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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the durability of two social policies, input subsidies and social cash transfers, in Malawi and Zambia. Informed by path dependency concepts, it finds that they can endure despite deep fiscal/political challenges when driven by powerful policy coalitions or mobilised recipients.

Paper long abstract:

The politics of social policy in Sub-Saharan Africa has recently received considerable scholarly attention. Some argue that social protection policies are largely domestically driven as part of regime survival strategies (Hickey et al., 2020), while others emphasise the coercive role of donors (Fischer, 2018; Adesina, 2020). However, most of the recent research has focused on single policies during moments of significant expansion. This paper builds on existing research by examining what makes social policies endure in contexts of limited fiscal space, political volatility, and competing existing social policies.

The paper compares agricultural input subsidies (AIS) and social cash transfers (SCT) in Malawi and Zambia. AIS have long been a fundamental part of both countries’ political economies, especially since the advent of multi-party politics. SCTs were introduced by the international aid sector in the mid-2000s with varying degrees of government buy-in, relatively high in Zambia and low in Malawi. Using the theoretical lens of path dependency (Campbell 2012; Weible & Sabatier, 2018), this paper finds that the durability of policies depends on the mobilisation capacity of its recipients, which is low for SCTs and relatively high for AIS. Moreover, the financial/political power of policy coalitions is crucial yet fragile, illustrated by a recent shift in favor of the donor-driven SCTs driven by the countries’ growing debt crises.

This paper draws on four months of qualitative interviews conducted in Malawi and Zambia, complemented by extensive desk research. Participants included officials from relevant government ministries, foreign donor agencies, NGOs, parliamentarians, and independent researchers.