Geof Wood

Staying Secure, Staying Poor: The "Faustian Bargain"

Abstract The determining condition for poor people is uncertainty. Some societies perform better than others in mitigating this uncertainty. In such societies we observe welfare regimes which reduce the uncertainties of the market to provide for all citizens minimum conditions for reproduction. Such societies are in a minority. Elsewhere, destructive uncertainty is more pervasive. Under these conditions, the poor have less control over relationships and events around them. They are obliged to live more in the present and to discount the future. Risk management in the present involves loyalty to institutions and organizations that presently work and deliver livelihoods, whatever the longer term cost. Strategic preparation for the future, in terms of personal investment and securing rights backed up by correlative duties, is continuously postponed for survival and security in the present––the Faustian bargain.

Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Latin America : towards a liberal-informal welfare regime

Introduction Esping-Andersen (1990; 1999) has developed a typology of welfare regimes for developed countries. His analysis focuses on the production of welfare, understood as the articulation of welfare programmes and institutions – including the state, markets and households – insuring households against social risks. In his later book he notes that understanding welfare regimes, and their change over time, involves ‘(a) a diagnosis of the changing distribution and intensity of social risks, and (b) a comprehensive examination of how risks are pooled between state, market, and family’ (Esping-Andersen 1999: 33). This chapter undertakes this task for Latin America. The welfare regime approach can provide a much-needed framework enabling a comprehensive analysis of changes in welfare production in Latin America, including the study of the linkages existing between social protection and labour market institutions, and an evaluation of the outcomes of these changes. There is important research on specific programmes or institutions, but few have attempted to compare and integrate their findings. Extending this framework beyond its original focus on industrialised nations can provide a valuable new dimension, and the chapter will consider whether the fundamental change in economic and social institutions undergone by most countries in Latin America provides a rare example of a welfare regime shift. The chapter is organised as follows. The next section identifies welfare systems in Latin America and the Caribbean. The following section considers the welfare mix prior to recent social protection and labour market reform and identifies a welfare regime for Latin America.

Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: East Asia : the limits of productivist regimes

Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy, defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare, operates in the poorer regions of the world. Social policy in advanced capitalist countries operates through state intervention to compensate for the inadequate welfare outcomes of the labour market. Such welfare regimes cannot easily be reproduced in poorer regions of the world where states suffer problems of governance and labour markets are imperfect and partial. Other welfare regimes therefore prevail involving non-state actors such as landlords, moneylenders and patrons. This book seeks to develop a conceptual framework for understanding different types of welfare regime in a range of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa and makes an important contribution to the literature by breaking away from the traditional focus on Europe and North America.

Informal Security Regimes: the strength of relationships

Introduction This chapter argues that the poorer regions of the world do not comfortably conform to the two key assumptions upon which the OECD model of welfare state regime relies: a legitimate state; and a pervasive, formal sector labour market. This immediately sets up the two key interactive issues of governance and the socio-economic circumstances of the common man (and woman). These circumstances are understood in this chapter through the metaphor of the peasant (to capture the significance of reproduction, family and household-level inter-generational transfers) and the analysis of clientelism as pervasive adverse incorporation (comprising hierarchical rights; meso-level intermediation with the national-level polity and economy; and quasi-public goods social capital, organised through unequal relationships). These political, economic, social and family dimensions are brought together in this book, for policy analysis purposes, as the institutional responsibility matrix with global as well as domestic dimensions. These four institutional domains are presented as permeable, which can have positive or negative outcomes for different societies. The worlds poor regions are characterised by negative permeability in which the level of personal objectives penetrates the level of public aims to produce poor governance and insecurity for the majority of their populations, thus removing any prospect of the corrective principle, in which the state regulates the market for social objectives. Only partial compensation for this absence of the corrective principle is offered by global discourses, conditionality and debt remission leverage.

Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: The dynamics of Africa's in/security regimes

Introduction In this chapter I use the in/security model developed in chapter 3 to analyse insecurity and welfare on the continent of Africa. The in/security model has five main components: the structural relationships and dynamics involved in the generation of insecurity; mobilisation outcomes; rectification mix; in/security outcomes; and stratification outcomes. It can be used to analyse regimes in long-term equilibrium, regimes in short-term equilibrium (‘regime episodes’, which can often only be identified retrospectively) and regimes in transition (often involved in ‘contentious episodes’ (McAdam et al . 2001)). As discussed in chapter 3, the model potentially allows for five ‘spaces of comparison’ across the five components, and a thorough analysis would make the comparison across all five spaces. However, in a chapter of this size it is not possible to do such an analysis covering all fifty-three African countries involved in processes of post-colonial transition. Furthermore, given the problems with data on welfare mix and welfare outcomes (which are discussed below), quantitative comparisons across these two spaces, of the kind made in the Latin America and East Asia chapters, would be difficult. In any case, I would argue that, in current African conditions, comparisons across the other three spaces lead to more interesting and policy-relevant conclusions. As a result the structure of this chapter differs from that of chapters 4 and 5. Tilly has suggested that understanding of ‘big structures’ and ‘large processes’ can be generated by a number of different approaches to comparison.

Private Provision after Public Neglect: Bending Irrigation Markets in North Bihar

Research in North-East Bihar shows public sector irrigation management to be embodied within the prevailing cultural structures of the region, involving the intrusion of local exchange behaviour into the practices of public allocation of water. With irrigation officials in strong rent-seeking positions over farmers, and without resort to a moral sense of community through which farmers might exert voice over official providers, opting out into private provision via tube-well borings and pumpsets has become the exit solution. However, the propensity to make even relatively small investments in bamboo borings is dependent upon access to pumpsets. While elite families own the pumpsets in a village, some farmers may have borings on just some of their land, and others may have no borings of their own at all. Farmers therefore have to enter into multi-layered transactions in order to secure access to timely water. Secure access to other inputs is also necessary. This study encapsulates the themes of: state versus common property resources management; the ‘incentives’ induced by costs of loyalty and the availability of exits to adopt private solutions; and the social embeddedness of behaviour when operating in interlocked, community level markets.

Projects as communities: consultants, knowledge and power

Outsider intervention in the lives of others is a key dimension of purposive human behaviour, involving the central concepts of power and politics in the mobilisation of resources to structure the distribution of resources and opportunities in other arenas. This paper explores some of the ethnography of consultant behaviour in projects, and in particular emphasises the contingency of knowledge. It focuses on how power over outcomes can be exercised in a project community with consultant actors, especially in teams of academic and commercial consultants. One way to understand the development process is as a system of outsiders and insiders in shifting communities. The consultancy role offers an opportunity for academic research into these interventionist dimensions of the development process, but only if consultancy is consciously used and justified as a research tool.

Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Conclusion : Rethinking social policy in development contexts

Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy, defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare, operates in the poorer regions of the world. Social policy in advanced capitalist countries operates through state intervention to compensate for the inadequate welfare outcomes of the labour market. Such welfare regimes cannot easily be reproduced in poorer regions of the world where states suffer problems of governance and labour markets are imperfect and partial. Other welfare regimes therefore prevail involving non-state actors such as landlords, moneylenders and patrons. This book seeks to develop a conceptual framework for understanding different types of welfare regime in a range of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa and makes an important contribution to the literature by breaking away from the traditional focus on Europe and North America.

Situating informal welfare within imperfect well-being regimes

This paper reflects upon the position of the nation state and non-state-centred actors in the support for welfare and the security of agency. In particular it argues that the normative agenda of rights-based autonomous security is undermined by the social facts of dependent, personalised and thus precarious security. The roles of other actors above and below the nation state are thus significant in any analysis of power relations, social reproduction and policy outcomes. In many middle- and lower-income countries, the problem for state actors is that power, authority and, more problematically, legitimacy lies significantly elsewhere across the domain of state, market, community and household. Aspects of globalisation can thereby interact directly with sub-national entities by-passing and undermining the state: multinational corporations, international donors, international non-governmental organisations, remittances, wider faith movements and cross-border ethnic solidarities. This is clearly a complicated institutional landscape within which to formulate the idea of responsibility for social policy and consider its intersecting role with international development.

Who is excluded and how? An analysis of community spaces for maternal and child health in Pakistan.

BackgroundThe maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) indicators of Pakistan depict the deplorable state of the poor and rural women and children. Many MNCH programmes stress the need to engage the poor in community spaces. However, caste and class based hierarchies and gendered social norms exclude the lower caste poor women from accessing healthcare. To find pathways for improving the lives of the excluded, this study considers the social system as a whole and describes the mechanisms of exclusion in the externally created formal community spaces and their interaction with the indigenous informal spaces.MethodsThe study used a qualitative case study design to identify the formal and informal community spaces in three purposively selected villages of Thatta, Rajanpur, and Ghizer districts. Community perspectives were gathered by conducting 37 focus group discussions, based on participatory rural appraisal tools, with separate groups of women and men. Relevant documents of six MNCH programmes were reviewed and 25 key informant interviews were conducted with programme staff.ResultsWe found that lower caste poor tenants and nomadic peasants were excluded from formal and informal spaces. The formal community spaces formed by MNCH programmes across Pakistan included fixed, small transitory, large transitory, and emerging institutional spaces. Programme guidelines mandated selection of community notables in groups/committees and used criteria that prevented registration of nomadic groups as eligible clients. The selection criteria and adverse attitude of healthcare workers, along with inadequacy of programmatic resources to sustain outreach activities also contributed to exclusion of the lower caste poor women from formal spaces. The informal community spaces were mostly gender segregated. Infrequently, MNCH information trickled down from the better-off to the lower caste poor women through transitory interactions in the informal domestic sphere.ConclusionA revision of the purpose and implementation mechanisms for MNCH programmes is mandated to transform formal health spaces into sites of equitable healthcare.