As we shall see in the next chapters, it was not until 2012 that the ILO agreed to recommend to countries that they establish SPFs. We shall also see that it was not until 2005 that the first real steps were taken inside the ILO to bring this about. The concept of some sort of global social floor was not formulated until 2000. However, the context that gave rise to the need for such a policy and the opportunity to get it agreed reaches back to the 1980s and 1990s. Only by understanding the impact of the neoliberal globalisation project both on the actuality of embryonic welfare states in Africa, Latin America and South Asia (as well as on post-Communist social policy) and on the global debates about desirable national social policy can we understand why, by 2000, a counter move had developed to repair the damage done to the idea of welfare states and to (re)establish the principle of universalism as a cornerstone of progressive global and national social policies. This chapter provides an overview of this recent history.

The chapter proceeds through six steps. First, it outlines the challenge that took place in the 1980s and 1990s to universal welfare states and to the universal social policy principles with which they were associated. Here we see the birth and subsequent dominance of the residual targeted safety-net policy of the World Bank, which challenged fundamentally the Bismarckian wage-related state social security policies that protected formal workers and with which the ILO had traditionally been associated. Second, we see the emergence of a counter project driven by global social reformists and social development experts seeking to re-establish the case for universal social policies within a development context. Third, we observe a significant fracture among the global forces seeking to defend these earlier social security achievements between those, mainly in the Global North, who were perceived by many in the Global South as social protectionists, wanting to conserve these largely northern country welfare states against competition from low-wage-cost economies in the Global South. Fourth, we observe the rebirth of a new form of social policy universalism from below within large parts of the Global South exemplified by the development both of conditional cash transfer programmes providing social transfers to families to encourage school and health clinic attendance and of universal categorical social pensions.