Development, 2014, 57(1), (30–35) © 2014 Society for International Development 1011-6370/14 www.sidint.net/development/

Thematic Section

Rethinking Social Development for a Post-2015 World*

SARAH COOK AND ESUNA DUGAROVA

ABSTRACT Current global discussions over the content of the post2015 sustainable development agenda provide a critical space for reflection on the future contours of development assistance, and an opportunity to rethink the social dimensions of the transformation to sustainable development. There is widespread recognition that the future agenda must be ambitious, universal and transformative; with policies and implementation mechanisms that are integrated, holistic and measurable. This article explores some of the challenges of moving from the poverty-focused targets of the MDGs, towards a socially sustainable development agenda, and points to directions that could help shape a fundamental rethinking of the current approach to social development. KEYWORDS social policy; post-2015 agenda; transformation; sustainability

Introduction Current negotiations over the content of the post-2015 sustainable development agenda provide a critical space for reflection on the future contours of development assistance, and an opportunity to rethink the social dimensions of the process of transformation necessary for sustainability. The need for a future agenda to be ambitious, universal and transformative has been widely acknowledged in key United Nations documents. Moreover, the aspiration is for policies and implementation mechanisms that are integrated and holistic across the potentially contradictory domains of the environment, society and economy, and that can be measured and monitored. This article explores some of the challenges of moving beyond the poverty-focused targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), towards a broad-based agenda that can realize the ambitions of poverty eradication and move to sustainable development pathways. Critical elements of this challenge involve addressing the symptoms of poverty, deprivation or exclusion while also tackling their underlying causes, structural drivers and constraints. This will require a fundamental rethinking of the current approach to social development. Development (2014) 57(1), 30–35. doi:10.1057/dev.2014.25

Cook and Dugarova: A Post-2015 World The social turn in development thinking The MDGs are widely acknowledged to have created a consensus in the international development community around the urgency of addressing persistent and chronic poverty, refocusing attention on neglected social issues. Underpinning this ‘social turn’ in development thinking and practice was an ideological and political shift that challenged both the trickle down assumptions that link liberalization to a virtuous cycle of growth, employment and poverty reduction, and the notion that the key social function of governments should be restricted to the provision of minimal safety nets. Since the turn of the millennium, in particular, there is growing recognition of the need for a more proactive approach to reducing poverty, protecting people against normal life contingencies (ill-health, ageing) and strengthening resilience against heightened risk and vulnerability at various levels. Early manifestations of this shift in thinking were the United Nations MDGs, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) promoted by the World Bank and the ‘quiet revolution’ (Barrientos and Hulme, 2008) by which new forms of social protection (such as conditional cash transfer programmes or CCTs) have spread across the developing world. At the international level significant developments have occurred in global social policy, a prominent example being the ILO’s (2011) global Social Protection Floor Recommendation. To some extent such changes reflect the ongoing reconfiguration of ideational forces, which began when the United Nations reclaimed the terrain of social policy from the international financial institutions during the latter half of the 1990s. It also reflects growing awareness of limitations associated with the new approaches. The MDGs, for example, were marked by significant gaps in measures to address inequality and employment; PRSPs tended to lock social policy into a supply-side macro-economic straitjacket, while CCTs or other social protection interventions often narrowly targeted specific populations with mixed results (UNRISD, 2010). The recognized limits to this social development agenda has generated calls for more transformative and universal

policies that are better integrated across social, economic and environmental domains.

The need to rethink social development for a post-2015 world The need to substantially rethink approaches to social development in the twenty-first century context arises from a number of factors. In part, it is driven by changing risks and challenges that mean that the current context for development, and thus the policy options available to developing countries, are fundamentally different from the conditions under which now developed economies were able to balance economic and social goals in their development process. Significant attention is currently focused on economic and financial volatility particularly since the 2008 crisis; on levels of inequality that generate social instability and impede economic development; on ecological threats related to climate change, and on demographic transitions resulting in many contexts in rapidly ageing populations. These and other interconnected risks are generating increasingly widespread conflict and humanitarian crises. These changes in the risk structure create challenges for both developed and developing countries. The latter need to transform their economies and ensure adequate livelihoods, incomes and well-being for all in an increasingly globalized world, but with limited fiscal and policy space and options for addressing both these new challenges and the social and ecological problems associated with the traditional growth model. The more stable social policy regimes of developed countries or welfare states are also under strain. Population ageing, already visible in developed and increasingly in emerging economies, puts pressure on the systems both of production and of welfare provision and care. Environmental challenges, or the externalities of the carbon-led growth model, were not part of the set of risks that welfare state policies were designed to address, but will increasingly and urgently need to be factored into contemporary social development policies. Furthermore, the 2008 crisis created a new context in which advanced economies, faced with low growth, rising unemployment, faltering consumer

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spending and high debt levels, along with widening trade and reserve deficits, have introduced austerity policies to foster a return to short-term GDP growth, to the neglect of many fundamental underpinnings of future sustainability. The inability of existing welfare states and social policy institutions to adequately counter these risks points to the need for a significant rethinking of how social issues are incorporated in policy in both developed and developing countries, and at the global level through a universal agenda. A second set of factors driving the need for a rethinking of social development arise from the way the ‘social’ has come to be treated or viewed in development policies and debates, and thus the way social problems are currently being addressed, whether at local, national or global levels. Social development can be broadly defined as the process of structural and societal change through which individuals and social groups attain improvements associated with well-being and compatible with justice (UNRISD, 2011). It involves changes in social structures and relations (including, e.g., patterns of stratification, related to class, gender, ethnicity, religion or location), and institutions, (both formal (laws) and informal (norms) that shape the behaviour of people and organizations in fairly predictable ways). It is also concerned with both processes and outcomes. The achievement of desirable development outcomes through just and participatory processes is ultimately a political project at the core of which lie power configurations at all levels and which inevitably involves contestation of ideas and interests among different groups. Despite the increasing attention to social issues in the development agenda, these structural and societal dimensions remain largely absent from the mainstream policy discourse and decision-making. Social issues are frequently treated as the problematic consequences of other changes, and social policies as residual in the sequencing of policy decisions. Social, environmental or other consequences (or ‘externalities’) of growth-focused economic policies are addressed through compensatory measures such as social assistance or targeted poverty alleviation. The limitations of this approach, given the nature of risk, are becoming

ever more apparent: in particular, where poverty and deprivation are widespread, targeting is unlikely to make significant and sustained inroads into poverty, may fail to build support among middleincome groups that are needed for funding and providing good quality services, and may further exacerbate exclusion and inequalities (UNRISD, 2010). A more ambitious development agenda needs to shift the normative hierarchy for decisionmaking, away from social and environmental issues as the consequences of economic policy choices, to economic choices being conditioned on sustainable and just social and ecological outcomes. Relatedly, the social sector is often viewed as autonomous, neglecting its critical relationships with the economy. Rather than focusing on interlinkages between economy and society, or indeed on the social embeddedness of economic institutions, social issues continue to be marginalized in policy discourse and debates, with disciplinary barriers constructed between the analysis of these sectors. This is evident, in particular, in the treatment of the family and the largely unpaid work of ‘care’ as separate from the market and state provision (Razavi, 2007). In most economies, the household is the major site of reproduction of labour on a daily and generational basis, providing vital inputs for both the public and private sectors: however, economic analysis and policy largely fails to recognize, value or measure this unpaid work as a fundamental underpinning of economic productivity as well as individual well-being and social cohesion. The analysis of the social, rather than addressing unequal structures that also shape economic and political institutions and outcomes, has instead increasingly been limited to problematic symptoms of deprivation with solutions focused primarily on vulnerable groups or the most marginalized. These limitations carry over into what is measured and by extension what is valued. The introduction of metrics of development other than GDP, such as the Human Development Index and other multidimensional indices of poverty, has better captured non-income dimensions of development. Alternative proposals for measuring economic development, including most recently the

Cook and Dugarova: A Post-2015 World work of the Sarkozy Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (Stiglitz et al., 2009), has reiterated the need to broaden the scope of what is measured to incorporate social, ecological and temporal dimensions. However, such measures have gained limited policy traction, with GDP maintained as the dominant measure of well-being and progress, and the main target shaping decisions of policymakers.

Alternative pathways to socially sustainable development Despite the limitations, there are nonetheless important signs of progress, as evidenced by various social protection floor initiatives at national and global levels, the expansion of social programmes towards universalism and other policy alternatives in many low- and middle-income economies. In many cases, democratization, participation and active citizenship have also given rise to pressures for expanding welfare provisions. Here we note three potentially significant developments. First, there is evidence of a shift from interventions that target the poor to social policy principles and practices that expand welfare provisioning and lean more towards universalism. These are occurring particularly in a number of middle-income countries. There are also signs of an ideational shift that (re)acknowledges social protection and social security as a universal human right; seen, for example, in debates about conditionalities associated with social transfers, and in the extension of entitlements to particular social or income groups as a right (Cecchini and Martinez, 2012; Sepúlveda and Nyst, 2012). Second, governments are (re)emphasizing the productive role of social policy, where social policy is seen not simply as a tool of protection but also as a key facilitator of economic development and structural transformation. Such productive social policies were a key feature of the Nordic and ‘Asian miracle’ development models. Several countries in Africa and Latin America have started to reframe development and poverty reduction strategies in this direction, building links to the productive sectors and promoting transformations towards higher-value production and decent employment.

There has also been a stronger emphasis on agricultural or rural livelihoods and development, including investment in rural infrastructure. Third, widespread calls for ‘policy coherence’ recognize the need for more integrated approaches to policy design and implementation, promoting complementarities and synergies among policies, while minimizing trade-offs that may undermine progress on core development objectives. This is central to the renewed concern with sustainable development and the consensus reached at Rio+20 regarding the need for better integration of the economic, social and environmental goals. In some countries of Africa and Latin America, there has also been a revival of planning as a tool for a more systematic approach to policy design and implementation. Reflecting these developments, social and fiscal policies are increasingly being coupled with environmental objectives; environmental policy coupled with social objectives and macro-economic policy reconnecting with the challenge of employment generation. In all these cases, the boundaries of social policy are expanding not only in comparison with the targeted approaches associated with the neo-liberal era but also in relation to the welfare state model. Although strong on social security provision via formal sector employment and social protection via public services, the welfare state model largely ignored the environmental question; it often failed to adjust the remit of social policy to address the increasing participation of women in the workforce and the care burden assumed by women. Furthermore, it did not anticipate the spectacular rise of the informal economy. The challenge for social policy today is to address not only conventional objectives associated with social protection and human capital formation, but also issues of gender justice, rising inequalities, precarious employment and unsustainable development. Contemporary social policies must differ from classic welfare state and neoliberal approaches in terms of governance arrangements; that is the mix of state, market and civil society actors and institutions in regulation, policy design and implementation, and the means of financing. A new approach to social development needs also to move from a primary focus on

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particular problems and groups towards addressing the structures of opportunity or constraint that generate better social outcomes, and to focus on the drivers of social transformation rather than only on symptoms and consequences. Three issues that may be elements of such a transformational approach are highlighted here (for further examples, see UNRISD, 2014). First, social policy needs to move beyond its protective function to play a transformative and developmental role (Mkandawire, 2004). As noted above, social protection is now widely recognized as an essential contributor to development. Beyond this protective function, social policies can influence profound transformations across economic, environmental and social domains – supporting economic productivity, raising human capital, reducing inequalities and sharing the burden of social reproduction, driving development outcomes in a more sustainable direction. These multiple functions demonstrate intrinsic linkages between social and economic policies. To be transformative, social policy cannot be limited to the residual role of assisting those at the margins of the economy. Rather, integration among functions is necessary to provide security and opportunity for individuals across the life course, to share the burdens and benefits of economic growth, and to redistribute the costs of care. Second, a key but neglected element of social policy concerns social reproduction and the economy of care. Social reproduction is a key foundation of a viable and sustainable society and economy, including the (largely unpaid and invisible) work of caring for children, the sick and elderly; of ensuring a healthy and well-nourished labour force; and of playing a range of community roles necessary for cohesive societies – responsibilities that fall predominantly on women within households. The costs of neglecting this issue include unequal gender opportunities and the marginalization of women in paid employment, the poor quality of care or low-human capital investments, and rapidly declining fertility and ageing populations. These in turn act as constraints on economic production. The burden of social reproduction needs to be shared: not just within the household (by gender and generation),

but more importantly between the household, state, market and other social institutions (Razavi, 2007). Third, greater attention should be given to alternative forms of economic organization, now widely termed ‘social and solidarity economy’. Social and solidarity economy implies the production of goods and services by organizations and enterprises that put social, and often environmental, objectives before profit; involve cooperative and associative relations and forms of democratic management; and espouse values of solidarity, sharing and caring. The historical experience of cooperatives as a principle form of social economy organization shows that collective organization of the production and exchange of goods and services can be an effective way of dealing with market failures and building resilience. Increasing evidence indicates that social and solidarity economy can be a key mechanism through which people living in poverty gain greater control over resources and decision-making processes. Supporting such forms of economic organizing can therefore offer significant opportunities for promoting environmental and social justice through economic and political empowerment (TFSSE, 2014).

Concluding remarks The post-2015 sustainable development agenda needs to be no longer only a development project but rather a universal agenda, concerned with the global public good as well as the challenges of particular national contexts, while pursuing the goal of leaving no one behind. In setting out a vision of the twenty-first century, the Millennium Declaration expresses shared social objectives based on universal values. Central values of social development are that every human being has an inherent right to a decent livelihood and that all people should be allowed to participate on equal terms in decisions that affect their lives. Social policy is a mechanism for promoting these fundamental values of social inclusion, solidarity, equity, respect for nature and human rights. Responding to the multifaceted risks and challenges of the twenty-first century context demands expanding the conventional boundaries

Cook and Dugarova: A Post-2015 World of thinking and practice. It also involves the reconceptualization of premises and assumptions upon which social policies are based, and calls for redesigning existing social policy instruments or developing new ones in order to adapt to the new conditions created by these changes. The above discussion offers insights into the range of actors and institutions that will affect the achievement of any sustainable development goals, as well as the structures of power, processes of governance, knowledge and belief systems, and social norms which interact, often in unpredictable ways, to lead to particular development outcomes. It also highlights the need for policy coherence and responsiveness, across the domains of economy, society and the environment, while

recognizing that policy coherence is not simply about better coordination in the design and implementation of interventions across different fields. It means ensuring that progress in one domain is not undermined by consequences or reactions in another; that the sharing of costs and benefits is perceived as equitable – between groups, countries or regions; that pro-growth policies and technological or efficiency gains do not crowd out welfare and sustainability objectives; and that environmental protection goals are balanced with human welfare considerations. Finally, there is a need for leadership, vision, ideas and values, grounded in serious research, evidence and expertise, which therefore requires investment in research and in the institutions that undertake it.

References Barrientos, Armando and David Hulme (eds.) (2008) Social Protection for the Poor and the Poorest: Concepts, policies and politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cecchini, Simone and Rodrigo Martinez (2012) Inclusive Social Protection in Latin America: A comprehensive rights-based approach. Santiago: ECLAC. ILO (2011) Social Protection Floor for a Fair and Inclusive Globalization, Report of the Advisory Group Chaired by Michelle Bachelet. Geneva: ILO. Mkandawire, Thandika (ed.) (2004) Social Policy in a Development Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Razavi, Shahra (2007) ‘The Political and Social Economy of Care in a Development Context Conceptual Issues, Research Questions and Policy Options’, Programme Paper 3, Geneva: UNRISD. Sepúlveda, Magdalena and Carly Nyst (2012) The Human Rights Approach to Social Protection, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland Series ‘Elements for Discussion’, Erweko Oy. Stiglitz, Joseph E., Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi (2009) Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. TFSSE (2014) ‘Social and Solidarity Economy and the Challenge of Sustainable Development’, Position Paper by the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on Social and Solidarity Economy. Geneva: TFSSE. UNRISD (2010) Combating Poverty and Inequality: Structural Change, Social Policy and Politics, Geneva: UNRISD. UNRISD (2011) Research for Social Change, UNRISD Institutional Strategy 2011–2014. Geneva, http://www.unrisd .org/80256B42004CCC77/%28httpInfoFiles%29/1BFA532DD8D1246080257920004252D3/$file/InstStrat1114a.pdf, accessed 5 August 2014. UNRISD (2014) Social Drivers of Sustainable Development, Beyond 2015 Brief 4, Geneva: UNRISD.

*This article is based on an intervention made by Sarah Cook at a side event on ‘The Post-2015 World: Implications for Social Development’ organized by the Club de Madrid during the 52nd session of the Commission for Social Development, February 2014. While it draws heavily on the work of UNRISD, it is written in a personal capacity and the views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the institutions involved.

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