Social policy as nation-building: identity formation, policy feedback, and social citizenship in Ghana

Social Protection and State–Society Relations in Environments of Low and Uneven State Capacity

“…Social protection programs can disempower citizens by consolidating their reliance on the state, entrenching polarized partisan affiliations, or undermining informal community-based social safety nets (Freeland 2009). While Béland et al (2018) argue that social policies have been instrumental in building a national identity in Ghana, Ibrahim (2019) finds that cash transfers have had no effect on the social contract even as they build state capacity for service delivery. Further, Ampratwum (2019) finds that politicians in Ghana use cash transfers to reward voters, thus potentially undermining the idea of a social contract for all, even if the transfer might increase trust in and connection to the state for select beneficiaries.…”

“…First, social protection programs can alter a recipient's perceptions of their own identity and self-image. Rather than affecting their attitudes toward government per se, educational programs or other interactions with new state institutions can disembed individuals from kinship and familial structures, placing them in a reconfigured relationship with the state wherein they take on new and more autonomous identities as members of a broader political community, with rights and attendant obligations (Merry 2003, p. 351; see also Béland et al 2018). Some studies showed that recipients of Brazil's Bolsa Família cash transfer demonstrated an increased sense of belonging and agency following participation.…”

‘9th May 2017 is OUR DAY’: The Homeland Study Group Foundation and contested national imaginaries in postindependence Ghana

“…147–198) notes as one of the reasons the integration of the former trust territory into Ghana through improved access to educational opportunities and the emergence of an educated elite whose careers were launched in Ghana. Béland et al (2018, p. 29) also note the importance of the social policies in building national identity and nation‐building in postindependence Ghana, ‘One can therefore infer that the feedback effect from the design and pursuit of social policies may have helped to weaken pre‐existing ethnocentrism and presumably redirected loyalties and sentiments towards the new nation‐state that had funded free access to the social programs’.…”