Abstract
I welcome you to this special issue on ‘Social Policy Implementation: Strategic Insights for Bridging the Gaps’. I am grateful to all the contributors, reviewers and the SAGE production team for efficiently producing this special issue. Policymakers, educators, students, researchers and trainers will particularly find this issue useful as it looks into one of the three important phases of the policymaking cycle—policy implementation.
Success of any policy often depends upon how effectively and efficiently the policy has been implemented. Since the late 1990s, policy implementation science has emerged as a specialised field and many universities are offering programmes to prepare personnel in implementation science. Cabassa (2016, p. 38) states that ‘Implementation science examines the factors, processes, and strategies that influence the uptake, use, and sustainability of empirically supported interventions, practice innovations, and social policies in routine practice settings’ and thus makes a case for its application in social work and social policies. But the focus of implementation science seems to be mostly in the sphere of health and reducing the gap between invention, implementation and adaptation (Bauer & Kirchner, 2020). What about in the field of welfare policies? Welfare states have innovated and introduced a range of social policies and programmes to meet the needs of people and communities from ‘cradle to grave’, at least in some nation-states. How have such policies been implemented? What is the people’s experience of benefiting or not benefiting from such policies?
Globally, about a half of the world population is not covered by even one social protection cash benefit (United Nations, 2023, p. 7). In the remaining nearly half, where social policies have been implemented, people seem to have mixed experiences. In the welfare policy, there are two critical challenges. The first one relates to covering the entire global population to deliver and provide access to relevant and needed welfare policies and services. This is an appropriate and achievable goal from a social development perspective as it focuses on universal wellbeing or the wellbeing of the whole population (Midgley, 1995, 2014; Pawar, 2014). This idea is not new as the shift from welfare state to welfare world was contemplated earlier, for example, by Gunnar Myrdal (Johnson, 2022). Contemporarily, the idea of universal basic income is experimented in some pockets and debated (Torry, 2023). Our relatively recent experience of the Corona Virus pandemic and the need for universal vaccine coverage has underscored the significance of social policies for the global welfare (Pawar, 2020). Thus, the scope for implementing welfare polices globally is huge.
Second challenge relates to implementation. Wherever social policies and programmes exist, often some of them have not been implemented fully to the satisfaction of people for whom they are meant. Despite the emergence of implementation science, experts and consultants, consultations, and co-design talks, many people at the receiving end experience problems and illfare, at least to some extent, rather than welfare. Policies often fail because of flaws in or poor implementation. Poor implementation and policy failure might be because of lack of expertise, commitment, resources, participation, incentives, understanding and coordination (Althaus et al., 2023). According to Rutter et al., (2012, p. 7),
The most successful policies are ones which achieve or exceed their initial goals in such a way that they become embedded; able to survive a change of government; represent a starting point for subsequent policy development or remove the issue from the immediate policy agenda. (cited from Althaus et al., 2023, p. 189)
All these and similar factors need to be considered within the varied social, economic, political, cultural, governance and rural/urban contexts. One of the critical aspects of policies and their implementation is that they should not result in administrative or implementation burden to people (Herd & Moynihan, 2018). It is necessary to proactively identify such burdens and implementation gaps and to develop strategies to resolve them (Hudson et al., 2019).
In this special issue, the following five articles provide a glimpse of implementation gaps and burdens in different national and policy contexts. These include a poverty alleviation programme in Ghana, the take up of National Health Insurance scheme in rural Indonesia, welfare of rural migrant workers in India, and media and protesting farmers in the Philippines. The articles provide strategic insights for bridging the gaps in policy implementation in similar contexts globally.
In their qualitative study, Kennedy Osei and his colleagues explore the impact of administrative burdens in Ghana’s ‘Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty’ cash transfer programme. Analysing the interviews, they argue that the programme beneficiaries were impacted by difficulties relating to information about and accessing the programmes, stigma attached to receiving benefits, and technical aspects of following the procedures and processes. As these experiences contributed to reducing their wellbeing, they make recommendations to improving implementation mechanisms at the local level. This insightful analysis is useful to many welfare states which face similar challenges in implementing social policies and programmes at the grassroots level.
Whether modern welfare institutions are akin to a square peg in a round hole within a rural context is explored by Muhammad Abdul Majid and his colleagues. Although about 95% of Indonesians have enrolled in National Health Insurance, their phenomenological study in an agriculture-based rural community reveals a preference for traditional informal care and welfare practices (Pawar & Cox, 2002; Pawar & Jojo, 2015). This preference is rooted in the community’s risk rationality which aligns more closely with their own informal caring and sharing practices. The state-provided welfare services appear foreign and remote, both socially and economically. This insightful analysis has theoretical and practical ramifications for the design and implementation of welfare policies and programmes that are tailored to the specific needs in rural socio-economic contexts.
In his article, Praveen Naik Bellampalli explores poverty-induced migration from four villages in rural Karnataka, India, and experiences of migrants. His mixed methods study shows that despite policies and programmes to provide employment, food security and crop insurance, people impacted by poverty, drought, loss of employment and similar related reasons decide to migrate to urban areas in search of livelihood. Their views on government policies and programmes leave much to be desired. His study recommends for greater awareness and effective implementation of policies and programmes in rural areas. In contrast to urban areas, as rural poverty has increased, the study has wider implications.
In her article, Lopamudra Mishra explores the phenomenon of seasonal migration in Western Odisha, India and how people, including families and children, fall into the trap of debt bondage. Her analysis shows the process followed by the poor people and middlemen, brokers, to make debt arrangements, which create exploitative conditions in which poor people find themselves helpless. Because of their life situations, lack of resources and lack of capacity in terms of poverty, low or no education and landlessness, they cannot break the vicious cycle of debt bondage. Her analysis has implications for initiating social development programmes through public policies so that suitable employment opportunities and social protection provisions are created at the point of origin.
Recently, media has come under considerable criticism due to disinformation, questioning the credibility of information. When some deprived and struggling farmers protest, how do the media represent them? In the Philippines context, Julius Cesar R. Pascual has addressed this question by analysing select tabloid news stories relating to protesting farmers and the Kidapawan Massacre in Central Mindanao. His analysis shows that the media portrayed protesting farmers and government actions in terms of victims and villains, conflicts and politics, fault finding and language issues. Although news stories included concurring, dissenting and non-discriminatory messages, these did not help to resolve conflicts. It makes us think about how media can better represent the interests of the marginalised and deprived groups so as to initiate needed structural changes.
Finally, two books reviewed are A Research Agenda for Basic Income by Manohar Pawar and Dalit Migrants: Assertion, Emancipation, and Social Change by Srija Naskar.
Overall, this special issue provides significant strategic insights for bridging the gaps in policy implementation. I hope you will gain from those insights.