Transformations in Global and Regional Social Policies

A. Kaasch, P. Stubbs, A. Kaasch, P. Stubbs

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137287304
• eBook ISBN: 9781137287311
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book discusses key issues in global and regional social policy, exploring Bob Deacon's pioneering approach to regulation, rights and redistribution. It addresses the role of international actors in shaping social policy and discusses the problems and possibilities of new alliances for global social justice.

1

Global and Regional Social Policy Transformations: Contextualizing the Contribution of Bob Deacon

Paul Stubbs and Alexandra Kaasch

1. Introduction

A literature on global and regional social policy has expanded exponentially in the last decade and a half, enriching the discipline of social policy and facilitating new and fruitful collaborations across disciplines. This book explores some of the key concepts and approaches at the forefront of global and regional social policy scholarship. The book engages, in particular, with the work of Bob Deacon, responsible for introducing the term ‘global social policy’. He has not only advanced the study of global social policy but has also considered a focus on both global and regional social policy as an important ‘political commitment’. Contributions to this book come from some of Bob Deacon’s closest collaborators, themselves leading scholars in the fields of global and regional social policy, and all engage critically with key aspects of global and regional global social policy.

2. Bob Deacon’s path to global and regional social policy

Bob Deacon’s academic career in social policy began as a young research assistant at the London School of Economics in 1966. In 1969, he moved to become a lecturer in social policy at what was then North London Polytechnic. Between 1974 and 1987, Bob worked as a senior lecturer in social policy at the then Plymouth Polytechnic. A committed Marxist and activist, he was among those who founded, and edited, the magazine Case Con in 1970, helping to define a whole generation, in the UK and beyond, of ‘radical social workers’,

attempting to give an answer to the contradictions that we face. Case Con offers no magic solutions, no way in which you can go to work tomorrow and practice some miraculous new form of social work which does meet the needs of your ‘clients’. It would be nice if there were such an easy answer, but we believe that the problems and frustrations we face daily are inextricably linked to the society we live in, and that we can only understand what needs to be done if we understand how the welfare state, of which social services are a part, has developed, and what pressures it is subject to. It is the purpose of this manifesto to trace briefly this development, to see how it affects us and our relationships to the rest of society, and above all to start working out what we can do about it.

(Case Con Manifesto, quoted in Okitipi and Aymer, 2009: 56)

In 1980, Bob, together with Gordon Peters, founded the journal Critical Social Policy. Its first issue was published in June 1981 just as ‘the new right’, associated particularly with the then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, began to assert its hegemony through the reworking of individualist and marketized conceptions of welfare. The journal, and its annual conferences, cemented a more radical stance on social policy within UK higher education and internationally, foregrounding feminist and, later, anti-racist critiques alongside socialist understandings of welfare. His text in the first issue, entitled ‘Social Administration, Social Policy and Socialism’ (Deacon, 1981), sought to explore the possibilities of socialist social policy, in part at least via a critical reading of ‘real existing socialism’ in Cuba and Russia. The argument was expanded upon in his book Social Policy and Socialism: The Struggle for Socialist Relations of Welfare (Deacon, 1983), based on a deeper reflection of the challenges to progressive social welfare in both capitalist and state socialist settings.

Bob Deacon’s move to Leeds Metropolitan University, where, between 1987 and 1997, he was Head of Department, Reader, and, later, Professor of Social Policy, saw him working much more centrally on issues of international and, later, global social policy. He was one of the rare scholars from Western Europe to explore social welfare in state socialist Central and Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall, working closely with progressive social policy scholars in a number of countries. His insights proved crucial in widening comparative social policy analysis after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as reflected in his book, co-edited with Julia Szalai, Social Policy in the New Eastern Europe: What Future for Socialist Social Welfare? (Deacon and Szalai, 1990), and other publications in the Ashgate series – Studies in the Social Policies of Central Europe and the Soviet Union – which Deacon edited. Again, he helped to found a journal, the Journal of European Social Policy (JESP), whose first issue appeared in January 1991, and which remains the key journal for comparative European welfare analysis to this day. Looking back on these times, Deacon interpreted the collapse of the Eastern bloc thus: ‘For all practical political purposes any further talk of a post capitalist society built in the image of a socialist utopia was dead. All that remained for now was to struggle for a social democratic form of capitalism.’¹ His argument was, essentially, that ‘the collapse of the East-West political systems posturing [ . . . ] liberates the potential for a global social reformist politics’ (Deacon, 1992).

While never abandoning his interest in Eastern Europe, indeed in collaborations with Paul Stubbs, expanding this to include South East Europe and the post-Yugoslav space (cf. Deacon and Stubbs, 1998, 2007), this interest was increasingly framed within an emphasis on the importance of international organizations in shaping national social policy choices. Indeed, the editorial in the first issue of JESP stated one of the aims of the journal as concerned with ‘the redistribution of social policy decision-making between national and supranational authorities within Europe and the efforts of these supranational authorities to establish common national standards’ (p. 1). From the mid-1990s onwards, his work helped to define a new field of research, that of Global Social Policy. This moved the focus beyond Europe, to a wider concern with social welfare and social justice around the world. His trilogy of books on this theme – Global Social Policy: International Organizations and the Future of Welfare (Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997); Global Social Policy and Governance (Deacon, 2007), and, most recently, Global Social Policy in the Making: The Foundations of the Social Protection Floor (Deacon, 2013) – established and maintained his position as the leading scholar in the field. Moving to Sheffield University in 1997 to become Professor of International Social Policy, he established the Globalism and Social Policy Program (GASPP) at the same time, initially a collaboration with STAKES, the National Research Centre for Welfare and Health in Helsinki, Finland. Later, GASPP expanded into a wider, and more global, network. Again, Deacon founded an influential journal, Global Social Policy, first published in 2001 and continuing to define the contours of a rapidly growing field. He also developed some of the first postgraduate programs on global social policy, including an MA at the University of Sheffield and a master’s-level course within the World University Network.

His work on global social policy has been complemented, for at least a decade, by path-breaking work on the social dimensions of world regionalism, collaborating closely with the United Nations University (UNU) Centre for Regional Integration in Bruges, where, in 2011, he became the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Chair in Regional Integration, Migration and the Free Movement of Peoples. The co-edited book World Regional Social Policy and Global Governance (Deacon et al., 2010) explores the development of world-regional social policies and argues that they have the potential to emerge as key elements of a more pluralistic and equitable system of global social governance. This work addresses the ways in which regional groupings of countries sharing similar traditions, legacies, and developmental paths can develop a degree of cooperation, and more progressive connections between the social and the economic (cf. also Deacon et al., 2007). Indeed, this and later work show Deacon’s willingness to respond to, and integrate, the demands of ‘the Global South’ regarding the problems of a ‘one-size-fits all’ global social policy frame, reflecting particularistic Northern and Western understandings (Deacon, 2000, 2001).

Having so far mainly studied and advised international organizations, in 2011 Bob spent some time inside an international organization, namely the International Labor Organization (ILO). He had received a research fellowship and was able to observe global social processes from inside, while still asserting that ‘[r]esearchers are impossibly outside the loops’. Luckily he was able to publish his book, arguing that ‘global policy synergy is now at the top of the agenda’ and ‘what is now required is a reverse mission creep of the social agencies into the territory of the economic’ and a better appreciation of the significant role of individuals in developing and maintaining (desirable) global social policy (Deacon, 2013).

3. Framing global and regional social policies

Clearly, this chapter and, indeed, the book as a whole cannot do justice to the enormous, lifelong contribution Bob Deacon has made to the broad field of social policy. Instead, we discuss Bob’s major contributions to the creation and development of the interlinked fields of global and regional social policy. Global and regional social policies are concerned with the complex and changing relations between globalization, regionalism, and new modes of governance, constellations of citizenship, and practices of redistribution. As such, the work represents a significant challenge to the ‘methodological nationalism’ underpinning dominant understandings of social policy and moves beyond comparative analysis of welfare arrangements between nation-states.

The framing contribution of Deacon’s work here has been to explore forms of global and regional ‘regulation’, ‘rights’ (termed ‘provision’ in Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 2), and ‘redistribution’ (the 3Rs). It is not surprising that virtually all of the texts which follow utilize this framework to a greater or lesser degree, with authors addressing diverse aspects of the supranationalization of these aspects or, in shorthand terms, their re-scaling across folded sub-national, national, cross-border, transnational, and supranational scales. For Deacon:

Redistribution mechanisms alter, usually in a way which makes more equal, the distributive outcomes of economic activity. Regulatory activity frames and limits the activities of business and other private actors, normally so that they take more account of the social consequences of their actions. The articulation and legislation of rights leads to some more or less effective mechanisms to ensure that citizens might access their rights

(Deacon, 2007: 4, original emphasis)

All of Deacon’s writings on the topic link explicitly the globalization of social policy with what he terms ‘the socialization of global politics’ (Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 1), arguing:

With the collapse of the cold war, the rise of international migratory pressures, and the human suffering arising from social instability in many parts of the world, the security that faces world leaders is, in effect, social security. Cancellation of debts deriving from the ill-informed period of structural adjustment, transnational humanitarian aid to create global political security, and the threat to economic competitiveness posed by the ‘social protectionism’ of European welfare states are today’s top agenda items.

(Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 3)

This framing serves to link the study of social policy firmly with disciplines of international political economy and development studies, not normally associated with rather insular social policy scholarship, combining their insights with what was termed ‘the central question posed by the present turn of world events’, namely

can the benefits of a socially regulated capitalism be extended globally given environmental constraints and the political problems posed by global inequity?

(Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 7)

Despite the quote, there has been a notable lack of attention, in Deacon’s work thus far, to issues of global environmental justice and the problems of climate change. In this book, Ian Gough (Chapter 6) and Asunción Lera St. Clair and Victoria Lawson (Chapter 7) precisely utilize the 3Rs framework in innovative ways to explore these issues.

The importance of the social dimensions of globalization, then, was central to Deacon’s work on global social policy from the start, moving beyond national and comparative analyses (although these remained important in terms of the influence of international actors at these scales) to explore the global scale itself. In this, he has always recognized that ‘the global social’ is in a complex, and often subordinate, relationship to the global political and, particularly, the global economic, while rejecting a one-dimensional understanding that ‘neo-liberal globalization’ inevitably means a global ‘race to the bottom’. His concern with ‘the political strategies available to global actors shaping global social policy’ (Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997: 13, original emphasis) and with ‘political agency’ whether in terms of globalized ‘epistemic communities’ (Deacon with Hulse and Stubbs, 1997) or, most recently, ‘agencies’, ‘actors’, and even ‘biographies’ of those within ‘global policy advocacy coalitions’ (Deacon, 2013: 151–153) prefigured wider theoretical concerns to both complement and amend forms of structural and institutional analysis which tended to deny or edit out both human agency and, indeed, ‘contingency, accident and luck’ (Deacon, 2013: 152).

In short, Deacon’s work has opened a theoretical, empirical, and advocacy space for exploring both the ways in which global markets and global actors influence national social policy and the emerging supranational global social policies of global redistribution (including global funds), global social regulation (including labor standards), and global social rights and provision (including demands for global basic income, international conventions, and so on).

As suggested above, then, global social policy as developed by Deacon essentially consists of two interlinked dimensions. One is the extent to which global structures and actors shape the development of social policies within countries, never autonomously, of course, but always in terms of their connectedness with actors operating at different scales. Within this broader canvas, one focus has been on the specific social policy recommendations certain key global actors make to countries concerning their national social policies. Here, it is important to remember that, from his earliest publications, Deacon has been keen to stress the importance of addressing the battle of ideas both ‘between’ and ‘within’ international and supranational organizations. The truth of the statement that ‘policy consensus within international organizations may be the exception, not the rule’ (Béland and Orenstein, 2013) is very much an open empirical question. Here, we would argue that ‘ideas’, ‘interests’, and ‘ideology’ all matter, as Deacon recognized, and that the balance between the three depends very much on what is being studied, when and where. Hence, Béland and Orenstein’s view that, over a long period of time, advocacy think tanks tend to be more ideological on pension reform than the World Bank does not necessarily call into question the ideologically rooted nature of World Bank–driven pension reform in the early transition years in Central and Eastern Europe. At the same time, it remains questionable whether generalizations from the pensions discourse to social policy more broadly are either possible or desirable (Kaasch, 2013).

The other strand in Deacon’s work regarding global social policy concerns the emergence and functioning of mechanisms of global social governance that address, at a supranational level, the dimensions of social policy which, in the past, tended to operate, at least primarily, at a national level. The concern is with modes and mechanisms of redistribution, regulation, and rights across borders, transnationally and globally, as well as the articulation, advocacy, and advancement of global social rights and provisions. It is here that the sometimes voiced concern of Deacon’s work that ‘an urgent desire to “mend the world” has led perhaps to a failure to pause long enough to “understand the world” ’ (Deacon and Stubbs, 2013: 7) does become relevant. In his work, Deacon is at pains to point out that technical re-orderings of global social governance, though necessary, are far from sufficient without ‘longer-term global political alliances’ (Deacon, 2007: 158), although the nature of this is sometimes, we would argue, left vague. The limitations, then, of a global social reformist stance lie, perhaps, in a tendency to focus rather more on some global institutions, forces, and movements, rather than others, and in particular, the relative lack of attention to social movements (cf. Yeates, 2001). Deacon’s institutionalist focus, albeit concerned with the ‘multi-actor, multi-sited and multi-leveled’ nature of policy, sometimes dismisses more radical analyses, finding critics of capitalism such as Hardt and Negri (2005), wanting and asserting that ‘whilst “waiting” for the pose to get its act together, we should seek to reform existing neo-liberal capitalism in a global reformist direction’ (Deacon, 2007: 158). It can be argued that what is to count as ‘neo-liberal capitalism’ and ‘global reformism’ can be interpreted differently and that, moreover, the latter is not the only alternative to the former. Nevertheless, although Deacon is cautiously optimistic about the real difference which the Global Social Protection Floor initiative might make to the lives of the poor, he also recognizes the dangers ahead and the possibilities of commitments being wat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Global and Regional Social Policy Transformations: Contextualizing the Contribution of Bob Deacon
• 2. The Socialization of Regionalism and the Regionalization of Social Policy: Contexts, Imperatives, and Challenges
• 3. Global Economic Downturn and Social Protection in East Asia: Pathways of Global and Local Interactions
• 4. Common Health Policy Interests and the Politics of Rights, Regulation, and Redistribution
• 5. Global Social Justice, Ethics, and the Crisis of Care
• 6. Climate Change, Social Policy, and Global Governance
• 7. Poverty and Climate Change: The Three Tasks of Transformative Global Social Policy
• 8. Antagonism and Accommodation: The Labor–IMF/World Bank Relationship
• 9. Grasping the Social Impact of Global Social Policy: How Neo-liberal Policies Have Influenced Social Action in Morocco
• 10. Toward a Transformative Global Social Policy?
• Index