Introduction

The origin of this book was our sense of a growing convergence between the leading edge social policy agenda of social investment and the development policy agenda of inclusive growth, especially among international organisations. This sense of convergence has been magnified hugely by the 2015 launch of the UN's 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development which, as Koehler (2016) observes, was conceptualised as ‘universal, in the sense of being applicable to all countries’ meaning that ‘the decades-old dichotomy of “developed” versus “under-developed” is cast aside’. As our contributed chapters suggest, the impetus for a new ‘universal’ whole world approach to social policy has come very much from the developing countries. There, often stellar growth rates have been accompanied by that explosion of social policy initiatives associated with inclusive growth; while in much of the OECD, the prospects for welfare reform through social investment remain constrained by austerity economics. But in spite of their very different origins and current policy challenges our volume concludes that social investment and inclusive growth do provide two key conceptual stepping stones towards a new universal global social policy framework in the making.

From the outset we observe just how relatively recent and dynamic has been the development of the two policy approaches. As Anton Hemrijck reminds us in Chapter Two, at the turn of the century social investment was little more than a ‘metaphorical’ gesture towards the productive value of social policy while by now it has become a systematic and fundamental rethink of the role of social policy in responding to the new social risks of the 21st century through social investment in human capital ‘stocks’ and ‘flows’, with the ‘buffers’ of social security. It has quite radically refocused policy attention away from a too exclusive emphasis on the role of taxes and transfers in moderating market inequalities to a focus on the role of social investment and services generally in enabling citizens to realise their capabilities amid the various ‘transitions’ encountered across the life course, described by Jon Kvist in Chapter Nine.

Introduction

Over the past two decades, there has been a fundamental reappraisal of the economic value of social policy, coming from a number of different directions. The first is the adoption of the ‘social investment perspective’ (OECD, 1997a: 14) in the advanced economies, as the old post-war welfare states were reformed in an attempt to address the ‘new social risks’ associated with post-industrial society. The social investment perspective in social policy appeared to offer a plausible alternative to neoliberalism and the neoliberal critique of welfare (and the discussions about ‘permanent austerity’ and ‘welfare state retrenchment’ that proliferated during the 1990s and early 2000s). The second major shift was the transition from the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ towards ‘pro-poor growth’ policies and ‘inclusive growth’ policy frameworks for reducing poverty in developing country contexts in the Global South (with an ‘emphasis on increasing the opportunities for the poor to contribute and benefit from the growth process’, as the World Bank observes, 2008: 7). Third, and related, is the shift in policy perspective at the OECD in response to rapidly rising inequality in the advanced economies (OECD, 2008, 2011a, 2015b), as international organisations and epistemic communities began to diffuse ideas for inclusive growth (OECD, 2013a). Finally, there is the environmental imperative of ‘sustainability’ that is shaping the new global development agenda (Sachs, 2015). Today, we find that socially inclusive models for sustainable growth and development offer policymakers in the Global North (as well as the South) a plausible remedy to address rising social inequality. Although initially quite independent, these intellectual movements and literatures, orientated towards investment and inclusion, have now begun to converge and coalesce and are increasingly seen to contribute towards a single analytical framework and shared policy agenda for human development and flourishing.

In this chapter we consider the emerging global social policy frameworks for inclusive growth and social investment, and draw out the sometimes similar and sometimes quite distinctive insights that these two policy perspectives now bring to our understanding of the relationship between economy and society in the 21st century, and for the future development of global social policy more generally.

As uncertainty in the global economy continues we find there is already underway a new worldwide movement away from the ‘neoliberal’ policy models and frameworks of the late 20th century. Policymakers and epistemic communities are in search of a new understanding of society which has at its core the quest for a better integration of economic development with social and environmental policy, in order to promote what Barack Obama has called ‘shared prosperity’ (White House, 2011) and Christine Lagarde (2014) at the IMF has termed ‘inclusive capitalism’.

Certainly the idea of the social investment welfare state has attracted significant critical attention but the new ideas about inclusive economic growth and development have not been held up to such critical scrutiny within the academic social policy discipline even though the central problem of promoting economic development while reducing inequality is fast becoming the characteristic political desideratum of our time.

We now find a constellation of international organisations like the OECD, the IMF and the World Bank (key actors in the global social policy arena, see Deacon, 2007; Béland and Orenstein, 2013; Kaasch and Martens, 2015) constructing new ‘policy ideas’ (Béland, 2009, 2016) and alternatives for social investment, inclusive growth and sustainable development out of neoliberalism. Global social policy is now being reframed to promote inclusion and cohesion. Rebuilding solidarity across countries and regions continues to be a challenge, however. After the global economic crisis, the shock of Brexit and the rise of ‘populism’ in Europe and the US, with the rhetoric of protectionism and parties on the right promising to stop job competition through migrants and refugees, the politics of any postneoliberal policy settlement has become impossible to predict. Growing inequality, however, presents the major threat to environmental sustainability, to equity and to the world economy, and needs to be tackled now. According to the economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, capitalism does not have to produce inequality (Stiglitz, 2015: 75–6, 105–13, 300–05). With the right policies, it is possible to choose both efficiency and fairness, he argues.

This volume takes stock of the major changes that are already underway in the global policy arena – the neoliberal period having reached its social policy limits.