Introduction

This final chapter does five things:

• • It provides an assessment of the SPF Recommendation in its own terms as a piece of ILO policy and asks whether the ILO has really modified its prime focus on workers’ social security and embraced a campaign for the social protection of residents. Will it be sustained within the ILO in the future?

• • It asks to what extent the ‘global social floor’ or SPF-I has become really embedded in the UN system in the context of parallel debates and processes concerned with environmental sustainability (Rio plus 20) and with the broader UN development agenda planned for the period from 2015 after the ‘expiry’ of the initial MDG agenda.

• • It discusses the further development of a global civil society campaign to realise SPFs in practice in countries. How will this new coalition take forward the work of the original Coalition for a Global Social Floor? Linked to this is the question of which of the two inter-agency coordination mechanisms (SPF-I and SPIAC-B) take forward the campaign at an official UN level? What will be the next ILO steps?

• • It reports and discusses the very recent call being made to establish a global social protection fund and asks how this might operate.

• • Finally, it returns to the broader question of complex global social governance and assesses the implications of this case study in global social policy formation for our understanding of the existing and future global social governance system.

Assessing the SPF Recommendation

The decision of the ILC in June 2012 to agree to a recommendation to its member countries that they should develop a SPF was historic. The SPF Recommendation is historic because, echoing and adding to some of the words of its main protagonist inside the ILO:

• • it asserts that the ILO has a role in formulating social protection policy for residents and citizens, not just workers;

• • it challenges the growth-first economists with the priority of social protection whatever the level of the economy;

• • it argues for redistribution nationally and even in small measure internationally;

• • it challenges the equity-efficiency trade-off economists with the case that equity supports efficiency;