The Pleonasm of Shock-Responsive Social Protection

The original version of this blog appeared on Development Pathways

Three Christmases ago, I wrote a blog post about all the oxymorons involved in social protection! I refrained from naming names, but I provided a number of examples of commonly used phrases that were oxymoronic.

An oxymoron, as a reminder, is a phrase that is inherently self-contradictory: “deafening silence”, “painfully beautiful”, “open secret”, to name but a few. In social protection, we happily talk about “productive safety nets”, “conditional social protection”, “graduation from poverty”, “poverty-targeting” and “progressive universalism”, which are all examples of oxymorons, for reasons that I explain in the earlier blog.

Today, as Christmas again approaches, I turn my attention to the use of another literary device in social protection: the pleonasm. The word pleonasm, like oxymoron, has Greek origins: it comes from the Greek word πλεονασμός (pleonasmos), which means “excess”. A pleonasm is a redundancy, where part of the phrase adds nothing to the sense. As with oxymorons, there are many examples of pleonasms in common parlance: “advance planning”; “close proximity”; “free gift”; “false pretences”; and so on. There are also some fine examples in literature: Shakespeare’s “This was the most unkindest cut of all”; or Isabel Allende’s “These terrible things I have seen with my own eyes, and I have heard with my own ears, and touched with my own hands”.

“Shock-responsive social protection” is a pleonasm. If social protection is not shock-responsive, then it is not social protection. By any definition, social protection is there to respond to shocks, whether they be lifecourse vulnerabilities (being born; growing old; becoming disabled), individual misfortunes (loss of livelihood; illness or injury; death of a family member), or extensive crises (natural disasters; climate change; conflicts; pandemics).

I challenge you to find a definition of social protection that does not include the notion of it responding to shocks and vulnerabilities. From the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s “Social protection refers to policies and actions which…enable [people] to better manage risks and shocks”, through the International Monetary Fund’s “Social protection…aims at protecting households from shocks” and the European Union’s description that it “enhance[s] the capacity of all people…[to] better manage risks and shocks”, to the World Food Programme’s text that says it “consists of policies and programmes designed to protect people from shocks and stresses throughout their lives” and Australian Aid with their “prevention against income shocks and drops in well-being”: all include this essential element. Therefore, there is no need to add the tautological descriptor “shock-responsive” to the term “social protection”: it is redundant.

Yet “shock-responsive social protection” is the flavour of the month. Everybody’s doing it! Why might that be? Please allow me a bit of pre-Yuletide speculation. I suspect that there are at least three under-currents at play, all of which have been accelerated by the impact of COVID-19.

• Humanitarians leaping on the social protection bandwagon – Humanitarian actors see this as a key entry point to broader social protection, a Trojan horse to jump the so-called “nexus” between humanitarian and development assistance. Such actors have a clear mandate for emergencies, so if social protection needs an explicit shock response component, then who better than they to provide it? There is an understandable, even existential, imperative of self-preservation here. As national governments increasingly recognise the value of delivering comprehensive, inclusive protection against life-course vulnerabilities, so the resilience of the population will increase, the need for ad hoc emergency response will diminish and the importance of non-government players in its implementation will reduce.

• Academia grabbing at a new plaything – Institutes, researchers, consultants and the like are only too delighted to have a new subject to dissect, a new expertise to vaunt, a new topic for webinars, a new module to add to their training courses. The literature has been filled with learned volumes on shock-responsive social protection, building new frameworks that involve excitingly arcane concepts such as “shadow alignment”, “piggybacking” and “design tweaking”. COVID-19 has clearly shown the need for “horizontal” and “vertical” expansion, it is true. But good social protection should provide that anyway: a mother gets a higher benefit when a new child is born; more people receive unemployment benefit during depressions or lockdowns; and the coverage of a social pension will increase as a country’s population ages.

• Poverty-targeters throwing their toys out of the pram – The third strand is that previous advocates of restricted poverty-targeted “safety nets” (which they have hitherto been disingenuously calling “social protection”), have been rudely alerted to the reality that what they are offering is not social protection. COVID-19 has cruelly revealed the weakness of discretionary programmes with limited coverage, restricted systems, weak political traction and inadequate domestic financial support. But rather than admit this, such players would prefer to imply that the problem lies not with their model of social protection, but rather with the fact that it is not “shock-responsive” enough. However, the problem with poverty-targeted safety nets is not that they are not shock-responsive, but that they are not social protection.

You have probably heard me say something like this before, with your own ears, or read it with your own eyes; and you are pensively thinking in your minds that “this is Groundhog Day, déjà vu – all over again!”. And you would be absolutely bang-on right and correct. But let’s not veer waywardly off course and get distractedly preoccupied with shock-responsive social protection. Let’s rather focus on what really matters: socially protective social protection that does what it is meant to do (which includes delivering the best possible response to shocks!).

Happy Christmas!

Social registry...or regular sophistry?

The original version of this blog appeared on Development Pathways

Stephen Kidd’s recent paper sets out very clearly the problems associated with the use to which social registries are commonly put: poverty targeting of social assistance, primarily through proxy means testing. I agree with many of his misgivings. But I have an even more fundamental concern about the concept of a “social registry”: what is it intended to be a registry of?

A registry is defined as “an authoritative list of one kind of information” (Wikipedia); “an official or authoritative book of records”(OED), “a collection of all the official records relating to something” (Chambers). To be useful and truly “authoritative”, a registry must be accurate and comprehensive, ideally exhaustive. So a land registry is a record of the ownership of all plots of land; a driver and vehicle licensing registry is a list of all licensed vehicles and of all those holding a license to drive them; Lloyd’s register is (and has been since 1764!) a list of all seagoing, self-propelled merchant ships of 100 gross tonnes or greater; a domain name registry is a complete list of registrants of all allocated Internet domains; and a civil registry (as discussed in Stephen’s paper) is a comprehensive recording of all births, marriages and deaths in a country. If such registries are incomplete or outdated or inaccurate, they cease to be authoritative, so they are not registries.

On this basis, and in the context of social protection, I can understand that a beneficiary registry is a list of all beneficiaries of a social protection programme; by extension that an integrated (or unified) beneficiary registry is a combined registry of beneficiaries of multiple social protection programmes; and even – though perhaps this becomes a bit more tenuous – that a single registry might be considered a consolidated registry of all beneficiaries of all social protection programmes.

But what is a social registry? I am worried that it a classic example of a Catch-22. The idea of a Catch-22 is that it presents an irresolvable paradox created as a result of its own inherent contradictions. The original Catch-22 comes from the eponymous novel by Joseph Heller, written in 1961. The hero is a fighter pilot called Yossarian, whose tent-mate, Orr, wants to stop flying combat missions. The only way to be excused combat missions is to submit an application stating that you are insane. However, if you submit such an application, it proves that you are not insane. So, either way, you have to go on flying combat missions. A practical example of Catch-22 occurs when you lock your keys in your car: you can’t open the car door because you don’t have your keys, and you can’t get your keys because the car door is locked. Another example would be the problem faced by young development practitioners at the start of their career: that they can’t get an overseas assignment without experience; and they can’t gain experience without getting an overseas assignment. Yet another was Groucho Marx’s famous assertion: “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”.

I have read multiple exhaustive manuals and earnest proposals on the subject of social registries, written by luminaries in the field (Leite, Veras, Barca, Chirchir, etc.), on behalf of important organisations in the social protection sector (World Bank, DFID, DFAT, IPC-IG, GIZ, etc.), for a range of stakeholders and governments around the world.

They all tell you at great length what a social registry will and won’t do, what function it can and cannot serve, to what use it may or may not be put. They tie themselves in knots trying to explain whether a social registry is a database or an information system or a “targeting mechanism” (Jaidi 2020, page 5) or an approach to data integration or “a synecdoche to indicate the broader information system and all its component parts” (Barca & Chirchir 2019, page 12), or even (phew!) “a ‘brand name’ that is defined by the function as an information system that collects, organizes, stores, processes, transforms, creates and distributes information for the predefined purpose of supporting outreach, intake and registration, assessment of needs and conditions, and determination of potential eligibility for social programs” (Leite et al 2017, page 8), by which I presume they mean “it does poverty targeting”. These analyses range from the turgid to the conversant, but most end up being tergiversant because they fail to answer clearly the very simple question: a social registry is an “authoritative list” of what?

It is here we see the first glimpse of Catch-22 sophistry. Leite et al postulate that “social registries contain information on all registrants” (Leite et al 2017, page 6); and Barca’s definition is that “It is a registry/database of all people and households registered” (Barca 2017, page 12). You see the problem here? Each definition is wonderfully circular, and ultimately totally unhelpful: what such definitions are saying in essence is that “this list is an authoritative list of all the people who are on this list”! Joseph Heller would have been proud!

Even if we persist, the Catch-22 remains. Probably the best definition otherwise to emerge from the literature is that “Social registries are databases of potential beneficiaries of social assistance” (Barca 2017, page 11). The problem here is that surely everyone is a potential beneficiary of social assistance? So, to have an authoritative list of all potential beneficiaries of social assistance, we would need a national registry of all individuals, not a social registry of only a subset of those individuals. We cannot choose the subset for the social registry unless we have a national registry in the first place. Ergo, we need a national registry in order to have a social registry, so we don’t need a social registry!

I would therefore support Stephen’s conclusion that we should do away altogether with the sophistry of social registries and concentrate instead on strengthening and integrating the national registries that already exist in many countries, for example in the form of civil registries or national identity systems. If that means keeping them uncomplicated, for reasons of cost, practicality and integrity, and if it encourages a move towards social protection that is based on simple, intuitive life-course indicators (age, employment, disability status, etc.) which can more easily be kept accurate and up-to-date, then so much the better!

As Yossarian would no doubt have said (if social registries had existed in 1961): social registries are an amazing tool: they just don’t serve any useful purpose. And the purpose they don’t serve, they serve incredibly badly!

 

References

Barca, V., Integrated data and information management for social protection: Social registries and integrated beneficiary registries, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Canberra, Australia, 2017.

Chirchir, R. and Barca, V., Building an integrated and digital social protection information management system, GIZ 2019.

IPC-IG, Étude de Faisabilité pour la Mise en Place d’un Registre Intégré pour la Protection Sociale au Burundi, IPC-IG (forthcoming).

Jaidi, L., Le Registre social unique : Enjeux et défis, Policy Centre for the New South (PCNS), 2020.

Leite, P. G., George, P., George, T. Sun, C., Jones, T. and Lindert, K. A., Social registries for social assistance and beyond: A guidance note & assessment tool, Social Protection and Labor Discussion Paper 1704, World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017.