factors include the rising costs of labour in advanced industrialised countries together with rapid advances in information technology and transportation systems that have allowed production processes to be broken down and their labour-intensive stages relocated to different regions of the world. Politics have also played a major role in driving the pace of globalisation. The ascendance of neo-liberal ideologies in some of the worldās most powerful countries, with their celebration of free market forces, spearheaded the liberalisation of their economies and the downsizing of their welfare regimes. The influence of these ideologies within the international financial institutions ensured that similar policies were pursued in indebted developing countries and in the transition from planned to market economies in previously socialist countries.
The deregulation of labour markets across the world, accompanied by reductions in social security provisions where these existed, have served to make labour markets increasingly informal and to turn labour into an extremely flexible resource that can be hired and fired in response to the market signals. While continued restrictions on its movement have prevented the emergence of a global labour market, labour is becoming a global resource. Companies have been able to use the possibilities offered by changing technology to find the sources of labour most suited to their needs, often relocating their production, or stages of production, from more to less industrialised countries. As Standing points out:
much has been made of ānorth-southā differentials in skills, wages, productivity and so on. However, perhaps the biggest difference between the newly industrialising and the industrialised countries in the 1970s and 1980s was that differences in labour costs were greater than any differences in productivity, especially as some of the former were able to mould disciplined (often largely female) and flexible labour forces (Standing 1999: 64, emphasis added).
Women now make up a much larger share of the worldās workforce than they did in the earlier import-substituting phase of industrialisation.
The growing integration of the world economy is evident in the doubling of trade as a share of global income between 1970 and 2000 (ILO 2004) and in the large increase in the flows of foreign capital. While official aid has declined in real terms, private capital flows have increased from less than half of the total resources flows in developing countries in 1990 to about three quarters in 2002. Surges in short-term capital flows have been responsible for a great deal of the volatility in international capital markets, but foreign direct investments have also demonstrated considerable mobility, adding to the insecurity of many countries. That the scale of integration into the global economy has exposed many countries to the vagaries of the global capital markets was demonstrated in the financial crises that erupted in East and South East Asia in the 1990s and subsequently in Latin America. These crises played a major role in drawing attention to some of the risks associated with globalisation and the need to rethink about the nature of social protection to deal with the changing nature of employment. The aim of this book is to bring a gender perspective into these efforts.
This introductory chapter discusses the central concepts in current thinking about social protection and the approaches taken by different actors within the development community in defining its content and boundaries. Chapter 2 sketches out in broad brushstrokes some of the factors that have led to the growing involvement of women with the labour market as well as their concentration in informal forms of work. Chapter 3 develops a framework of analysis that integrates gender, life course and livelihoods perspectives in order to explore the interactions between gender inequality, household poverty and labour market forces that help to produce gender-differentiated experiences of risk and vulnerability for the working poor. Chapters 4 to 8 examine and assess examples of social protection measures in order to illustrate what a gender-analytical approach brings to debates about social protection. Finally, Chapter 9 synthesises the main lessons that emerge out of the discussion and identifies gaps and exclusions in the social protection agenda.
What Do We Mean by Social Protection?
While the terminology of āsocial protectionā is used in a number of different ways in the development literature, it revolves around a common set of concepts that spell out the nature of the problem that it is intended to address. These concepts draw attention to the fact that, while poverty measures have conventionally captured the state of deprivation at a particular point in time, the problem for the poor also relates to their insecurity and vulnerability and to fluctuations in their ability to meet their basic needs (see Box 1.1).
Box 1.1 Poverty, insecurity and vulnerability
As traditionally defined and measured, poverty is a static concept ā a snapshot in time. But insecurity and vulnerability are dynamic ā they describe the response to changes over time. Insecurity is exposure to risk; vulnerability, the resulting possibility of a decline in well-being. The event triggering the decline is often referred to as a shock, which can affect an individual (illness, death), a community, a region or even a nation ā¦Risk, risk exposure and vulnerability are related but not synonymous. Risk refers to uncertain events that can damage wellbeing ā the risk of becoming ill, or the risk that a drought will occur. The uncertainty can pertain to the timing or the magnitude of the event. For example, the seasonal fluctuation of farm income is an event known in advance but the severity is not always predictable. Risk exposure measures the probability that a certain risk will occur. Vulnerability measures the resilience against a shock ā the likelihood that a shock will result in a decline in well-being.
Source: World Bank 2000: 139.
Social protection is a response to this more dynamic understanding of poverty. As a broad framework of analysis, it refers to the full range of interventions undertaken by public, private and voluntary organisations and informal networks to support individuals, households and communities in their efforts to prevent, manage and overcome risks and vulnerabilities (Shepherd 2004). However, the concern of this book is with social protection as public policy and hence with a subset of the interventions included in this definition. Within this more limited definition, social protection refers to particular policy approaches and instruments that deal with the problems of risk and vulnerability.
As a set of instruments, there is not much that is necessarily new about social protection. It encompasses the various forms of social insurance and social assistance that have traditionally made up the social security agenda associated with formal employment. It also encompasses the range of public works and income-generating programmes through which many poorer countries have sought to reduce poverty. Both sets of instruments were already part of the development agenda for several decades before the concept of social protection became a part of the development terminology.
As a policy approach, however, social protection is relatively new. It reflects attempts to integrate concerns about social security and poverty reduction within a unified conceptual and policy framework in response to the perceived increase in the vulnerability of populations across the world. And it reflects a greater appreciation of the need to have protection in measures in place before a crisis occurs rather than in its aftermath.
Various factors explain this heightened sense of vulnerability, but a greater appreciation of the ādownsideā of economic globalisation has been at the forefront. While the policies of the international financial institutions have played an important role in driving the integration of the world economy, the risks associated with this process were becoming evident ā even to these organisations ā by the end of the 1990s. Consequently, social protection now features centrally on the agendas of most international agencies as well of many national governments. Despite some convergence on possible instruments of social protection and some consensus about the broad approach, however, there are important differences in philosophy and interpretation evident in current discussions.
This chapter compares the approaches to social protection emanating from the World Bank and the International Labour Organization (ILO) in order to clarify some of these differences. The focus on the World Bank is in recognition of both its growing interest in this area of policy as well as the clout that it exercises in shaping national and international agendas by virtue of the resources it has at its disposal and its dominant position in the world of development ideas. The focus on the ILO, on the other hand, reflects its particular role as the United Nationsā (UN) agency most directly concerned with the labour market, and hence with the sections of the population with which this book is concerned. A comparison of the two approaches will thus also help to illuminate how the analysis of vulnerability helps to shape the nature of the response.
The World Bank and the Social Protection Agenda
From Safety Nets to Social Protection
While all the agencies that make up the UN system are today focused on poverty reduction as a central element of their defining missions, the World Bank has a broader focus than the more specialised agencies and a considerably larger resource base. Although it has re-invented itself in recent years as a āknowledge bankā, the influence of its past incarnation as a financial bank is evident in its current approach to the mission of poverty reduction. Its projects continue to be formulated in terms of financial objectives, even when their primary purpose may be social, and market relationships are given priority over all others (ILO Working Group 1995: 11).
The Bankās thinking about social protection can be traced back to the experiences of structural adjustment, carried out in the 1980s in various indebted countries in Africa and Latin America. The social costs of these measures had not been not factored into their design, and by the end of the decade it became clear that they were inflicting considerable pain on vulnerable groups within the population ā both the long-term poor and those newly impoverished by adjustment programmes. Compensatory measures were consequently put in place to ameliorate some of this āshortterm painā that had to be endured before the ālong-term gainsā to economic liberalisation could be realised.
Given that these measures had to fit within the fiscal austerity framework of structural adjustment, they were designed as residual āsocial safety netsā, which the Bankās World Development Report 1990 recommended should be targeted to those who would not profit from the benefits of growth in the short run and would remain acutely vulnerable to adverse events. The Report, which spelt out the Bankās return to poverty concerns after a decade or so of pursuing growth-oriented structural adjustment, combined a continuing concern with economic growth with a new emphasis on the utilisation and quality of labour, now widely seen as the most abundant asset at the disposal of the poor.
Although safety nets were initially intended as ātransitionalā measures to provide a ābridge between the crisis and the reactivationā of the economy (Jorgensen 1992 in Vivian 1994: 15), it became clear that economic liberalisation in an era of intensified global competition was bringing new forms of insecurity in its wake along with the exacerbation of inequality and the persistence of older vulnerabilities. This was spelt out by the Social Protection Sector set up within the World Bank in the late 1990s, which noted that āthe exact same processes that increase the opportunity for welfare improvements also increase the variability of the outcome for society as a whole and even more so for specific groupsā while at the same time āthe trend towards globalization and the higher mobility of production factors also reduce the ability of governments to raise revenues and pursue independent economic policies and, thus, to have national policies when they are needed most ā¦ā (Holzmann and Jorgensen 1999: 1007).
Social safety nets were apparently here to stay and, over a period of time, became the favoured means through which both the transitional costs of adjustment as well as deeper structural problems could be addressed (Vivian 1994). The World Development Report 2000/01, which revisited the issue of poverty, exemplifies the new thinking. Risk and vulnerability were now seen as integral to the multidimensional understanding of poverty: āpoverty means more than inadequate consumption, education and health ā¦it also means dreading the future ā knowing that a crisis may descend at any time, not knowing how one will cope ā¦Poor people are often among the most vulnerable in society because they are the most exposed to a wide array of risksā. The security of the poor, along with economic opportunity and empowerment, made up the new three-pronged approach to poverty reduction as described in the report.
In addition, the financial and economic crises in East Asia, Latin America and Russia had brought home the need to put safety nets in place before a crisis (ex ante) rather than as a response to it (ex post). Discussing the differences between the World Development Reports (WDRs) of 1990 and 2000, Holzmann et al. (2003) point out:
In the WDR 1990, social safety nets, largely understood as ex-post provision of support in response to economic crisis and structural adjustment, was subordinate to the need for labour intensive growth and access to basic social services ā¦ In the WDR 2000/01, by contrast, social protection is a primary element in the new three-pronged approach. Absence of poverty is considered to be achieved when households have enough to consume both now and in the future (Holzmann et al. 2003: 4).
Social Risk Management: Maximising Welfare in the Face of Diverse Risks
The social risk management (SRM) framework was developed by the Social Protection Sector of the World Bank as an analytical tool to promote its new thinking and to shift the concern with social protection away from ādefinition by instrumentsā to ādefinition by objectivesā (Holzmann and Jorgensen 1999). It is theoretically rooted in the neo-classical economic analysis of individuals, households and communities seeking to maximise their welfare in environments that are characterised by imperfect information and diverse forms of risk (Holzmann and Jorgensen 1999; Holzmann et al. 2003). Welfare is represented in this framework by flows of income or consumption and includes money, in-kind and imputed income as well as social services that cannot be easily purchased from the market.
The risks in question are manifested in adverse events...
