Philippa Bevan

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.

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.

The successful use of consultancies in aid-financed public sector management reform: a consultant's eye view of some things which matter.

Independent consultants, often contracted through consultancy firms, are important players in donor attempts to trigger and guide institutional change processes in recipient government structures and practices. However, little is known about the efficacy or ‘success’ of such consultancies. This article explores some of the issues involved. Following a discussion of the problems of defining ‘success’, we present an analytical framework which can be used in all kinds of contexts to generate information relevant to institutional change programmes, and to the design of consultancies to help carry the change processes along. Such information can be used to predict the likely success of intervening at all, for designing the elements of an intervention, and for ongoing monitoring of implementation. We apply the framework to eight consultancies which were undertaken in three different change contexts: post-communist regimes in the early transitional period; aid-dependent regimes committed to ‘politics-as-usual’ and the longer-term highjacking of donor funds by patron – clientelist structures. We summarize the main lessons which emerge from our case studies in the form of criteria for judging whether and how (responsible) donors and/or consultants should get involved in change projects. Donors, consultancy companies and consultants should all be thinking of ways to exclude irresponsible parties and behaviour from aid-financed institutional transformation processes. Copyright