The limits to ‘global’ social policy: The ILO,the social protection floor and the politics of welfare in East and Southern Africa

Introduction

The concept of ‘global social policy’ has generally been an elastic one, but at its core is the idea that intergovernmental and other international institutions have been engaged in social policy-making at the transnational or global level, informing policy-making at the national level also. Bob Deacon’s (2013) study of the ‘social protection floors’ (SPFs) initiative provides an unrivalled analysis of the making of an apparently pivotal global social policy. An unprecedented array of international organisations, national governments and non-state organisations came together to endorse not simply a set of shared global objectives – as with the Millennium Development Goals – but a policy on how to achieve such objectives.

One of the architects of the SPF initiative – Michel Cichon of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) – went so far as to describe the ILO’s Recommendation #202 (on SPFs) as ‘a “Magna Carta” of social protection’ (Cichon, 2013: 37), referring to the milestone charter of 1215 in which the King of England first recognised that his subjects had civil and political rights. The ILO generally talks up the significance of its Recommendation. For example, a 2016 ILO publication declared that ‘This Recommendation is the only internationally agreed treaty that reflects a global consensus on universal social protection’ (Ortiz et al., 2016: 1–2, emphasis added). While Deacon himself was concerned with the making of the initiative rather than its importance, he did describe the SPF initiative as ‘historic’ for a number of reasons (Deacon, 2013: 157-8). His account suggests that the most important of these was that the SPF initiative was the culmination of a process of rethinking social protection, from the poverty- or worker-focused approaches of the late 20th century to the idea of universal social protection or social protection ‘for all’. The SPF initiative that was the first major international commitment to ‘basic income security’ and ‘essential health care’ for all sections of the population rather than for only the poor or working people. Further respects in which the SPF initiative was historic, according to Deacon, included the recognition that social protection was as much a priority for low-income as for high-income countries, that is, it did not become a priority only after some minimum level of development had been achieved, and the recognition that it required redistributive financing.

The importance of the SPF initiative is open to question. Deacon himself notes that the Recommendation #202 entailed multiple compromises. The ILO embraced the SPF concept in preference to the more radical idea of ‘basic income’ (whose champion was marginalised within the ILO). The final agreement took the form of a Recommendation, not a Convention. The SPF comprised a set of guarantees not a defined benefit package. The Recommendation was for a set of national SPFs (in the plural) not a single, global SPF. Specific proposals for funding the SPF(s) were omitted. The SPFs remained a national responsibility rather than a global social contract. The inclusion of the ‘vertical’ dimension to the ‘floor’ (i.e. social insurance) was an inegalitarian sop to the trade unions (Deacon, 2013). Moreover, it is not clear that the Recommendation went much further than the ILO’s 1944 ‘Philadelphia Declaration on Income Security’ and accompanying Recommendation (#67). Notwithstanding these qualifications, Deacon’s central point seems compelling: the Recommendation entailed the clearest statement of the need for universal social protection systems, at least since the 1940s. It went beyond earlier arguments in favour of ‘comprehensive’ social protection because ‘comprehensive’ was often understood as covering the risks of poverty, whereas the SPF initiative encompassed also provision for the non-poor.

The value of Deacon’s analysis does not depend, however, on the importance of Recommendation #202 or the broader SPF initiative. Deacon’s account was pioneering in setting out the process, whereby international and national organisations came together behind the initiative. In successive chapters, Deacon examines the emergence and revision of the SPF concept between 2000 and 2010 (in Chapter 3), struggles within the ILO (in Chapter 4) and the formation of a broader coalition of international organisations (including the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and United Nations Children’s Fund [UNICEF]) (in Chapter 5). Deacon’s account is based on close reading of documents, mostly from within the ILO, and interviews, mostly with (named) ILO officials in Geneva.

Deacon’s close study of the contestation and cooperation within and between global organisations (especially the ILO) is the strength of his analysis. It also points to the limit of his analysis: Deacon pays secondary attention to the perspectives of national governments (or other national players, including business and union representatives to the ILO) with regard to the SPF initiative. National players walk across Deacon’s stage in Chapter 4 of his book, shaping the way that the SPF initiative took form, but Deacon does not attempt to analyse how national players understood the initiative or the ILO’s role in promoting policy reform. Indeed, he concludes that the adoption of a Recommendation is just the beginning of an uncertain process of implementation.

This article builds on Deacon’s foundations through a close study of how ‘global’ social policy is seen from and travels to (and within) a part of the world – Africa – where conditions are especially unfavourable to its implementation. Whereas Deacon analysed the SPF initiative primarily in terms of relationships within and between (often competing) global institutions, I reassess this case of ‘global’ social policy-making and implementation in terms of the interactions between institutions at the global, regional and national levels. The next section of the article examines the role of African representatives in the making of the policy. I argue that the adoption of the SPF initiative within fora such as the ILO did not reflect equal ‘buy-in’ from all parts of the world. The article then turns to the ‘vernacularisation’ within Africa of global social policy, prior to, during and following Recommendation #202. The article examines the character and role of the international organisation most closely associated with the SPF initiative – the ILO – in Africa, before reviewing the evidence for the impact of the initiative on national policy, focusing on selected countries in Southern Africa. I argue that, in Africa, the SPF initiative had limited immediate effect at the national level.

This article thus questions what precisely it means to refer to the SPF initiative as ‘global’ social policy. For sure, as Deacon demonstrates, the initiative developed at the ‘global’ level through intergovernmental and other international organisations. But the conflicts over the making of this policy cast doubt on whether it should be considered ‘global’ in terms of the regional scope of its authorship. Moreover, the implementation of the policy has been regionally very uneven, casting doubt as to whether the policy should be considered as ‘global’ in terms of its effects. Deacon recognised well that the importance of ‘global social policy’ lies primarily in its consequences. Global social policy might encompass ideas and discourses as well as concrete policy models, but if the ideas turn out not to matter, then the policy itself is of little importance.

This article contributes to the growing literature on the interaction between international organisations and national governments over social protection policy-making. International organisations have clearly been energetic champions of various models of social protection (von Gliszczynski and Leisering, 2016; Hickey and Seekings, 2017). Some scholars analyse the proliferation of social protection programmes in terms of, primarily, the successful transfer of selected policy models through and by international organisations, especially those with considerable resources such as the World Bank (e.g. Peck and Theodore, 2015). Empirical case studies, however, point to a more complex ‘negotiated’ and contested politics. Multiple international organisations both compete and cooperate, interacting separately and collectively with the various players within any national state, who are themselves typically institutionally fragmented and divided in their attitudes towards reform. Local civil society is also often a player – or rather set of players – in the negotiated politics of policy reform (Hickey et al., 2018). Studies of almost any country in the global South can point to more instances where the proposals of international organisations have been rebuffed than cases of evident influence resulting directly in policy reform. Models often fail to be transferred (and ideas often fail to diffuse) (Stone, 2017). As many case studies have revealed, policy reform generally requires that the national government and state, or at least some important faction or institution therein, take ‘ownership’ of the reform, typically shaping it in line with their own interests, norms and values (e.g. Kwon et al., 2015, on Cambodia; Leisering et al., 2017, on China; Seekings, 2016, on Zanzibar; Grebe, 2015, on Uganda; Chinyoka, 2019b, on Botswana). This article examines interactions between international organisations and national governments (and regional intergovernmental organisations) in the national agenda-setting that constitutes the first step in the negotiated politics of national policy reform.

The article is based primarily on the analysis of documents. The interpretation draws on interviews, mostly conducted off-the-record. The article focuses on social assistance programmes and neglects universal health care, which forms a second component of the SPFs.

Africa in the making of global social policy

Deacon’s analysis of the process that culminated in the ILO’s (2012) Recommendation details the importance of four factors: the idea of universalism, the agency of individual champions of the SPF (three within the ILO, one at the time within UNICEF), the institutional politics of the ILO itself and the changing structural context (including, especially, the global financial and economic crisis). This is a largely but not entirely Northern story, in the sense that the major players were from the global North, with players from the global South playing largely secondary roles.

Southern actors were certainly not absent from the process. Deacon notes that the SPF concept originated vaguely with the Chilean Juan Somavia, who became Director-General of the ILO in 1999. In Deacon’s account, much of the impetus for universalism came from the South. Deacon implies that the ILO’s shift away from a focus on the European model of social insurance in favour of a dual approach combining social insurance with social assistance was driven by a recognition that the European model was inappropriate in Southern contexts characterised by large informal economic sectors. When trade unionists within the ILO became anxious about departing from the employment-centred European model, one of the individuals who persuaded them to support the SPF initiative was the South Africa unionist (and subsequently government minister) Ebrahim Patel.

Deacon acknowledges that Southern actors were far from uniformly supportive of the push for global social policy. Deacon reveals that a British initiative in 2000 to push for global social policy principles was rejected by much of the global South (including Egypt, India, Indonesia and Pakistan), in part because of the unwillingness of the North to pay (Deacon, 2013: 21–23). When the SPF proposal formally came before the annual International Labour Conference (ILC), African representatives were at first (in 2011) supportive, but subsequently were much more guarded. African governments joined with some governments from the global North (as well as South Asia) in opposing ‘progressive’ amendments proposed by Latin American governments (Deacon, 2013: 87, 94). In 2012, Deacon records, 50 African countries proposed an amendment (that was not accepted) that would qualify SPFs ‘in accordance with national context and considering the level of national economic development’. The representatives of African governments also resisted the insertion of commitments to ‘decent wages’ and ‘the reduction of informality’ (Deacon, 2013: 89, 94).

Deacon also points to the participation of African governments in planning prior to the SPF proposal being presented at the 2011 ILC. In 2007–2008, the ILO hosted tripartite regional meetings in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia and the Pacific. The final regional event, for Africa, was held in Yaoundé (in Cameroon), sometime later, in October 2010. Compared to his detailed analysis of politics within the ILO, however, Deacon pays little attention to these regional meetings and associated politics. The ‘Yaoundé Declaration’ – adopted at the 2010 meeting – appeared to indicate that African governments had endorsed the SPFs. It called on African governments ‘to engage with social partners and promote effective social dialogue to achieve the most appropriate national policies and time frames for the progressive implementation of effective social protection floors’ (ILO, 2010). But this endorsement of SPFs was qualified in at least four respects. First, the Declaration explicitly added that African governments should take into consideration the African Union’s (AU) 2008 Social Policy Framework as well as ‘perspectives that also take into account the necessity to promote employment, economic and social development’ (ILO, 2010). The Social Policy Framework was not entirely consistent with the SPF initiative, as we shall see further below. The specification that developmental perspectives needed to be taken into account also undermined the boldness of the SPF initiative. Second, the Yaoundé conference was a tripartite event, with representatives from governments (mostly ministers of labour), business and trade unions, focused primarily on promoting ‘decent work’. Ministers of labour cannot be considered as representative of African policy-makers, not least because they are often drawn from trade unions representing the small and non-poor minority of workers in formal employment. For ministers of labour, the expansion of social assistance (typically under the control of other ministers) was, in part, a way of legitimating social insurance programmes (typically under their own control). Third, and most importantly, the Yaoundé Declaration entailed essentially the ratification of a position drafted from within the ILO, not an autonomous statement originating within Africa itself. As we shall explore more fully in the next section, the Declaration entailed the very partial vernacularisation of a ‘global’ position, not an African position in itself. The ILO subsequently liked to refer to the ‘emergence of an African vision for social protection’ (e.g. ILO, 2011a: 3) but this was more an exercise in persuasion than a valid historical assessment. Indeed, the purpose of the conference, Declaration and ensuing Plan of Action (ILO, 2011a) was largely persuasive, that is, to persuade policy-makers and interest group leaders that they should go along with the ILO’s agenda, rather than genuinely deliberative.

Deacon points to the position adopted by the African governments during the final deliberations over the proposed and then drafts SPF Recommendation at the 2011 and 2012 ILCs in Geneva (see above). The import of his observation needs to be emphasised. In 2012, the ‘Africa Group’ of governments collectively and separately lined up on almost every divide alongside the government representatives from India and Bangladesh as well as the employers’ representatives against the Latin American government representatives and the representatives of organised labour. On some issues, they aligned with Northern governments, on others not. The long series of issues which divided the ILC included the expectation of reforms beyond the introduction of SPFs, time frames, explicit commitments to universalism, the need for higher wages and the importance of the informal economy. Deacon points to the amendment proposed by the Africa Group with regard to the insertion of a clause calling for the implementation of SPFs ‘in accordance with national context and considering the level of national economic development’. Deacon describes this as unsuccessful. In the committee stage, this amendment was initially opposed by the leaders of the representatives of organised labour, but a compromise formulation (‘in accordance with national circumstances’) was adopted (ILO, 2012: paras 507–518). The reference to the constraints of ‘national circumstances’ ended up in the key paragraph 4 of the Recommendation: ‘Members should, in accordance with national circumstances, establish as quickly as possible and maintain their social protection floors comprising basic social security guarantees’. The Africa Group also proposed successfully an additional amendment for the addition of a clause calling for inclusion of people in the informal sector. Despite opposition from organised labour – who preferred a formulation that listed specific groups of informally employed workers but did not include peasant farmers – this amendment was adopted (ILO, 2012: paras 466–480), ending up as paragraph 3(e) of the Recommendation.

It is difficult to unravel precisely the contribution that African government ministers and others (including trade unionists and employers) made to the making of global SPF policy. It is not clear how ILO officials based in Geneva interacted with their colleagues in the African regional and local offices, although most ILO documentation appears to be driven centrally from Geneva. At least one individual from Africa – Ebrahim Patel, from South Africa – clearly wielded considerable influence within the ILO. For the most part, African governments seem to have been less invested in deliberations over the proposed Recommendation than their counterparts in Latin America (who backed a strong formalisation and SPF agenda) or even South Asia (who opposed these). African governments seem to have gone along with the general thrust of the Recommendation despite conservative anxieties over many of the details.

It appears that the developmental and often conservative concerns that are widespread among most African policy-makers (as we shall see further below) were reflected in some of the details in ILO documentation (including the Yaoundé Declaration) and then more weakly in Recommendation #202 itself. It seems that African governments played a role in restraining the ambitions of organised labour, Latin American governments and the ILO’s own Social Protection Department with respect to the scope of the Recommendation. African governments probably played a significant role in the substitution of SPFs (in the plural) in place of a single SPF (as set out in the Yaoundé Declaration). Despite these modest successes, African governments failed to reorient the SPF initiative in line with their own norms, values and priorities. This left them in a position whereby their resistance shifted to the implementation of SPFs.

The partial vernacularisation of global social policy in Africa

The Yaoundé Declaration and other ILO documents point to the more general process of ‘vernacularisation’ ¹ of global discourse and documents in Africa. African governments have a long history of ignoring ‘global’ policies that they deem inappropriate in Africa. When they have engaged with global policy, they have tended to vernacularise it through softening and modifying the more emphatic commitments to social and economic rights or state-led social protection that have emanated from ‘global’ institutions dominated by the countries and individuals from the global North. This is most evident in most of the general declarations adopted by the AU (and its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity, OAU), beginning with the African Charter in 1981, but it is evident even in policy documents adopted by AU structures in which the ILO plays a significant role.

African governments’ history of ignoring global policy is most evident in their refusal to ratify ILO conventions on social protection. As recently as 2010, the ILO’s flagship social security convention – the 1952 Social Security (Minimum Standards) Convention (#102) – had been ratified by only five countries in Africa, none of which were Anglophone. In 2011, the AU explained the ambivalence of African countries towards Convention #102 in terms of the inappropriateness of contributory social insurance schemes in the African context, where most poor people were too poor to afford contributions and the state lacked the capacity to organise large-scale (or universal) social insurance (AU, 2011: para 18). More importantly, African governments have long seen social protection, in whatever form, as a distraction from (and possibly even undermining of) developmental imperatives.

The AU (and OAU before it) have not been able to ignore more general statements of rights, including social and economic rights, and have instead vernacularised them. While a growing number of African scholars has denounced the global rights discourse for its ‘Western’ preoccupation with the rights of individuals (e.g. Mutua, 2002), the OAU opted ‘to append an African “fingerprint”’ on global policy (Chirwa, 2005: 323), resulting in an uneasy mix of external and African priorities. The foundational 1981 African Charter thus recognised a limited range of individual rights, added some group rights (including to ‘development’), emphasised the importance of the family and inserted a discussion of duties.

Since its establishment in 2002, the AU has adopted three major policy positions with respect to social protection specifically: a Social Policy Framework for Africa in 2008, a Social Protection Plan for the Informal Economy and Rural Workers (SPIREWORK) in 2011 and the Addis Ababa Declaration on Social Protection for Inclusive Development in 2015. Individuals or organisations from the global North played a role in each of these, but each reflected also a process of partial vernacularisation. ²

The 2008 Social Policy Framework was adopted at the first Conference of Ministers in charge of Social Development of AU Member States (‘CAMSD’) in Windhoek. The context was important. A Social Policy Framework had been proposed 5 years earlier in the AU’s Labour and Social Affairs Commission (LASC), in which the ILO wielded considerable influence. Indeed, the LASC was established in part as an ILO-backed counterweight to the influence that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund exercised through the poverty reduction strategy paper process. The first draft of the Social Policy Framework was prepared through a team within the LASC. The ILO seems to have wielded much less influence within the new CAMSD. In Windhoek, an alternative draft Social Policy Framework was presented, without any mention of social protection. Discussion during the CAMSD led to the insertion of a section on social protection, but it was cautious and non-committal (Wright and Noble, 2010). The first of the guiding principles listed in the Framework declared that ‘Social policies must encapsulate the principles of human rights, development imperatives and be embedded in the African culture of solidarity’ (AU, 2008: para 16). The section on social protection emphasised that governments should ‘choose the coverage extension strategy and combination of tools most appropriate to their circumstances’ while aiming at an unspecified ‘minimum package of essential social protection (AU, 2008: section 2.2.3).

The Social Policy Framework remained the cornerstone of AU policy until at least 2015, despite the growing momentum behind the SPF initiative on the global stage. None of the subsequent CAMSDs – held in 2010, 2012 and 2014 – appear to have discussed SPFs. Their primary focus was on the importance of and need to strengthen the family. The theme for the 2014 CAMSD was ‘Strengthening the African Family for Inclusive Development in Africa’.

The LASC was a little more in tune with ILO-led thinking around social protection. In 2011, it adopted SPIREWORK. The plan as a whole represented a compromise between the ILO, which pushed the idea that poverty could be addressed through the formalisation of the informal sector, and the AU (and individual African countries), which pushed for employment creation (‘job-rich and inclusive growth’), especially for young people. With respect to social protection, SPIREWORK barely engaged with the SPF initiative. The plan did acknowledge what it called the ‘UN SPF initiative’ (AU, 2011: para 17) but immediately added the caveat that ‘the current reality in Africa . . . is that the Continent is faced with numerous constraints’ – which explained why so few countries had ratified relevant ILO Conventions (AU, 2011: para 18). The plan used the discourse of a minimum package but pointed vaguely to community-based insurance schemes as the way forward. The plan did acknowledge the possibility of non-contributory (social assistance) programmes, but without any evident enthusiasm.

In 2015, the AU replaced the LASC and CAMSD with a new Specialised Technical Committee for Social Development, Labour and Employment (STC-SDLE). The first STC-SDLE session was held in Addis Ababa in 2015, with the theme ‘Social Protection for Inclusive Development’. The prioritisation of social protection might have reflected (belatedly) the momentum around the SPF initiative, but the deliberations and ensuing ‘Addis Ababa Declaration’ focused on implementing the 2008 Social Policy Framework not the SPFs. The 2015 STC-SDLE also discussed the need for a Protocol (to the African Charter) on the Rights of Citizens to Social Protection and Social Security. This was discussed further within the AU in 2016–2017. In 2018, external consultants prepared a draft Protocol. It appears that there continues to be little enthusiasm from African governments for any clear endorsement of the radical expansion of social protection implied through SPFs. As of 2018, it is far from clear that the AU has really embraced the concept or discourse of SPFs. There was little evidence that the idea of universalism – that Deacon considered so important in the SPFs – had diffused, even in a vernacularised form, very far into Africa.

The ambivalence towards social protection among African elites reflects the strength of conservative ideas about the family, work and dependency (Seekings, 2017, 2018), which are in turn rooted in the agrarian character of society (in the past, if less and less so in the present). In Tanzania, for example (and as the ILO itself reports), two out of three working adults are peasant farmers working on their own land, and most of the rest are in informal self-employment in ‘household enterprises’ (ILO, 2009: 10). The norms associated with the SPF initiative – that is, universalism and individual rights – are widely viewed among African elites as alien and inappropriate. The expansion of social protection is viewed as a lower priority (and hence as ‘unaffordable’) relative to other government interventions, including subsidies for peasant farmers.

The ILO’s promotion in Africa of its ‘global’ social policy

While the ILO has not been the only champion of the SPFs, it was the primary driver of the initiative. Other international organisations have undoubtedly embraced – and championed – aspects of social protection in their own work (von Gliszczynski and Leisering, 2016; Hickey and Seekings, 2017) and notionally signed up to the SPFs in response to the global crisis of 2008–2009, as Deacon himself documented. But these other organisations tended to emphasise other aspects of social protection. It was the ILO that expended most energy in the promotion of SPFs specifically, both prior to 2012 (to generate support for what became Recommendation #202) and since 2012 (to encourage national governments to implement the Recommendation). Within Africa, the ILO has utilised its African Regional Meetings (held every 4 years) and its sponsorship of and support for AU structures (including the LASC and subsequent STC-SDLE, see above) to promote reform at the continental level. It has disseminated its publications, especially through its African head-office (now in Abidjan), its four regional offices and eight country offices. It has conducted specific research and advocacy projects.

The ILO’s promotion of SPFs has, however, been shaped by the fact that the SPF initiative has been subordinate to the ILO’s ‘decent work agenda’. The decent work agenda – pushed strongly by Somavia – was innovative in that it recognised that a large proportion of the world’s workers were in informal, generally low-productivity employment. Formalising employment would entail higher wages and improved employment conditions, incentivising employers to raise labour productivity. In debates at ILCs, organised labour pushed strongly, often with support from employers, for using SPFs to accelerate the formalisation of employment (see, for example, ILO, 2012). But the primacy of the decent work agenda meant that the formalisation of informal employment was a higher priority for the ILO than the expansion of social protection for the large majority of the population remaining in the informal economy (including in peasant agriculture) or not working at all.

The subordinate status of the SPFs in the ILO’s work is evident in both documents and the speeches of ILO officials. The ILO has stated repeatedly that social protection can only be built as part of national ‘Decent Work Country Programmes’. When Somavia himself reported to the ILO’s 12th Africa Regional Meeting in 2011, he did not mention the SPFs, focusing rather on the implementation of the Decent Work Agenda. The full report of the Regional Meeting – more than 100 pages in length – included only short discussions of social protection policy (ILO, 2011b: 35–36, 58–59). The subordination of SPFs to the decent work and formalisation agenda was also evident in the deliberations at the 2012 ILC. The representative of organised labour repeatedly referred to SPFs not so much as a goal in itself but rather as a mechanism to achieve the primary goal of formalisation. The ILO’s Recommendation (#204) Concerning the Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy (ILO, 2015) pointed to the need for SPFs but prioritised the extension of ‘social security’ through social insurance rather than universal social assistance.

The decent work and formalisation agenda reflected conditions and challenges in parts of the world like Latin America, not the conditions and challenges in Africa, where decent work could be a reality in the foreseeable future for only a small and non-poor section of the population. The ILO’s embrace of the SPF seems rather less progressive when the organisation’s preoccupation with decent work is taken into account. SPFs offered a means of legitimating the ‘vertical’ dimension of social insurance, linked to decent work, with an ill-defined promise of the ‘horizontal’ dimension of social assistance for some set of people outside of decent employment. It was often unclear whether the horizontal floor protected only wage workers (whether employed formally or informally) against the risks of unemployment, old age and poor health, or whether it would protect everyone – including peasant farmers – against the risks of poverty. It is likely that the ILO was itself divided over these issues, with some departments and individuals in favour of a more genuinely universal policy while others remained preoccupied with the ILO’s historic constituency of waged workers. The ILO’s packaging of SPFs within its decent work agenda meant not only that the ILO tended to pay more attention to the vertical dimension of the SPFs (i.e. expanding social insurance) than to the horizontal dimension (i.e. universal social assistance) but also that the entire SPF initiative was marginalised on the policy agenda of most countries in Southern Africa. Put simply, the decent work agenda was less important in Africa than what we might call the peasant farmer agenda. By hitching the SPFs to the former and not thinking through the latter, the ILO missed an opportunity to promote a version of SPFs that was more appropriate in agrarian societies and might have achieved the progressive objectives of the initiative.

The ILO promoted decent work, with social protection tacked on, at different levels. The ILO’s Decent Work Agenda in Africa 2007–2015 included, as its fourth priority, promoting Social Protection for all. The ILO initiated pilot country-level Decent Work Programmes in around 2006, before branching out more widely from about 2009. The Decent Work Programmes typically involved a social protection ‘pillar’, at least from 2011 onwards. At the regional level, the ILO organised tripartite ‘Decent Work Symposia’ from 2009 (including in Yaoundé, in October 2010, where the SPFs were endorsed).

The ILO did also promote social protection directly. Prior to 2011, its primary focus seems to have been on costing social protection programmes to demonstrate that they were affordable (see, for example, Pal et al., 2005). Since 2012, the ILO has talked up the SPFs in both its general and its Africa-specific publications. Its flagship World Social Protection Report – published first in 2014, then in 2017 – communicates strongly the basic argument that governments concerned with poverty have expanded their social protection programmes. In 2016, the ILO published a three-volume study of Social Protection Floors that showcased ‘successful’ social protection experiences across the world, including Africa, to dispel national governments’ anxieties (Ortiz et al., 2016).

The ILO’s most direct promotion of SPFs in Africa was an (initially) 3-year project on Building National Floors of Social Protection, focused on three ‘pilot’ countries: Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. The project, funded by IrishAid, entailed the promotion of reforms through public events (including ‘social protection weeks’), technical assistance and research. An evaluation of the initial 3-year project was very positive: ‘To have genuinely moved the debate towards a greater acceptance of social protection floors in all of the three countries where it operated, and in the space of only 3 years, is a significant achievement for a project with just a handful of staff . . .’. The project’s impact was impressive ‘in opening up the debates around social protection to a more integrated, more rights-based and more universal, approach, that is fully consistent with ILO’s values and vision’ (Freeland, 2017: 13, 18). In all three countries, the project had helped to push the reform agenda forward. It had also elevated the ILO to the position of premier international organisation in terms of influence over policy-making, while working closely with aid donors and other United Nations agencies over implementation.

The ILO project deserved the fulsome praise of the evaluator, but the evaluator did not comment on what is arguably the most striking feature of the project: the difficulties that the ILO (and other organisations and individuals, including local non-government organizations) had in persuading the governments of the three countries to take seriously universal social protection and to implement the reforms that turned the rhetoric of national ‘policy’ into actual programmes that realised the goal of a SPF. The evaluator did describe Malawi as a ‘challenging environment’, but without elaboration. The ILO project was an exercise in advocacy that made some progress in the face of strong and widespread resistance. Progress was slow. In Malawi, the ILO had reportedly anticipated at the outset that a redesigned national social protection strategy would have been adopted by mid-2015, resulting in the expansion of coverage. But Malawi did not publish its new National Social Support Programme (MNSSP II) (Malawi, 2018) until early 2018, and actual expansion of coverage has been slow. In Zambia, also, strategic planning and legislative reform lagged far behind the anticipated timetable. Coverage of social protection has continued to expand, as existing schemes have been rolled out to more districts, but coverage gaps remain immense. Overall, in these countries, the ILO participated in energetic and exemplary advocacy of social protection in the face of governments that continued to drag their feet. The ILO-backed SPIREWORK plans also failed to make significant progress.

The ILO has played a major part in both the distribution across Africa of data and documentation that present the evidence-based case for the expansion of social protection and progress towards SPFs. Through events such as the Social Protection Weeks in Zambia, the ILO (with other organisations) has mobilised enthusiasm for reform. The extent to which this has transformed thinking among the political elites who preside over policy-making remains unclear, however. Insofar as progress has been slow, this attests to the resistance to ‘global’ social policy across much of Africa.

Social protection reform in Africa since 2012

If Recommendation #202 in 2012 marked a turning point in social protection in Africa, then we might expect to find that progress towards more universal social protection in Africa accelerated after 2012. The ILO, 2017 World Social Protection Report did indeed report ‘notable progress in the extension of social protection coverage’ in Africa (ILO, 2017: 119), noting that ‘most African countries have made social protection a priority in their development strategies’ and have adopted or are developing national social protection policies and plans (ILO, 2017: 131).

One possible indicator of the impact of the SPF initiative is the content of national social protection documents from across Africa. Zambia adopted a National Social Protection Policy in 2014, Lesotho a National Social Protection Strategy in early 2015 and Malawi a new MNSSP II in 2018. All three proposed the expansion of social assistance programmes, to provide (in effect) a more complete SPF. The Zambian National Social Protection Policy explicitly referred to Recommendation #202, envisaged the expansion of provision for the working poor as well as children, the elderly and disabled, and criticised past governments for inconsistent and under-funding of social protection. A timetable set out specific targets for progress over 5 years (2014–2018), including the establishment of a National Social Protection Coordinating Unit (in 2015) and a battery of new legislation (a Social Health Insurance Act in 2014, a new and harmonised National Pension Act in 2015 and a Social Protection Act in 2016). The existing Social Cash Transfer Scheme (SCTS) would be rolled out countrywide by 2016, an old-age pension scheme would be introduced in 2015 (and 100,000 pensioners enrolled by 2018), and contributory welfare programmes extended to the informal sector. The new social health insurance system would register (by 2018) all public and (formal) private sector employees, 60% of all informal workers and more than 500,000 SCTS beneficiaries (Zambia, 2014). This was a bold set of apparent commitments.

Similarly, the 2015 Lesotho National Social Protection Strategy set out a bold set of commitments. The Lesotho Strategy seems to have been prepared without much or any input from the ILO, with UNICEF playing the leading role (and the World Bank is also active). Nonetheless, the Lesotho Strategy reflected the universalist ambitions of the SPF initiative (and referred twice to the SPF). The document set out what it called ‘a comprehensive integrated suite of core programmes, implemented by different Ministries, to address vulnerabilities throughout the life-course’. This would include three new programmes: a new disability grant, a universal infant grant (for children to the age of 2 years) and the ‘first steps towards the establishment of a national seasonal employment guarantee scheme to offer public works to the working age poor who need it’. The existing means-tested grant for older children would be expanded, the age threshold for the existing old-age pension lowered (although only from 70 to 68 years) and the existing discretionary public assistance grant would be reformed to provide ‘a residual safety net to catch those who fall through the (now much narrower) gaps in the social protection floor’. These reforms would be phased in over 4 years, so that they would be completed by the end of the 2018–2019 year. The result would be an expansion of coverage from 23% to 41% of the population, at a cost of about 4% of GDP (or 5% if school feeding and other related programmes are included). The document envisaged further expansion by 2025 (Government of the Kingdom of Lesotho, 2015).

Malawi’s MNSSP II was more cautious than either the Zambian or Lesotho documents (and did not refer to SPFs). It combined aspects of the global social protection discourse with the more developmental approach – focused on farmers – that is favoured by Malawi’s governing party (the Democratic Progressive Party). Much of the document uses a developmental discourse, including discussion of ‘building resilient livelihoods’, integrating social protection and agricultural policies and ‘graduating’ out of poverty. Recognising resource constraints, the document commits only to the progressive realisation of rights. It also emphasises that the government must control programmes, which is an unsubtle criticism of aid donors. No new programmes are proposed, but existing programmes – the Social Cash Transfer Programme (targeted on very poor, ‘incapacitated’ households), workfare and school feeding programmes – would be expanded (Malawi, 2018).

While none of these documents was framed in terms of implementing a SPF, they all – with a qualification in the case of Malawi’s MNSSP II – envisaged substantial progress towards the implementation of a SPF, as understood by the ILO. These strategy documents might reasonably be seen as proposing progress towards SPFs by stealth. The Zambian case even reproduced much of the ILO’s blindness with respect to peasant farmers, providing largely for people who were unable to support themselves through farming (because of old age, for example) or who were employed in the formal or informal sectors. This was not so true in the Malawi document, which was more cognisant of agricultural factors.

It is easy to assess the content of social protection strategy documents but difficult to assess their importance. In a review of these documents, focusing on the Ghanaian case, Kaltenborn et al. (2017: 3) conclude tentatively that ‘Policy frameworks can act as a catalyst towards building social protection systems but do not offer a guarantee for success’. Kaltenborn et al. could not discern any pattern in the sequencing of strategic plans and reforms. The two processes often appeared to run in parallel. This lead Kaltenborn et al. (2017) to suggest that ‘the process appears of greater importance than the outcome itself’. Building on this observation, we need to know precisely who wrote strategic plans, who approved them, and what that approval signifies. In many cases, strategic plans are written by consultants proposed and paid by one or other international organisation. When a minister or government approves a plan, it is often unclear whether they are taking ownership of it or merely indicating to international organisations (especially aid donors) that they are conforming to the latter’s expectations.

A more compelling indicator of the possible impact of the SPFs initiative is the pace of reform. The ILO – along with other advocates of social protection – tends to ‘talk up’ progress, in part (it seems) to persuade recalcitrant governments that they are missing out on what other governments have accepted as good policy. The World Bank thus concurs that ‘safety net’ programmes have proliferated in Africa (World Bank, 2015: 10) and points to rising coverage in countries with poor coverage until recently, such as Tanzania and Senegal (World Bank, 2017). The trend of proliferating programmes and rising reach (or ‘coverage’) has been corroborated by other, independent studies. The Social Assistance Politics and Institutions (SAPI) project, for example, finds that the number of social assistance programmes in Africa rose more than fourfold from about 20 in 2000 to about 85 in 2015, and their reach rose fivefold over this period (Hickey et al., 2018).

Much of this expansion predated 2010–2012 (see Garcia and Moore, 2012). South Africa’s social assistance programmes – which are by far the largest in Africa, accounting for about one-half of the total in terms of the number of people reached – expanded primarily in the 2000s. Programmes in Ethiopia, which account for the second highest number of beneficiaries in Africa, also expanded in the early 2000s more than in the 2010s.

The ILO’s data on coverage suggest that it did rise rapidly in the 2010s. The ILO has usefully collated extensive data on coverage, but much of this remains incomplete. The least incomplete data concern old-age pensions. In its first World Social Protection Report, the ILO calculated that 17% of elderly people in Sub-Saharan Africa received pensions. The proportion in North Africa was much higher, at 37%, giving an Africa-wide total of 21.5% (ILO, 2014). In its second World Social Protection Report, 3 years later, the ILO reported that coverage was 30% (ILO, 2017). These data imply a major expansion in coverage over a short time period. The national data provided by the ILO do not seem to confirm this trend, however. Neither contributory nor non-contributory schemes have expanded sufficiently to warrant the finding of aggregate expansion (Seekings, 2019).

Aggregate data on other forms of social assistance are less clear. It seems that the major category of expansion in social assistance programmes has been targeted (i.e. means-tested) programmes for very poor households. Since 2010, there has been considerable expansion in such programmes in Tanzania, and to a lesser extent in Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal and Zambia. In these seven countries, by one estimate, the total number of people living in households that benefit from a social assistance programme rose to more than 10 million by 2015. ³ To put this into perspective, however, this corresponds to only 6% of the total population of these countries, despite their high poverty rates. Moreover, this 6% includes all members of households where anyone receives a benefit.

The cases of Zambia and Lesotho are instructive. As discussed above, the governments of these two countries adopted social protection strategies in 2014–2015 that promised bold reforms. Few of these reforms have been effected. In Zambia, the promised National Social Protection Coordinating Unit does not (as of 2018) appear to have been established (despite the plan’s specification that this would happen in 2015). The Health Insurance Act was passed in 2018 (4 years behind the promised schedule), and neither the promised National Pension Bill nor the Social Protection Bill has been published. The (targeted) SCTS appeared to have expanded, but events in 2018 cast this in a new light. First, a scandal over corruption led to the dismissal of the minister. Second, the government was at least 6 months behind in its payments. In January 2019, payments were effected for the previous May and June. The dedicated old-age pension scheme proposed in the strategic plan had not been introduced and few informal workers had been reached by contributory welfare programmes. The efforts of the ILO (through its Building National Floors of Social Protection project) and others can be viewed as attempts to push or persuade the Zambian state to inch in the direction mapped out in the country’s 2014 plan. Siachiwena’s analysis of the Zambian case only goes as far as 2016, but his thesis appears to continue to be relevant: one faction within the governing Patriotic Front had been in favour of social protection programmes. When this faction was marginalised politically, reform dropped down the government’s agenda (Siachiwena, 2016, 2017).

In Lesotho, also, the 2015 National Social Protection Strategy envisaged a substantial expansion of the country’s social protection system. The only programme to have been expanded is the Child Grants Programme, and even after expansion, it only reaches a small minority of the country’s poor children. Analyses of Lesotho up to 2015 suggest that its governments were much less committed to the child grant than to the old-age pension. Whereas the old-age pensions had been ‘home-grown’, the child grant programme had been pushed heavily (and funded until 2013) by UNICEF and aid donors (Granvik, 2015; Pellerano et al., 2016).

In neither Zambia nor Lesotho was the lofty vision of the social protection plan matched by substantive reform. There appears to be a disjuncture between the rhetoric of reform and the practice of procrastination. Global social policy has changed the public discourse far more than it has expanded the actual coverage or reach of social protection.

Analysis of other countries in East and Southern Africa suggests that reform has generally been incremental and the expansion of coverage (or reach) has been slow. South Africa has the most extensive social protection system in Africa, on its own accounting for just over one-half of the total number of beneficiaries of social assistance across Africa (Hickey et al., 2018). In South Africa, however, the last major reform of social protection was initiated in 2008–2009. Since 2012, there has been no significant expansion of the reach of social protection. Moreover, a SPF is rarely mentioned in recent government documents or ministers’ speeches. In Namibia, the government rejected proposals for a general child grant made by UNICEF and the ILO. In 2014, in the run-up to an election, the government introduced a means-tested child grant (the Vulnerable Grant). As of 2018, however, this reached only about one-quarter of the country’s children. Despite the appointment of Bishop Zephania Kameeta – the champion of the basic income grant – as Minister of Poverty Eradication and Social Welfare following the election, no further reforms have ensued (Chinyoka, 2019a). The government of Botswana also rejected proposals for a child support grant (proposed by foreign and local consultants in 2010) and for a family support grant (proposed by the World Bank in 2013) – although it did expand the public works programme (Chinyoka, 2019b). Case studies of the politics of reform in these countries do not attach much importance to either the SPF initiative or the ILO as a player.

Conclusion: the limits to ‘global’ social policy

The SPF initiative was clearly a ‘global social policy’ in that it was adopted by a set of intergovernmental and other international organisations, that is, at a ‘global’ level, but it was far from global in terms of authorship, ownership and impact. Viewed from Africa, the SPF initiative looks suspiciously Northern (with strong input from Latin America), based on a normative concept of universal coverage with which many African policy-makers did not agree, and hitched to an understanding of individual social and economic rights that they viewed as alien. If the SPF Recommendation was the ‘“Magna Carta” of social protection’, as Cichon asserted, it was a charter to which African governments signed up with even less enthusiasm than medieval English kings, with little or no intention of honouring and with many fewer mechanisms to hold them to account. Neither the idea of universalism nor the specific policy models associated with this were reflected in actual policy reform and, most importantly, implementation.

In global fora, Southern African governments went along with the SPF Recommendation, opposing stronger formulations and supporting (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) formulations that took into account ‘national circumstances’. Within the AU and at the national level, they have incorporated aspects of the SPF discourse into their official documents, in a vernacularised form. As a set of ideas, the SPFs were not so much diffused as diluted, to the point of losing their bite. This was not a case of policy ‘transfer’ nor even ‘translation’.

The ILO has been the primary champion of the SPFs, even if they have not been its primary concern. The ILO’s impressive publications and the very solid work of its staff (especially in its African offices, in Lusaka and elsewhere) have surely had some effect on attitudes towards social protection within Africa. But the bold vision set out in the SPF Recommendation – and echoed in most national strategy documents – has rarely been matched by corresponding reforms on the ground. The universalism underlying the SPF initiative has run up against the conservatism of many policy-makers across much of Africa. Not only do many policy-makers view rights-talk with suspicion, but many remain unpersuaded also of the developmental benefits of social protection. The scientific evidence might be very strong that the expansion of social protection reduces poverty and encourages development, but many Southern African policy-makers simply do not believe this, believing instead that ‘handouts’ encourage ‘dependency’ which both undermines development and is antithetical to norms of reciprocity and responsibility that are widespread across Africa (Seekings, 2018). The ‘global consensus on universal social protection’ described by Ortiz et al. was at best superficial rather than substantive, and perhaps even illusory.

The global policy-making process entailed too few concessions to conservative African governments to ensure that they shared in the ‘ownership’ of the SPF Recommendation. Linking SPFs to the decent work agenda further weakened its appeal. Given this, the efforts of ILO personnel on the ground – together with allies in local civil society as well as other international organisations – could make only very limited progress in advancing the universalist vision of the SPF initiative.

In the negotiated politics of national policy reform across most of Africa, the SPF Recommendation and even its echoes in some AU and national strategy plans have not proved to be a major factor. The recognition of norms and models in the social policy adopted on the ‘global’ stage does not mean that these norms and models will be embraced at the regional or national levels. In this sense, even a highly heralded ‘global social policy’ entails a performance, which the audience dutifully applauds but without sharing the vision that it conjured up.

Unlike its ‘conventions’, ILO ‘Recommendations’ are not subject to ratification, making it hard to gauge their significance to governments. Unusually, the ILO itself is currently surveying progress with respect to Recommendation #202, through a General Survey of national governments (and social partners). The report form has been distributed (ILO, 2016) with a deadline for responses at the end of December 2018 so that the results can be presented to the 108th session of the ILC in June 2019. It will be interesting to see how African governments – and their critics in civil society – present progress towards SPFs.

Bob Deacon was right to study the SPF initiative as a case of ‘global social policy’ in that it was approved formally at the supra-national level by a set of international organisations as well as national governments and non-state organisations. Building on his incisive analysis, I have shown that there are clear limits to its ‘globalness’, in terms of authorship, ownership and impact. The SPF initiative was global in some senses but far from global in others. In some respects, this is likely to be typical of much ‘global social policy’: policies adopted through pressure from actors in some parts of the world may not have strong effects in other parts of the world. The implementation of global social policy is almost always contested and negotiated. In the case of the SPF initiative, these limits were especially striking: across much of Africa, conservative political elites view the progressive idea of universalism and the SPF model as alien, something that international organisations are trying to impose on them. These particular limits to the globalness of the SPF initiative are not common to all global social policy. Universal health care (encompassed in the SPF initiative but not discussed in this article) and education are much less likely to display these limits than universal income support policy. Labour market policies are more likely to display these limits, given inter-regional differences in the character of and attitudes to work.

This article has focused on Africa, and more specifically Southern Africa. It does not consider the SPF initiative from the perspective of South Asia, Latin America or any other part of the global South. It therefore cannot determine whether the limits to the globalness of the SPF initiative identified in this article have been specific to Africa. Contestation over the making of the SPF initiative suggests that South Asian governments were marginal as much as, if not more than, African governments, while Latin American governments were much more invested in the initiative. In terms of implementation and impact, much of South Asia remains agrarian, suggesting that the SPF initiative might be viewed as inappropriate and alien, especially if it is hitched to the decent work agenda. Further research is clearly needed to assess the specificity of the African experience.