This paper contributes to an ongoing conversation between development studies (DS) and social policy (SP) as academic fields, particularly in the UK. Using Andrew Abbott's analysis of the social sciences as an evolving system of knowledge lineages (KLs), it reflects on the status of DS and its relationship with SP. Defining DS as a distinctive KL centred on critical analysis of ideas and projects for advancing human well-being, I suggest that it has lost coherence even as research into international development thrives. Indeed it is easy to envisage its gradual assimilation into other KLs, including SP. The two increasingly overlap in their analysis of the causes of relative poverty and injustice, and what can be done to address them, within countries and globally. Strengthening links between the two fields can be justified as a political project, even at the risk of some loss of plurality and plenitude across the social sciences.

This paper examines the social policy consequences of systemic banking crises or financial crises in 13 Latin American and Caribbean countries between 1990 and 2010. It takes a rationalist approach to political economy to analyse the effect of these crises on aggregate social policy spending and on four distinct social welfare policy programmes – education, health, housing, and social security – benefits of which vary across social groups. The results indicate that banking crises have a statistically strong negative effect on aggregate social expenditure, but the impact is not uniform across the four programmes. While social security spending increases during the course of crises, health and education expenditures decrease in the same period. The results reinforce the view that distributional conflicts overshadow governments’ response and the burden of crises is unevenly shared in a heterogeneous society. These findings are robust to alternative specifications.

This article contributes to the literature on political gerontology by analysing the role that social capital plays in the political participation of older adults. More specifically, the aim is to test the importance of individual-level and contextual-level social capital for different types of political participation of older adults in a Scandinavian setting by using survey data from Finland and Sweden (N = 6838). The results show that even though membership in voluntary associations, intense social networks and high levels of interpersonal trust tend to be positively correlated with political participation of older adults as a whole, the explanative logic differs between them depending on the kind of political engagement. The only type of social capital with a robust positive impact on all dimensions of political participation was individual-level membership in voluntary associations.

This article focuses on the discussion of global policy convergence through the implementation of “distributed governance” within the education policy sector. Here, the focus is directed at the emergence of national education standards (NES) as a simultaneous instrument of fair school control and performance increase. Both the US and Germany show a high traditional resistance to nationally centralised educational control, but experienced a massive transformation in this direction by the recent implementation of a national core curriculum initiative (National Education Standards in Germany and Common Core State Standards in the US). This article will rely on global governance and distributed governance research, focusing on the concept of “heterarchies”, to analyse the interplay of global and national contexts in the case of the rise of NES in the US and Germany, ultimately showing the concepts' contributions (and limits) to explain policy convergence.

This paper argues that while social policy as an explicit aspect of policy discourse has relatively recent origins within the international development agenda, concerns with “the social” have featured from its very early days seeking to challenge the conflation between growth and development. The paper focuses on key international conferences and policy documents to analyse contestations over the meanings of “the social” within development policy discourse and their efforts to rethink its boundaries with “the economic”. It suggests that these contestations have helped to spell out the basic outlines of an alternative policy agenda in which concerns with “the social” have come to define both the means and ends of development.

The process for developing social policies in the Palestinian Territories has undergone several changes in recent years. Most recently, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) formally adopted the partnership approach whereby policies are developed with participation by the civil society sector and international donor organizations. However, it is unclear whether these partnerships have been realized as little is known about the power relationships between PNA and these other parties. Using a qualitative case study design, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 16 Palestinian ministry officials and a review of archival materials. The findings confirmed that Palestinian agencies, civil sector organizations, and international donor organizations are now helping formulate anti-poverty policies. However, the partnerships are far from balanced or equal. Due to strained relationships with the PNA characterized by tension, conflict, and competition, the influence of the civil society sector remains modest. Conversely, international donor organizations continue to exert extraordinary influence on the policy-making process through financial and technical assistance. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.

The paper draws on the cases of Brazil and Chile to consider the lack of progress towards securing better health outcomes for women in the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). At first glance, these poor outcomes for women appear surprising, given that both countries represent middle-income countries where significant developments have occurred towards ensuring universal access to healthcare services. Yet, a more nuanced analysis uncovers the historically constructed gender regimes and policy legacies within relevant institutions that act to limit progress. The discussion in the paper specifically focuses on the evolution of the health sector in the two countries, the role of the medical profession and the influence of the Catholic Church, which, we argue, have been key to constraining women's SRHR in Brazil and Chile.

This paper reflects upon the position of the nation state and non-state-centred actors in the support for welfare and the security of agency. In particular it argues that the normative agenda of rights-based autonomous security is undermined by the social facts of dependent, personalised and thus precarious security. The roles of other actors above and below the nation state are thus significant in any analysis of power relations, social reproduction and policy outcomes. In many middle- and lower-income countries, the problem for state actors is that power, authority and, more problematically, legitimacy lies significantly elsewhere across the domain of state, market, community and household. Aspects of globalisation can thereby interact directly with sub-national entities by-passing and undermining the state: multinational corporations, international donors, international non-governmental organisations, remittances, wider faith movements and cross-border ethnic solidarities. This is clearly a complicated institutional landscape within which to formulate the idea of responsibility for social policy and consider its intersecting role with international development.

The last few decades have seen increased theoretical and empirical interest in multi-dimensional measures of social welfare. The objective of this paper is to measure social welfare in Iranian provinces. To achieve this, we used a composite social welfare index (SWI) for Iran. The SWI was developed through the methodology of constructing composite indicators. The index comprises information on different social indicators from various life domains, including: health, education, economy, social security, housing, and employment. We then categorized Iranian provinces on the basis of SWI scores. The results show that value of the SWI was poor in provinces located in the periphery of the country. Furthermore, we found the best and worst performances in Yazd and Sistan and Balochestan, respectively.

Asian welfare capitalisms as well as advanced economies face the risks associated with globalization. In order to understand how Asian welfare capitalisms respond to globalization, it is essential to describe the institutional diversity of Asian welfare capitalisms and the welfare–risk nexus. This paper defines four types of Asian welfare capitalisms based on social spending data and investigates the welfare–risk nexus by focusing on globalization risks, such as a globalized production process, trade openness, and financial integration. The empirical results based on multiple factor analysis and cluster analysis clearly show that Asian welfare capitalisms are heterogeneous and that four clusters can be found in the welfare–risk nexus based on the dimensions present in Asian economies in the 2000s. This analysis stresses that globalization has different effects on these types of Asian welfare capitalisms according to their welfare–risk nexuses.

This article draws on recent data provided by the Asian Development Bank's Social Protection Index and uses Fuzzy Set Ideal Type Analysis to develop ideal types of welfare activity to which 29 countries in Asia and the Pacific can have varying degrees of membership. There is little evidence that the commitment to “productive” and “protective” welfare is oriented along broad geographical units or predetermined by economic affluence and the size of the informal economy. It also adds an explorative Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to test the effect of “productive” and “protective” welfare properties on human development and income equality. Here, it finds that the absence of strong income protection is most clearly linked to low human development at the macro-level; high education investment is linked to high income inequality if governments fail to invest in employment and income protection or employment protection and training, respectively.

Information and knowledge are frequently upheld as the cornerstones of development programmes. Poverty reduction measures delivered through social policies are frequently premised on the need to ensure that both users and providers of services have access to information. In contexts where poor and marginalised groups are largely excluded from knowledge access and uptake, Southern-based civil society is called upon to act as an interlocutor to leverage knowledge on their behalf to achieve social welfare objectives. Ensuring that the greatest number of people have access to timely and relevant information, promoted as part of global-level discourses on the desirability of fostering a “knowledge society”, is presumed to contribute, for instance, to the capacity of citizens to uphold government accountability, ensure access to entitlements or protect basic rights. This paper critically analyses the capacity of knowledge, delivered primarily though not exclusively through new information and communications technologies and leveraged through Southern-based civil society acting as intermediaries, to achieve social policy objectives in development.

Since Esping-Andersen classified the 18 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries into the “three worlds of welfare capitalism” in 1990, the comparative studies of welfare have been dominated by the responses to this study. This paper focuses on two of these responses. The first response is concerned with the gender insensitivity of Esping-Andersen's way of categorizing the welfare regimes. The second response is concerned with the issue that the East Asian countries are under-represented in the 18 OECD countries. To make contributions to these responses, two analytical tasks are conducted. First, we build new defamilisation typologies covering both East Asian countries and OECD countries. Second, we demonstrate that the evidence generated from the typologies suggest that some of the indispensable conditions for the development of a Confucian welfare regime do not exist.

Following formal economic liberalisation in 1991, business, in particular big business, has gained increasing access to and influence over policy decision-making in India. Industry has been an outspoken critic of national labour laws and has lobbied extensively for greater labour market flexibility. While business has not been successful in influencing “official” labour reform at the national level, it was able to influence labour policy within the National Manufacturing Policy 2011, which curtailed labour protections and implemented “hire and fire” policies. Utilising qualitative data from 40 face-to-face interviews with policy stakeholders in New Delhi, India, this paper aims to explore how business was able to influence labour reform within this policy as well as underscore the wider social welfare implications that may follow. It will be argued that the ability of business to dictate labour reform, while strong, is somewhat variable as competing factors serve to constrain business influence. Furthermore, the extent to which labour laws are hindering manufacturing investment is widely debatable. Nevertheless, curtailment of labour protections, as afforded in this policy, will have a widespread and damaging impact on workers. While the policy promises to empower rural youth, provide gainful employment, and enable growth to become more sustainable and inclusive for its citizens, it is questionable whether these goals can be achieved alongside the curtailment of labour protections.