The Negotiated Politics of Social Protection in East and Southern Africa

Abstract

Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The existing literature on social assistance, or social protection more broadly, offers little in explanation of this variation. Drawing on the literature on political settlements and democratic politics, we argue that variation results from the political contestation and negotiation between political elites, voters, bureaucrats, and transnational actors. The forms of politics that matter at each of these inter-related sites of negotiation include struggles over ideas as well as material interests and reflect the ways in which social assistance is being used to advance certain political as well as developmental projects in sub-Saharan Africa.

The distributional impact of tax and benefit systems in five African countries

“…In the context of the sustainable development goals to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030 (Goal 1.1) and to achieve substantial coverage of social protection for the poor and vulnerable (Goal 1.3), it is clear that more needs to be done: to do so requires an appreciation of competing priorities and the politics of social protection (e.g. Hickey et al , 2020) but also analysis such as the one presented here that can shed light on the strengths and shortcomings of current policies. The African Union (AU) has made a commitment to redistribution (African Union, 2008: paras 14 and 16) and tax-benefit micro-simulation models enable analysis to be undertaken to assess the extent to which current policy arrangements are sufficient to achieve this goal.…”

The Poverty Reduction Effect of Social Protection: The Pros and Cons of a Multidisciplinary Approach

“…This constituted a relatively innovative approach within the PEA landscape of literature, which mostly looks at the political economy of single social protection policies, instruments, or domains and which tends to overlook local-level implementation processes (e.g. Abuya et al 2015;Brooks 2015;Fox and Reich 2013;Hickey et al 2019;Schuering and Gassmann 2013;Ayede et al 2015;Plagerson et al 2019). Only very few studies offer a comparative approach across different pillars of social protection (Bender and Rompel 2010;Bekenya and Hickey 2019;Ulriksen and Plagerson 2017;Wanyama and McCord 2017).…”