Understanding global social policy (3rd edn)
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development initiatives underway across Africa, South America and the Caribbean, and greater recognition of the role that regional blocs can play in realising the SDGs (Yeates, 2017). • The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, which triggered a whole-of-society shock to all countries worldwide, highlighting the threat to human health that unsustainable development poses, and exposing nationalism as an impediment to greater global social solidarity (Gostin et al, 2020). The gaping global inequalities in access to COVID-19 vaccines and the enduring weakness of many countries’ health systems posed distinct challenges for global health governance and global health security (Gostin et al, 2020; Legge, 2020), among other things. These ‘new’ and ongoing developments inform each of the chapters, and find concrete expression to different degrees. Chapter authors place different emphases in their approach to their topics in ways that reflect their personal intellectual and/or discipline-specific perspective. However, all chapters address the core tenets of GSP from the perspective of how these global imperatives and forces, governance structures and policy actors are (re)making GSP in practice.
Outline of the chapters Each chapter in this book surveys and illuminates the nature of contemporary GSP-making in relation to specific areas, issues, populations or sectors. Collectively, they illustrate the breadth and richness of GSP as a field of academic study and research and as a set of ‘living’ political ideas. Each discusses in tangible and illuminating ways the nature of social issues with which contemporary GSP is grappling, how global policy responses are, in turn, addressing them, and the challenges that lie ahead. The book is divided into three main parts. Part One examines ‘Institutions, actors and theories’ and comprises five chapters. The main institutions of global social governance and the key actors in GSP are introduced first to provide a foundation on which later chapters build, and a lexicon that will familiarise readers with key terms and concepts in GSP. Sophie Mackinder, Chris Holden and Nicola Yeates (Chapter 2) introduce the actors and institutions that between them constitute global and regional social governance. Central to this governance is a multiplicity of IGOs, although non-state actors also play an important role. The different forms taken by IGOs relevant to GSP are examined, as are their overlapping mandates and different capacities to influence social policy and outcomes. Chris Holden (Chapter 3) focuses on global economic governance, trade and welfare. He discusses the changing nature of international trade agreements, the main forms that global economic governance takes, and the role of national welfare states within a liberalised world economy. Given recent shifts in the politics of trade, the chapter draws out ‘behind the border’ issues, such as
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