IDS Working Paper 501

Conference on Social Protection Systems in Africa

This November (10.-11.11.2016) the Gesellschaft für afrikanisches Recht (African Law Association), together with the Institute for Development Research and Development Policy (IEE), Ruhr-University Bochum, will organize a conference on “Law for Development: Strengthening Social Protection Systems in Africa”. Experts from both African and European research institutes will discuss the current challenges of Social Protection Law in African countries. The conference will be hosted by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in Berlin. For more information on this event see Agenda / Logistical-Information-Law_for_Development . The conference presentations have been published in the Journal Recht in Afrika – Law in Africa – Droit en Afrique.

EADI-Working Group on „Social Protection“

In 2014, a new EADI-Working Group on „Social Protection“ has been established. EADI (European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes) is a the leading network for development studies in Europe. The Working Group has been convened by Prof. Dr. Katja Bender (Professor at the University of Applied Science Bonn-Rhein-Sieg) and Dr. Markus Loewe (Senior Economist at the German Development Institute) . For further information see http://www.eadi.org/working-groups/wg-social-protection.html.

Contribution to the INCLUDE-Platform 

“What are promising examples of the design and implementation of social protection legislation in African countries?” For more information on this question see the blog on the INCLUDE-Platform.

Social Rights and International Development – Global Legal Standards for the Post-2015 Development Agenda

(published by Springer in 2015; http://www.springer.com/law/international/book/978-3-662-45351-3) This book addresses practitioners in development cooperation as well as scientists and students who are interested in the interaction of human rights and development issues. In the practice of development cooperation, linking poverty reduction programs with human rights is mainly achieved using so-called “Rights-based Approaches to Development.” In this context the right to an adequate standard of living (including access to food, water and housing), the right to health and the right to social security are of particular importance – human rights that will play a key role in the design of the Post-2015 Development Agenda, which is currently being negotiated as a framework to succeed the Millennium Development Goals. The book provides an overview of the main international legal standards that are relevant for the protection of social rights, while also analyzing the content of those rights. Moreover, it informs readers on the current debates surrounding the extraterritorial obligations of donor countries and the duties of transnational corporations and international organizations (e.g. the World Bank and WTO) with regard to the implementation of social rights in the Global South.

VRÜ-Special Issue on Social Protection Law (edited by Philipp Dann and Markus Kaltenborn)

The majority of people in the Global South lives in poverty and has no – or only insufficient – access to basic social protection systems. According to the data of the International Labour Organization (ILO), only 20 per cent of the world’s population has adequate social security coverage; more than half of the world’s population lack any coverage at all. While many academic debates have focused on the economic, political and sociological aspects of this global problem and much has also been written on social rights in general, this special issue wants to shine a more focused light on the protection not of social rights in general but on the right to social security in particular. It presents five in-depth case studies on India, Brazil, South Africa, Ghana and Vietnam as well as an analysis of the overarching international human right to social security, analyzing the often highly innovative but also contentious ways in which countries in the Global South are deploying the law to protect basic needs and produce social change. There are several legal layers to be considered in this context. There is of course the international legal framework: Apart from the basic ILO obligations and the social protection guarantees laid down in global and regional conventions on human rights, a considerable number of recommendations of international development organisations and other soft law-docu­ments provide further authoritative orientation both for drawing up new and for reforming existing social protection systems. In recent years, the subject has been discussed intensively on the international level because the global economic and financial crisis has emphatically demonstrated the urgent need for some kind of social protection for all people around the globe. Outcomes of this debate are, among others, a new Communication of the European Commission on social protection issues in EU development cooperation, the revised Social Protection and Labor Strategy of the World Bank, and the Social Protection Floors Recommendation of the ILO. Even more dynamic and innovative, but much less studied is the domestic plane. Most constitutions in the world include – explicitly or implicitly – the right to social security, and nearly all countries have social protection systems established by statute and parliamentary laws. Be it the Bolsa Família program in Brazil or the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India, to name only two examples, there is a whole new wave of domestic legislation that is attempting to put the human right to social security into more concrete, more tangible legal forms, often using highly innovative mechanisms. It is these attempts that the current issue of “Verfassung und Recht in Übersee / Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America” studies, providing insights both into the efforts of five countries on three continents to reform the existing protection schemes or even to set up new systems and into the general political debate on the relevance of social security law for the development process. For more details see http://www.vrue.nomos.de/1/archive/2014/issue-1/

Social Protection in Developing Countries: Reforming Systems (edited by Katja Bender, Markus Kaltenborn and Christian Pfleiderer), Routledge, Abingdon 2013

Ensuring universal access to health systems and providing support to the poor and near-poor as well as establishing systems of old age protection are among the core areas of political interest in international development debates. This is the first book to explore from an interdisciplinary and global perspective the reforms of social protection systems which in recent years many governments of low- and middle-income countries have started to introduce. Through case studies of African, Asian, and Latin American countries, the book covers this ‘global phenomenon’ which unsurprisingly, differs across countries both in terms of scope and speed of institutional change. It addresses on the one hand the major elements impacting on the political feasibility of social protection reforms in order to analyse reform successes and reform failures, and on the other hand the successful strategies in building political and public support for these reforms. Some of the topics considered are:

• the role different political institutions in explaining institutional change;

• the impact of external factors or agents (e.g. international donors of development aid) on domestic institutional change;

• the impact of socio-economic factors on institutional change;

• the relation between specific contextual features relevant in a developmental context and the political feasibility of social protection reforms;

• international and constitutional legal requirements ;

• lessons to be learnt from reform processes in high-income countries.

This book gives students, researchers and practitioners an in-depth understanding of these political reform processes and combines contributions from both academics and practitioner experts in the field of social security. For more details see http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415641036/