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Paper short abstract:

What role does crisis play in competing visions of social protection? This paper focuses on the possibilities afforded (or foreclosed) by the Covid-19 pandemic in South Africa, by arguing that the temporarily of work and welfare is crucial to popular and state visions of just distribution.

Paper long abstract:

How does crisis open-up - or foreclose - new possibilities for a radical expansion of social protection? This paper focuses on the policy futures afforded by the Covid-19 pandemic by exploring possibilities for radical redistributory policies in contexts where access to income via work is increasingly tenuous. To do so, we turn to South Africa, where we examine the unfolding political possibilities and support for more radical and universal forms of social protection and (re)distribution during and after the Covid pandemic. In particular, we analyse visions of redistribution both from above and from below, via original empirical data on the views of low-income inner-city residents in Johannesburg; interviews with government actors and civil society activists; and a close reading of media and policy discourse around social protection between 2020 and 2022. We argue while framing Covid as a crisis forced the state to embrace less workerist approaches to social protection, the very fact that new policies are rooted in a moment of perceived 'crisis' may have blunted more radical redistributory visions. This argument is underscored by the vacillations and internal contradictions of the South African government's expansion of its social grant system, as well as by the delimited scope of grassroots demands for direct economic support through multiple lockdowns. We make the case that a 'crisis temporality' -- and the temporality of work and redistribution more generally -- is critical to understanding the lack of popular demands for more radical forms of redistribution and economic security beyond work.