Global social policy as a field of academic study and analysis

high frequency transport links. The consequences of both types of event are farreaching, touching every part of our lives. But even if we can agree that such global crises require global and not just national political responses, this raises questions about what sorts of global response are ethical, desirable and possible, which ones come to fruition in practice (or not) – and why – and whether they are effective. This is not just a question of whether the institutions and technologies are fit for purpose; it is as much about politics and the ‘art’ of making meaningful social change happen.

This is not to say that all social problems come to be defined as a matter for GSP, or that they are defined in the same sort of way, or that the nature of those responses is unchanging over time and/or among different parts of the world and populations. Indeed, GSP is dynamic; it is changeable, not fixed; differentiated, not universal in either form or impact. A key task of GSP scholarship is therefore to uncover these variations (between sectors, issues, parts of the world, populations and over time), and to explain the reasons for them.

A final point in this regard is that GSP is not irrevocably tied to forces of greater integration on a world scale (‘globalisation’). Because GSP analysis examines the global dimensions of the social organisation of welfare, so with this is also included the possibility of deglobalisations, or at least of uneven integration–disintegration processes. For example, if powerful states do not become members of intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), or withdraw from them, as the USA has done (under the Trump administration, from the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization [WHO] and the World Trade Organization [WTO]; under previous US administrations, from the International Labour Organization [ILO] and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO]), and as the UK has from the European Union (EU), then global dynamics of social policy are reconfigured as ‘new’ actors and ideas emerge and global connections are restructured.

In sum, understandings of the contemporary world have moved away from a world made up of a multitude of bounded national social systems and towards an understanding of a global social system that links populations and places in different parts of the world and comprises various global and sub-global hierarchies and networks of border-spanning connections, interactions and effects. At the same time, this global system and the social policies instituted within it are changeable and structurally differentiated.

Global social policy as a field of academic study and analysis

From global social policy as a practice of elite global institutions and actors …

The genealogy of GSP as an academic field conventionally starts in the mid-1990s with the publication of Global social policy: International organisations and the making

of social welfare by Bob Deacon, Paul Stubbs and Michelle Hulse (Deacon et al, 1997). They defined GSP as:

… a practice of supranational actors [which] embodies global social redistribution, global social regulation, and global social provision and/or empowerment, and … the ways in which supranational organisations shape national social policy. (Deacon et al, 1997, p 195)

Their core argument was that economic and political globalisation processes fundamentally shape the course of social policy. The restructuring of national welfare systems could only be fully understood, they argued, by reference to the pressures that global economic restructuring unleashed and the responses of international organisations (IOs). Several consequences of globalisation for welfare states and social policies were sketched out (see Box 1.5). These ranged from predictions of the demise of comprehensive welfare states where they exist and their stalled development where they don’t, to how welfare systems were adapting and managed to remain (largely) resilient in the face of neoliberalism, to the possibilities that globalisation opened up new forms of social welfare financing, regulation and provision. For Deacon et al, a crucial part of any explanation of which paths were taken was the response of IOs. IGOs such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations (UN) ‘social’ agencies such as the ILO and the WHO, and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) like Oxfam, Save the Children and so on are all meaningful social actors, addressing social policy questions as a matter of routine and intervening in political debates to shape welfare trajectories. Therefore, their policy discourses and programmes of social action had to be centre stage of analysis, rather than merely part of the background. Deacon et al’s work had a strongly normative, political inflection to it, in the sense that not only were they trying to assess the extent to which GSP founded on social regulation, social redistribution and social rights could be said to actually exist, but also to delineate the kinds of reforms that should be instituted in order to realise such a GSP.

There is no doubt that this work was influential, even if the newness of global policy discourses about social policy and the extent of the shift of governance structures from national to global levels that Deacon et al claimed to have discovered was questionable. Notably, contemporary GSP studies is predated by a substantial body of theory and research by ‘early pioneers’ since (at least) the 1950s. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s Peter Townsend developed a global analysis of world poverty, combining the insights of global sociology, development studies and social policy. The concept of poverty set out an ‘approach to development and stratification [to explain] how poverty arises, and is perpetuated, in low income and high income countries’ (Townsend, 1970, p 30), and argued that ‘[a]

wealthy society which deprives a poor country of resources may simultaneously deprive its own poor classes through maldistribution of those additional resources’ (Townsend, 1970, p 42). The riches of those living in high-income countries are, Townsend argued, inextricably linked to the poverty of those living in low-income countries. He was, in essence, drawing attention to webs of interconnectedness and interdependency long before ‘globalisation studies’ took off in the 1990s. In addition, others argued that the shift in power away from the national level to the global level was overstated, and that Deacon et al’s thesis was overgeneralised from the specific experience of one part of the world at one point in time, namely, Central and Eastern European countries following the end of the Cold War.

Box 1.5: Some possible effects of globalisation on social policy and welfare states

• Creates new or additional social risks and opportunities for individuals, households, workers and communities. • Sets welfare states in competition with each other. This is said to threaten comprehensive systems of public service provision where they exist, or to stall their future development where they do not. Among the anticipated effects are: – lowering of social and labour standards; – privatisation of public services; – creation of global health, education and welfare markets; – growing reliance on voluntary and informal provision. • Raises the issues with which social policy is concerned to supranational and global institutions, agencies and forums. • Brings new players into the making of social policy (for example, the Bretton

Woods institutions; various UN agencies; development banks; and international commercial, voluntary and philanthropic organisations). • Generates ‘new’ political coalitions within and between countries (regionally and globally) concerned with social policy reform.

Source: Yeates (2008), adapted from Deacon (2007)

Despite these objections, the lasting value of this work was to demonstrate how the battle over ideas and policy was being waged at the global level, within and between IGOs, as well as at the national level, and how national political and policy actors were faced with competing policy reform prescriptions in part

defined by these IGOs. This work helped stimulate academic debates revolving around the extent to which GSP was implicated in trends in welfare convergence or welfare divergence, and whether national governments’ dominant role in social policy formation had been displaced by the growing power of transnational actors (Yeates, 2001, 2014). It also energised the study of social policy, spurring a new generation of vibrant scholarship on how transnational social, economic and political processes – past and present – shape contemporary welfare development around the world in countries at all ‘stages’ of development. This, in turn, stimulated the ‘globalisation’ of concepts and, later, theories of social policy. Regarding concepts, they could either be ‘stretched’ to take greater account of transnational actors (as in the concept of the extended welfare mix; see Table 1.1) or entirely reformulated. Deacon et al put it this way:

The classical concerns of social policy analysts with social needs and social citizenship rights becomes [sic] in a globalized context the quest for supranational citizenship. The classical concern with equality, rights and justice between individuals becomes the quest for justice between states. The dilemma about efficiency, effectiveness and choice becomes a discussion about how far to socially regulate free trade. The social policy preoccupations with altruism, reciprocity and the extent of social obligations are put to the test in the global context. To what extent are social obligations to the other transnational? (Deacon et al, 1997, p 195)

Table 1.1: The extended welfare mix of social institutions and actors

Domestic

State National government, regional government, local authorities, town/city councils

Market Domestic markets, local/ national firms

Intermediate National service NGOs, consultancy companies

Community Local social movements, neighbourhood associations

Global

IGOs, world-regional formations, international donors

Global markets, transnational corporations (TNCs)

INGOs (charitable and philanthropic bodies), international consultancy companies

Global social movements, diasporic communities

Family/ household Household survival strategies Transnational household survival strategies, such as migration, remittances and care

Source: Yeates (2007b)

… To global social policy as a broader range of social policy dialogues involving a wider range of social actors and taking place across multiple locations and spheres of governance …

The last three decades have seen the maturation of the study of GSP (see Box 1.5). One aspect of this is the recognition that the range of social actors, locations and organisations involved in GSP formation, together with the transnational arenas in which GSP options and responses are debated and contested, is far broader than presented by Deacon et al (1997). Among the earliest contributors was Nicola Yeates (1999), who argued that a range of social dialogues among social actors about social policy take place outside the boardrooms and bureaux of elite IGOs as well as within them. The much wider realm of GSP formation that she pointed to included the activities of non-elites in global social politics and policy-making, notably social movements and NGOs operating in the numerous shadow congresses and social forums that accompany international governmental meetings. It also included citizen movements and NGO campaigns against (for example) local branches of transnational corporations (TNCs) alleged to be polluting the environment or harming the health and welfare of communities and workers’ livelihoods. Even households’ survival strategies of (for example) sending a member of the family to work overseas to send home remittances to supplement household income could be conceived as global social policy and/or as a social policy dialogue. The key point Yeates was making was that GSP formation takes place not just at the headquarters of the world’s ‘elite’ and most visible IGOs, but across multiple levels and spheres of governance. This work (further developed in Yeates, 2001) also laid some of the foundations for a theory of GSP, in locating the emergence of GSP as a set of responses to regulate increased social and political conflict worldwide that accompanies contemporary globalisation processes.

… To global social policy as co-determined and embedded

Extending Yeates’ focus on a broader range of sites of GSP and governance, Mitchell Orenstein broadened the definition of global social policies as ‘those that are developed, diffused and implemented with the direct involvement of global policy actors and coalitions at or across the international, national or local levels of governance’ (2005, p 177). This intervention highlighted that social policies enacted nationally and sub-nationally could be considered as ‘global’ to the extent that they are co-determined by global policy actors and are transnational in scope (2005, pp 177–8).

Hierarchy is implicit in GSP vocabularies of ‘level’ and ‘tier’ – with supranational entities placed at the top of the hierarchy and city authorities at the bottom, with power, authority and influence travelling ‘downwards’. However, GSP scholars

have come to emphasise how these different levels are parts of an overall system in which all parts affect each other, with influence ‘travelling’ multidirectionally. This opens up questions about: the ways in which, and extent to which, actors located in domestic arenas influence the formation of supranational policy; the ‘embeddedness’ of transnational policy actors in specific cultural/political territories; and how transnational policy actors operate at different ‘levels’ of and spaces within global governance – often concurrently (Stubbs, 2005; Yeates, 2007).

These works connect with literatures that reject conceptualisations of ‘the global’ as something ‘out there’, ‘above’ or beyond the nation-state, and emphasise the ways in which the global is ‘in here’, ‘within’ the nation-state and something that involves ‘us’. This embedded notion of GSP points to the existence of transnational spaces within nation-states and the playing out of transnational processes within national territories as well as across them (Clarke, 2005). In this sense, welfare transnationalisms can be found in ‘national’ identities, social institutions, economic interactions and political processes as well as in the more visible border-spanning structures and ‘high-level’ forums and processes.

The necessity of locating global social policy in time and place

The universalising claims that some saw in Deacon’s approach to GSP rendered it vulnerable to criticisms of being decontextualised from time (history) and place (geography). The emphases on contemporary global institutions and present-day forms of GSP exaggerate breaks with the past and neglect older forms of global social welfare and GSP. For example, historians of welfare could reasonably point to how the social forces behind welfare state building and the social regulation of capitalism have long operated in a global economy characterised by extensive international trade and migration, TNCs and developed international monetary and exchange rate regimes (Hirst and Thompson, 1996). Taking account of this invites us to look beyond the Western ‘global’ welfare settlements embodied in the Bretton Woods institutions and the UN system after the Second World War. And while much recent commentary focuses on contemporary transnational political mobilisation in the anti-globalisation or ‘alter-globalisation’ movement, there are examples of political mobilisation on social policy issues dating back two centuries that were international and extended beyond Europe. The antislavery movement (1787–1807) is one such example; the Movement Against Congo Colonization (1890–1910) is another (Yeates, 2012). The history of the British welfare state is intricately bound up with its colonisation of the world’s land mass and populations since the 16th century, and continues today in the postcolonial Commonwealth (Midgley and Piachaud, 2012; see also Schmitt, 2020). Not all of these transnational influences were colonial, however. Japan imported Western models of welfare in the 1870s (Goodman, 1992), while