Paper short abstract:

This study attempts to explain the politics behind the targeted 'safety nets' logic employed in Bangladesh's National Social Security Strategy. This is significant because targeted schemes can have a substantial impact on the type of social contract that develops in a country.

Paper long abstract:

Recent developments in the study of social protection shows that the particular form social protection will take in a specific country will depend on the political settlement in that country. Mediated by both local and global factors, political settlement is the shared understanding among competing actors in a society, especially the elites, about the modality of distributing and exercising resources and power amongst themselves. To an extent, political settlement can be used to explain the design of Bangladesh's National Social Security Strategy too. Despite aspirations to the contrary, this Strategy is unable to escape the logic of targeted schemes for the poor, in the form of safety nets, frequently coining oxymoronic terms such as "targeted universal" to set its aims. Employing data from qualitative interviews of elite actors, along with document analysis, this study attempts to explain why the Strategy employs the logic of safety nets in the first place. This is significant because the literature shows the safety nets logic can have a substantial impact on the type of social contract that will develop in a country. The research also posits that the political settlement approach may have limitations when attempting to explain policymaking at the micro level.