Since the 1980s, social policy research shifted attention from institutional development of welfare programs to what were described as crises of the welfare state in an era of austerity. Much of the scholarly debate in this area had focused on the maturation of welfare programs, especially the post‐war old age income support programs in the advanced industrialized countries to the neglect of social protection in Sub‐Saharan African (SSA) countries. This paper is intended to bring the dynamics of social policy in SSA countries into the comparative welfare dialogue and into the global social security debate in particular. Using a historical institutionalist approach, this study analyzes the trajectories of old age income support development in SSA countries through a careful study of old age income security or protection strategies in the region across time and space. The paper develops ideal typologies for understandings variations and transformations of pensions and old age income provision programs in the region. In doing this, it argues that the ideas and institutions around which recent rounds of pension reforms revolves have always been at both the foreground and background of old age income protection thinking and practices in SSA countries since the pre‐colonial era.

This article examines the relationship between nation-building and social policy in post-independence sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It argues that post-independence nationalist leaders used health, housing, and education programmes to foster a sense of national unity that would transcend the existing ethnic divisions created by the arbitrary drawing of state boundaries during colonization. Yet, in SSA, the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s favoured the decline of state-level integration and solidarity, which helped trigger territorial mobilization and fragmentation. As a consequence, the politics of welfare retrenchment in SSA does more than simply reduce benefits and increase inequalities; it also potentially weakens national unity.

Over the years, a large body of literature about social policy development in subSaharan Africa (SSA) has emerged. However, due to a concern for pressing humanitarian and development issues, most of the scholarship devoted to contemporary African social policy is not grounded in systematic theoretical models aimed at explaining policy differences between and within countries. Because a large body of literature has been published in recent decades to tackle this type of issue within the advanced industrial world, it is important to assess the relevance of existing theories of social policy development for policy analysis in SSA. This article makes a direct contribution to the comparative welfare literature because it draws attention to the limitations of existing theories for understanding social policy development in Africa, while highlighting their relevance for the analysis of the development and transformation of social programmes in the region's countries.

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This issue of Canadian Public Administration marks two landmarks. It is the 50th anniversary issue of the Journal, and it is the last issue to be published by the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. For this issue, we have not produced a “special issue” in the sense of commissioning particular articles. Instead, we have brought together a number of articles that were already in the “pipeline” but that the editors thought made a particular contribution to public administration in Canada. This introductory article, or editor's review, is a retrospective analysis of the content of the Journal. It would appear that while there has been a slight shift towards public policy and a greater concern with provincial and local administration, cpa has maintained an enduring interest in its core areas of administrative theory and political and legal institutions. The content is also compared with findings of the content of other journals and also other analyses of cpa. This review is followed by commentaries by former editors and associate editors on their experiences with the Journal.