Paper short abstract:

Social support represents a key element for reducing everyday hardships in the Global South yet remains predominantly understood through a policy lens. I re-position the lens using a mixed methods approach to personal networks to provide new insights on the role and diversity of social support.

Paper long abstract:

A growing consensus points to the quality and quantity of social relations playing an essential role in people's life and well-being. Particularly in the Global South, there is strong evidence showing that social support represents a key element for reducing everyday hardships. Yet, support relations remain almost exclusively understood through a policy lens, typically labelled as informal safety nets or informal social protection.

In this paper I reposition the lens. Using a mixed method approach to personal networks, I describe and measure the role of social relations and their varying reasons and intentions; particularly accounting for a person's socioeconomic context. Therefore, I draw on 205 personal networks containing support activities reported by adult Namibians residing in Windhoek. I demonstrate how activities range from ad-hoc gestures, daily habits, mutual favours, to long-term investments into someone else's future; providing a glimpse into shared and lived experiences of persons and their immediate contacts. Thereby, they constitute mechanisms which are not necessarily well-crafted and carry the foresight of co-crafting someone's socioeconomic position as reflected in formal provisions of support.

I use these insights to address literature which frames social support networks as 'informal'. Conceptualizing social support as informal social welfare puts it into the same conceptual space as the state and might impose rationales to social practices meriting different labels and intentions. I show how personal networks can provide a novel framework of measurement, which allows capturing the diversity of social support and social relations to revisit understandings of informal forms of social protection.