Global welfare: one size does not fit all
Research undertaken in rich countries and development in the world’s poorer nations seeks to understand variations in forms of welfare provision.
Professors from the Department of Social & Policy Sciences at Bath have brought together thinking from studies of social policy in rich countries and development in the world’s poorer nations to help understand variations in forms of welfare provision. Professors Ian Gough and Geof Wood have been considering what happens to welfare policy when citizens do not see their states as legitimate and where the labour markets cannot be a base for employment based social insurance. Working in collaboration with colleagues from Bath and further afield, the pair used national level quantitative data and local level qualitative case studies from Latin America, Asia and Africa to identify how forms of welfare provision vary from state-led models familiar to us.
The research has produced a global typology of welfare regime types which identify different relationships between state, domestic economies and the functions of social protection. It can be used to explore different levels of insecurity, the degree of reliance on the community, family, philanthropy in providing social protection and support for human development and wellbeing.
It allows policy makers to distinguish between three major regime types: in/security; informal security; and welfare state. To do so, the research draws upon the concept of a fourfold ‘institutional responsibility matrix’ which adds the significance of community institutions to those of state, market and household, specifying them as problematic at national and international levels. As the research has developed, the analysis has been widened to include more ambitious ‘wellbeing’ agendas, drawing upon the Economic & Social Research Council sponsored Wellbeing in Developing Countries research programme at Bath.
The research has been published by Cambridge University Press- three reprints since 2004 and now a paperback - and in prestigious journals such as ‘World Development’. Originally funded by the Department for International Development, the work has influenced the social development thinking of the World Bank and social policy work of United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. The World Bank organised a large international conference on ‘Frontiers in Social Policy’ in association with the Department for International Development and other donors (Arusha, Tanzania December 2005) using its conceptual framework. The work has been presented to individual governments, some by invitation such as the Austrian Foreign Office, as well as research groups globally in India, Peru, The Netherlands, Spain. In May 2009, both professors were invited to inaugurate, with separate papers, an international conference at Harvard on ‘The Politics of Non-State Welfare’. It reflects an increasingly wide readership of their work in the USA.
With this comprehensive, comparative model, the professors are able to show policy makers in different country circumstances what political and social conditions need to be fulfilled to enable different kinds of policy interventions to work. These interventions comprise varying combinations of individual, community level and state responsibility. In other words: one size does not fit all.
Research aims
To look at welfare policy where citizens do not see their state as legitimate. Also examine situations where labour markets do not facilitate employment-based social insurance.
