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- Convenor:
-
Shailaja Fennell
(University of Cambridge)
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- Format:
- Thematic Panel
- Theme:
- Revisiting role of the welfare state
Short Abstract:
This panel raises fundamental questions about the centrality of the market in the 20th century, and the associated logic that the welfare state is there to remedy market failure. It suggests a reconfiguration that underlines the imperative to provide new thinking about both the role of public provisioning, the types of tools as well as the methods of delivery and the associated monitoring.
Long Abstract:
Research Context
The traditional welfare state has not met the expectation that it would abolish ‘poverty’. It has also become clear that neither the expected redistribution of incomes nor the presumed reduction in economic, educational and social inequality that was to be brought about through social programmes have been achieved by the end of the 20th century.
This panel raises fundamental questions about the centrality of the market in development analysis in the 20th century, and the associated logic that the welfare state is primarily to be brought into play in the case of the occurrence of market failure. The panel proposes a new configuration for analysing the design of welfare programmes: one where both the logic of provision and the mechanism of delivery build on an understanding that the state does not have a full formulation of the characteristics that need to be adhered to by a welfare state. Tillin (2022) makes the case that states often have ‘informal security regimes’ rather than full-fledged welfare state regimes, and this thinking allows us to explore how to obtain a deeper understanding of how to conceptualise welfare in economic contexts with are characterised by the shallowness of the market, with very limited share of formal employment and a very large informal sector. Such a reconfiguration also underlines the imperative to provide new thinking about both the role of public provisioning, the types of tools as well as the methods of delivery and the associated monitoring -e.g., social audit (Dreze, 2019), through local initiatives and bottom-up governance approaches.
Methodology
The three papers are presented by authors who come from across a wide professional arena: retired civil servants, a private sector development professional, and long-term university academic. The papers share a common concern that the design of and the tools deployed for the delivery of welfare programmes do not adhere to the primary tenet that the welfare state promotes social justice. The papers reviews areas where this weakness is evident: the attraction of a populist agenda, the inability to devolve governance to local administrative units, the reluctance to adopt community-led delivery and monitoring tools for the evaluating welfare programmes.
All the three papers in this panel address the importance of local governance: with the lowest-level administrative units being awarded fuller forms of financial devolution, as well as the operation of bottom-up approaches where communities play a key role in identifying their needs that require the formulation of social policies, e.g., affirmative action or targeted policy provision. The papers will examine the processes and pathways through which to ensure that the priorities on the ground are linked to the decision making at the national and regional levels. All three papers draw on the framing of the capability approach that shows that conversion factors that constrain the ability of marginalised people, and the appropriate methods that will achieve desirable development outcomes can also be more readily identified from a bottom-up approach. They move away from thin forms of conceptualising welfare such as the 'informal security regime' to more complex principle of 'human security' and with the additional value of making opportunities, both those provided through market exchange and social networks available to all.
Analysis
The paper by Patankar and Kumar, both retired Indian civil servants, addresses the inequities in the current welfare system: particularly the lack of dignity accorded to beneficiaries as well as critique the populist preference for handing out ‘freebies’ rather improving human development outcomes, examples for a range of welfare programmes in India. The paper by Avneet Kaur, focuses on the current skilling programmes in India that do not go beyond populist slogans, and also fall short in ensuring improved skills that will result in the successful accessing of employment outcomes. It also analyses why the skilling programmes that have been adopted in India are unable to deliver better targeted social protection and access to training for potential entrants to skills programmes. The final paper by Fennell makes the case for a bottom-up reporting system that moves towards a monitoring system that is emerges from a deeper engagement with the needs and aspirations of the community. Building on case studies from South Asia and Africa, using instances where community designed and deployed monitoring methods as well as local measures of human development indicators have been generated it argues that local engagement provides the basis for deepening democracy and advancing social justice.
While the individual case studies provide important detail, the three papers also resonate as a group in their analysis that there is a need to reconfigure the understanding of the welfare state: that the most important aspect of its ability to deliver social justice lies in its ability to create compassionate individuals with compassion for their fellow citizens (Stiglitz, 2017).
Conclusion
All the three papers make contributions to advancing our understanding of social welfare and protection. Using examples such as targeted welfare schemes, to that of skilling programmes and from examining the costs of populist programming to the alternative of community designing monitoring schemes, these papers highlight that greater impact of programmes (e.g., by targeting priorities) that provide more support for marginalised group to achieve capabilities, as well as interrogating the short-sightedness of regarding social programmes as only second-best solutions that should be brought in to remedy market failure. All the three papers make the case that understanding the later social nature of human lives, and the importance of regarding welfare as a socially enabling feature (Saez, 2021) would be a better use of public funds and reduce structural inequalities in a society.
Key words: welfare state, populism, democracy, human development outcomes
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
This paper will examine bottom-up and community led approaches to generating local development indicators. It uses case studies from the local sphere in South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa to gain insights into how community led indicators advance the democratisation of welfare programmes.
Paper long abstract:
Three-quarters of a century on from the first welfare policy programmes set out in a post WWII world, we have come a long way with measuring, with an increase in indicators for measuring human development outcomes. Among these new measures, is the set of self-reporting instruments, e.g., social audit schemes and household evaluation/testing kits, that have important consequences for the democratisation of development.
This emphasis on democratisation resonates strongly with the centrality of justice, a core tenet in the capability approach. The considerable potential for an overlap between subjective well-being and capabilities has become a subject of considerable interest in recent years (Binder, 2014) and provides the starting point for this paper. The intention of this paper is to examine bottom-up and community led approaches to generating local development indicators. This examination will be using case studies from the local sphere in South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa to gain insights into how bottom-up data collection could generate community led indicators. The results of the case studies will facilitate a better understanding of how an increasingly democratisation of local development processes could both provide methods of triangulating existing development measures as well as improve currently available indicators. The evaluation of these case studies has important implications for how developing countries could advance social justice in a manner that are currently being investigated in high-income countries (Biedenweg, 2017). The possibility of comparing indicators generated through bottom-up approaches in developing countries with those in OECD and other high-income country contexts provides a 21st century update to the original narrow income-based measures that were proposed at the beginning of post-war development.
Paper short abstract:
Public participation and public accountability in welfare schemes has been diminishing perceptibly owing to a strong tendency towards centralisation of government. This can be reversed by acknowledging and assigning the role of local government in policy-making and implementation.
Paper long abstract:
The growing centralisation of governance has resulted in diminishing public expression of democratic dissent even in fairly robust democracies like India. Consequently public participation in welfare schemes has also suffered. The state has been perceptibly moving away from genuine concern for people's welfare towards a greater pre-occupation with populism for the perpetuation of the political party in power at the Centre or in States.
Democratic decentralisation with local governments being given earmarked funds, functions and functionaries is the answer to restore the concept of welfare to centerstage in policy formulation and implementation. Community participation is crucial to identifying needs and prevailing inequities for programme formulation. For welfare to be socially enabling, policy-making must reflect people's perception of their issues and suggested remedial measures which uphold their dignity and are conducive to enhanced social mobility and access to opportunities of economic growth. This has to be a continual process of delineating distribution of decision-making power among central, provincial and local governments. The state intervention for welfare in a particular geographical or social sphere should be properly identified as the domain of that tier of government which is vested with the authority to formulate and implement such policy directly impacting the public at that particular level. Local government's role in problem-identification, policy formulation and policy implementation would involve optimum people's participation and public accountability which would greatly increase the efficacy of welfare delivery.
In the present scenario in India, such a conscious movement towards democratic decentralisation and the recognition of the role of Local Government would have to involve a re-imagining of the architecture for social welfare. This could include precisely defining the extent of powers of all three tiers of government, the areas of interface, the restructuring of the bureaucracy and the police, the reframing of tools of government like financial institutions, accounting and audit, data management and other regulatory systems. Such redesigning would have to be carried out in accordance with Constitutional means and procedures. But it is by doing so that the Local Governments would come into their own and in the process, democracy would be strengthened for the greater wellbeing and understanding imbued with human dignity, for the community, society as a whole.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the Government’s present approach of providing free-of-cost skill development training serves a populist agenda, rather than being an impactful and sustainable welfare measure.
Paper long abstract:
The Government of India aims to address the issue that only a small percentage (4.69 percent) of the workforce in India is formally skilled. This problem acquires an even greater urgency considering that more than 62 percent of the country’s population is in the working age group (15-59 years), and more than 54 percent of the total population is below 25 years of age. Furthermore, on the demand side, a skills gap of 110 million workers by 2022 across 24 key sectors of the economy has been projected. The MSDE therefore aims to address the challenge of providing skills training at scale with speed, standard and sustainability in order to meet the rising aspirations of the country’s youth for sustainable livelihoods.
This paper argues that unless an integrated approach that addresses the gaps in the skill development ecosystem and considers the aspirations of people is adopted, the policy agendas would remain unfulfilled.
A typical trainee is knowledgeable, has the capacity to aspire and be an agent of change. Therefore, a participatory approach will promote better skills development outcomes and sustainable development. To ensure quality programme design and implementation, an integrated view of training, employment and development needs to be established. This includes, creation of local employment and entrepreneurship opportunities in sectors that are aspirational and provide decent wages. In addition, institutionalized provision of support services such as counselling, mentoring, networking and access to finance, is required. It is also important to strengthen the life-skills and experiential aspects of training to facilitate desired development outcomes, both in terms of personal and community development.
The effectiveness of skills development is also dependent on the labour market conditions. Therefore, skills development needs to be closely aligned with the emerging work trends which necessitates creating skills-based opportunities for entrepreneurship / self-employment in both rural and urban areas due to the lack of job creation in the formal sector, especially in the rural areas. There is also a need for mapping skilling with sectors in which jobs are created; aligning skills development processes to support migrating workers whose choices to work locally are constrained due to persistent differentials in wages and the ongoing process of urbanization; and ensuring improved skilling and employment outcomes for women for improved aggregate participation rates and economic growth. It is also important to ensure that skills delivery is decentralised and there is effective capacity building at the local government level.