Protection + prevention + promotion = policy paralysis

 Protection + prevention + promotion = policy paralysis[1]

For the past two decades, the most commonly used conceptual framework for social protection has been the one proposed by Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler[2]. This builds from a proposal made by Guhan in 1994[3], that social protection comprises different measures that serve a variety of functions within the broader reduction of poverty:

·       Promotional measures which aim to improve real incomes and capabilities;

·       Preventive measures which directly seek to avert deprivation in specific ways; and

·       Protective measures that are even more specific in their objective of guaranteeing relief from deprivation.

Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler[4] introduced a fourth function, that of transformation through social justice. So far so good (except for the fact that it would have been much neater if the fourth dimension had also begun with “pro-” or “pre-”!). But they go on to state that “The full range of social protection interventions can be categorised under protective, preventive, promotive and transformative measures.” And they proceed to attempt such categorization:

·       Protective measures include social assistance for the chronically poor and typically include targeted resource transfers – disability benefits, single-parent allowances and social pensions for the elderly poor. Other protective measures can be classified as social services for the poor and groups needing special care, including orphanages and reception centres for abandoned children, feeding camps and the provision of services for refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), and the abolition of health and education charges.

·       Preventive measures deal directly with poverty alleviation. They include social insurance for economically vulnerable groups: both formalised systems of pensions, health insurance, maternity benefits and unemployment benefits, and informal mechanisms, such as savings clubs and funeral societies.

·       Promotive measures aim to enhance real incomes and capabilities, which is achieved through a range of livelihood-enhancing programmes targeted at households and individuals, such as microfinance and school feeding.

·       Transformative measures seek to address concerns of social equity and exclusion, such as collective action for workers’ rights, or upholding human rights for minority ethnic groups. Transformative interventions include changes to the regulatory framework to protect socially vulnerable groups as well as sensitisation campaigns.

The 2004 paper was ground-breaking, particularly in highlighting the inadequacy of the preceding “Social Risk Management” framework and the precariously threadbare nature of “safety nets”. It put the “social” back in “social protection”. The Transformative Social Protection (TSP) framework, as it came to be known, rapidly became the must-have structure that underpinned multiple national social protection policies and strategies: e.g. Malawi (2009), Sierra Leone (2009), Mauritania (2011), Kenya (2012), Chad (2013), Ethiopia (2014), Liberia (2014), Zambia (2014), the Gambia (2015) and Zimbabwe (2016) spring to mind.

Yet this paper argues that, from a policy-setting perspective, the TSP framework has inherent flaws; and it has also become less relevant over the twenty years that have elapsed since its publication.

First, the inherent flaws. If it were possible to map different social protection instruments, or broad types of instruments, to the four functions outlined above, that might be helpful. If “social assistance”, say, always served only a protective function, “social insurance” was just preventive, and “social justice” alone delivered transformation, then it would be clear which set of instruments was suited to deliver each required outcome. But the reality is far more complex.

Even in the original paper the authors recognize that such categorization is often unsatisfactory and ambiguous. It is dotted with provisos to the effect that: “some measures could simultaneously ‘promote’ incomes as well as ‘prevent’ deprivation”; “most preventive mechanisms could be argued to have promotive effects”; “some social protection instruments…can be both promotive and transformative”; “some preventive mechanisms can be transformative, and vice versa”; “many interventions that can be considered as social protection measures have more than one objective, and are therefore discussed as both protective and promotive…or as both promotive and transformative”; and so on. This ambiguity is one reason that the proposed TSP framework is less helpful operationally than it is conceptually.

Another is that it is more intuitive to academics than to beneficiaries. Ultimately the function of social protection depends on the situation and inclination of its recipients, rather than on scholarly theory. For some beneficiaries of a cash transfer, the function may be purely protective, to buy basic food for the household; for others it may be preventive, to participate in a funeral club or savings and loans group; for others it may be promotive, even transformative, to invest in a productive livelihood that may lead to independence and dignity. Similarly, school meals might be seen as protective (basic consumption), preventive (avoiding loss of concentration), promotive (improving nutrition and learning), or transformative (keeping girls in school to avoid pregnancy and early marriage). In each case the transfer is the same, but the function varies depending on the status and characteristics of the recipient. As a consequence, it is likely that one would receive an understandably bewildered response if one asked a beneficiary whether the transfer s/he has just received is protective, preventive, promotive or transformative.

So the problem faced by countries that have adopted the TSP framework for their policy is that it doesn’t help them with the selection of instruments with which to implement that policy. Nor does it help them to explain their social protection policy to their citizens, who have no real concept of whether they are in need of protection, prevention, promotion, transformation or some combination of these. Nor does it facilitate the monitoring of success: there are no practical metrics to measure the number of individuals who have been protected, prevented, promoted or transformed.

Second, compounding these intrinsic challenges, there have been substantial changes in the understanding of social protection since 2004. This paper argues that – in addition to the inherent conceptual weaknesses of TSP for policy purposes – there have been three fundamental shifts, which do not invalidate the framework, but which make it even less useful operationally in setting national social protection policy:

1)      Social protection is now seen less as a way of alleviating current poverty, and more as a mechanism to invest in human development by building resilience to a range of vulnerabilities.

2)      Those vulnerabilities tend to reflect the risks faced by an individual rather than a household, and social protection is increasingly seen as being founded on the rights of individuals.

3)      An individual faces changing vulnerabilities from birth to death, so the objectives of social protection also need to change through the lifecycle[5].

Let us consider each of these in turn, in the context of the TSP framework.

Social protection is not just about alleviating current poverty. The 2004 paper is explicit that “The key objective of social protection is to reduce the vulnerability of the poor”. And it circumscribes “three categories of people in need of social protection: 1) the chronically poor 2) the economically vulnerable 3) the socially marginalised”. The danger here is the implication that social protection is for “them”, not for “us”. Yet we all need social protection: we have all been babies, we have all wanted to benefit from an education, we all face the risk of unemployment, we may all acquire a disability, we hope we will all grow old.

Social protection should be based on the individual. The paper is also ambivalent about whether social protection is for the household or the individual – indeed social protection for households is referenced more frequently than social protection for individuals. It recognises that “it is important that social protection is delivered on the basis of claims being made by citizens with entitlements”, but it doesn’t resolve how social protection for households will ever be justiciable. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) should be the foundation for social protection, and it is framed around the rights of individuals.

Social protection should address lifecycle vulnerabilities. The focus on “reducing the vulnerability of the poor” obfuscates the important distinction between the very different vulnerabilities faced by individuals at different stages of the lifecycle, which in turn determine which objectives social protection should contribute to achieving. Social protection should link with other policy interventions to ensure that pregnant women and infants are well-nourished, that older children attend school, that adolescents gain necessary skills, that adults are protected from unemployment, exploitation and violence and that older persons and persons with disabilities participate fully and in dignity. In essence, social protection is about protecting “everyone” (as per the UDHR), not just the “poor and vulnerable”, because we are all vulnerable at different stages of our life.

This paper argues that, at least from a practical policy perspective, a lifecycle framework has become more useful than the TSP framework for framing national policy. The UDHR itself is structured explicitly on a lifecycle approach: its Article 25 stipulates “the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood”, and specifies that “motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance”. This is the basis for social security in high-income countries, but has often been ignored when implementing social protection in international development contexts. The lifecycle is a more intuitive basis because every citizen knows where s/he fits within it, and policymakers know clearly what they are trying to achieve, and therefore which types of intervention are most appropriate, at each particular lifecycle stage. It allows a much clearer focus on the very different vulnerabilities faced through the lifecycle, some examples of which are shown in the figure below.

Source: Author

The lifecycle framework facilitates the definition of primary and secondary objectives for each lifecycle stage, helps to identify coverage gaps once all existing interventions have been mapped, and permits the identification of key linkages, thereby making the scope of strategy development more manageable by focusing collaboration on just the key partners for that particular lifecycle group. It also makes it much easier to monitor and measure impacts, because implementers know what they are aiming to achieve, and can quantify improvements (reduction in maternal deaths or stunted infants, improved school attendance rates, employment rates, pension coverage, etc.).

The lifecycle approach also allows clearer differentiation within the so-called “cross-cutting themes” of social protection, such as disability, gender and nutrition[6]. Key objectives here, too, evolve through the lifecycle. So, for example, in the case of disability, the primary concerns for young children are around early detection, for older children around inclusive, quality education, for youth around appropriate skills, for adults around access to employment and compensation for the additional costs of equal participation. Or in the case of gender, the emphasis shifts through the lifecycle from equity at birth to equality of opportunity at school, to child protection, to avoidance of early marriage and pregnancy, to prevention of gender-based violence and sexual harassment, to compensation in older age for contributions to the care economy.

There are promising signs that this message is being heard and observed. We are witnessing a welcome shift in the framing of social protection policy.

Lesotho was one of the early explicit adopters of a lifecycle approach in its National Social Protection Strategy 2014/15-2018/19[7]:

Bangladesh’s 2015 National Social Security Strategy has at its core “programme consolidation along life cycle risks, with programmes for children, working age people – including specific focus on youth and vulnerable women – the elderly, and persons with disabilities”. It envisages a “transformation towards a lifecycle system by consolidating progress in a small number of priority schemes”, as depicted below.

Zambia adopted the following for its 2018 Integrated Framework for Basic Social Protection Programmes:

It has incorporated this vision into its new 2023 National Social Protection Policy, which “therefore, identifies five levels in the life cycle approach as: maternity, childhood, youth, adulthood and old age”.

Botswana’s 2021 National Social Protection Framework (and subsequent Implementation Plan) is similarly built around lifecycle pillars.

 Cambodia’s new 2023 National Social Protection Policy Framework has adopted a lifecycle structure:

Sierra Leone has shifted from a classic TSP framework in its 2011 Social Protection Strategy (note the somewhat arbitrary distribution of instruments in the purple ellipse, suggesting, for example, that “unconditional cash transfers” can only be protective), as shown in the figure below…

…to a lifecycle structure in its 2022 Social Protection Strategy:

 Similarly, Malawi’s 2009 National Social Support Policy was recognisably derived from TSP, with four key components: Provision of Welfare Support, Protection of Assets, Promotion through Productivity Enhancement, and Policy Linkages and Mainstreaming. Its 2023 draft National Social Protection Policy, by contrast, states that: “Another inclusion in the Policy is the life cycle approach to social protection, reflecting that individuals face different risks and vulnerabilities at different stages in life”. Its new draft 2024 National Social Protection Strategy is explicitly structured around the lifecycle.

These are all positive developments which demonstrate that – from a policy-setting perspective at least – it is time to move on from the TSP framework that has dominated the last two decades.

So my parting message to all you social protection practitioners out there is to get on your bikes and peddle the lifecycle wherever you can! Good luck!

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[1] A version of this paper was first portrayed as an “arts-based” presentation at the Centre for Social Protection International Conference on “Reimagining social protection in a time of global uncertainty” (Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, 12-14 September 2023). The full version was then published on the Development Pathways website as a "Pathways Perspective" (Issue No 34, April 2024).

[2] Devereux, Stephen, and Rachel Sabates-Wheeler. 2004. Transformative Social Protection. IDS Working Paper 232. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.

[3] Guhan, S. 1994. Social Security Options for Developing Countries, International Labour Review, 133 (1): 35-53.

[4] I would like to declare a serious conflict of interest. I have known Stephen and Rachel for even longer than their conceptual framework has been the gold standard for social protectionistas. I am fortunate to count them both as friends (at least until now!), and I have the most enormous respect for all the incisive contributions they have made to the theory and practice of social protection over the years. I just don’t think that their conceptual framework is the optimal one for operationalising social protection policy.

[5] I tend to prefer the term “life-course” because – unless you are Buddhist – life is not a “cycle”: it gets more and more alarmingly linear the older one gets!

[6] Otherwise, these tend to be “mainstreamed”, which is development-speak for “ignored”.

[7] Interestingly, in the revised second version of this Strategy, covering the period 2021 to 2031, Lesotho retained the lifecycle structure, but attempted to overlay it with the TSP framework. Whether this simplifies or complicates policy implementation remains to be seen!

Bretton Woods Universalism

I greatly enjoyed reading Daisy Sibun’s excellent paper ("Can a leopard change its spots?") contrasting ILO’s Social Protection Floor with the World Bank’s Social Protection Flaw: namely the latter’s belief that “progressive universalism” is possible.

Nonetheless, I have one small semantic niggle. Her paper uses “universalism” and “universality” interchangeably. Yet the two terms mean, or should mean, slightly different things. Universalism is a theological doctrine that there are certain truths that are universal and that transcend the boundaries of religions, nations or cultures. So, for example, Christian universalism is the doctrine that all sinful and alienated human souls—because of divine love and mercy—will ultimately be reconciled to God. Hindu universalism conceives the whole world as a single family that deifies the one truth, and therefore accepts all forms of beliefs and dismisses labels of distinct religions which would imply a division of identity. And Unitarian universalism draws on a wide range of beliefs and practices from all major world religions and a variety of different theological sources.

Universality, on the other hand, implies the global application of genuinely universal constructs, such as human rights or international law. As its basis, the Preamble of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world… [emphasis added]”. So it is this term, universality, that should properly be used in the context of social protection, deriving as it does from the recognition, in the same Universal Declaration, that “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security”.

Which makes me wonder why the World Bank uses “universalism” instead? Perhaps it is a Freudian slip? If so, it might explain a lot. Over the course of many decades working in social protection, I have met and worked with a large number of World Bank experts. Almost without exception, they have been intelligent, committed, enlightened and charming individuals. Yet, collectively, they continue to propagate a distinctive, and distinctly unedifying, blueprint of social protection – see, for example, my earlier Book Review on their “Revisiting Targeting”. Perhaps the explanation for this dichotomy is that they are all in thrall to a belief that there is a single universal truth that underpins social protection, a fundamental reality from which there can be no deviation: Bretton Woods Universalism.

This fundamental truth that transcends national, religious and cultural contexts is one that relies on a holy trinity of conditionality, poverty-targeting and proxy means testing, the three classic features that exist coequally, coeternally and consubstantially in the Bank’s vision of social protection. Like the Holy Trinity, these represent a homoousion (“the same in essence”, from the Greek ὁμός, or homós, meaning "same" and οὐσία, or ousía, meaning "being" or "essence") that is promulgated globally and unswervingly by members of the creed. And because it is a fundamental truth, no contrary evidence can shake its foundations:

• The fact that conditionality can very rarely be shown to increase impact, and usually then only in highly nuanced circumstances; while at the same time being complex to apply, costly to implement and morally bankrupt to enforce.
• The reality that effective poverty-targeting is impossible (as Daisy’s paper explains), while at the same time it generates substantial problems of damaging social cohesion, creating perverse incentives, encouraging dishonesty, inciting patronage and stigmatizing beneficiaries.
• The clear evidence that proxy means testing is seriously flawed, both in terms of its design and its implementation, giving rise to levels of inaccuracy that are unacceptable in any rights-based society.

Really, now is the time that the World Bank needs to make the tectonic shift from blind faith in the illusion of “progressive universalism” to a genuine endorsement of its stated commitment to universality in access to social protection.

Book Review: “Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance: A New Look at Old Dilemmas”

The World Bank has just published its latest thriller, “Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance: A New Look at Old Dilemmas”. The tone is set by the name. Using a pivotal colon as in “Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus”, “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “Chapterhouse: Dune”, the new book continues this tradition of futuristic science fiction, set in a dystopian fantasy world. And the use of the gerund in its short form, “The Revisiting” (as it is already becoming known to its cult followers), deliberately echoes the psychological horror genre of “The Shining”, “The Awakening”, “The Haunting” and “The Reckoning”. Weighing in as it does at 578 pages, the Bank’s new mythopoeia falls, in terms of its length at least, somewhere between JRR Tolkein’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” and JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. Fortunately, like both of these precursor tomes, it is a riveting page-turner, with a myriad of mythical creatures, magical illusions and richly-imagined villains leaping out of each page.

Without wishing to spoil the plot for avid World Bank neophytes, the story revolves around an elite cadre of superior beings, who are plucked out of society, transported to the Capitol (echoes here of the “Hunger Games”), and subjected to some kind of collective brainwashing (the exact nature of which is never clearly explained). They are then trained in an arcane science to become “Technical Experts: Selecting Targets Of Social Transfers & Emergency Response” (TESTOSTER). Based on this acronym, the members of this privileged cabal are thenceforth known by the moniker of the “TESTOSTER-Ones”.

The Testoster-Ones are given extraordinary powers of life and death over their fellow beings: they literally choose which of the lesser humans survive and which do not. Over the years, ordinary folk become their playthings and the guinea-pigs of their cruel experimentation. After explaining the rituals of their induction, the rest of the book gradually reveals the evolution of the increasingly savage and sophisticated methods that the Testoster-Ones apply in their arbitrary selection of who should live and who should die.

Early approaches were relatively straightforward. The Testoster-Ones would simply select by geographical region: inhabitants of one area would be humoured with token support, whilst others would be abandoned to their fate. Later variants of this were to select on the basis of ethnicity, political allegiance or age: all members of a particular tribe, all supporters of a particular party, or all people within a certain demographic could be allocated, or deprived of, a particular favour.

Another early favourite was to encourage self-selection through slavery: all those who were prepared to work for the Testoster-Ones – breaking stones, digging pits, building temples, constructing roads and so on – were given the minimum wherewithal to eke out a living; all others fell by the wayside. Later refinements to this approach encouraged greater participation of women in such excessively physical tasks, or reduced the pittance paid to well below the bare minimum required for survival. The slavery approach, euphemistically referred to as “public works”, was also sometimes combined with another early favourite: that of a public lottery where the winners survived and the losers were consigned to the dogs. Or it was replaced by a particularly pitiless version of self-selection where potential beneficiaries were only offered food that was unacceptable to the vast majority of them, such as crushed insects or diced worms.

Later selection procedures drew their inspiration from the post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, where, for the 25^th Hunger Games, each district had to choose its own “tributes” (where a “tribute” is a nominee selected to fight to the death). Such “community-based” targeting offered the convenient illusion that it was not the Testoster-Ones making the selection, but rather mere mortals sending one another to their death. Problems encountered with this approach included the fact that the mortals often preferred not to make a selection at all, and that – if they did – they very often selected the weakest and most marginalised to be sacrificed.

The Testoster-Ones’ art of destiny-determination reached its apogee of refinement with the so-called “PMT” (mysteriously only ever referred to by its sinister initials – but perhaps denoting “Perfected Mechanism of the Testoster-Ones”?). Described in the book as “a more complex and opaque…inference-based assessment”, this generates a seemingly arbitrary selection of individuals, ostensibly based on predicted weights from a statistical model generated by computer, thereby bestowing a convincing veneer of scientific authenticity. The exact formulas used for the targeting are never revealed, but the reader is provided with a number of tantalising glimpses of the kind of variables that underpin their obscure equations: sex features prominently, whether the person owns an odd or even number of chickens, which element their roof is made of, the colour of their hair, the cooking fuel they use, their energy source… From this witches’ cauldron (euphemistically referred to in the book as a “social registry”) emerge the secret lists on which the Testoster-Ones’ subsequent selection of survivors is based.

The book concludes with a tantalising glimpse of the future, and offers hints that future random decision-making will be handed over to “big data” and “machine learning algorithms”, perhaps signifying an end to the Testoster-One era as we know it. As the book intimates: “Changes in technology and the availability of new data always excite hope that these will make targeting more accurate or easier”. Exciting stuff, indeed!

Although a compelling story, “Revisiting” suffers from one key short-coming. While the Testoster-Ones are roundly portrayed in all their magnificent finery and disdainful arrogance, the rest of the human race (their subjects, if you like) are depicted rather one-dimensionally. They do not come across as having individual characters or any degree of agency. They accept their destiny with a kind of resigned fatalism. Nor does the book go into much detail about the impact of the Testoster-Ones’ choices on these poor “huddled masses”: the fact that the system encourages them to deceive, imposes stigma on them, deprives them of dignity, creates perverse incentives, corrodes public morality, undermines social cohesion and sets one person against another to survive.

By the end, the reader rather wishes that the mass of mortals would come together, would rise up in popular protest against the Testoster-Ones, would rebel against their obvious abuses or would claim some basic human rights even in their capacity as subservient beings. One longs for the emergence of a Catniss, a Frodo or a Hermione to lead an insurrection against the callous cruelty of the cabal. There are occasional hints of this, but it doesn’t happen, even though it would have perhaps allowed a more balanced representation of the dichotomies between good and evil, rational and irrational, power and impotence. But, then again, perhaps this is a subject-matter that will be explored more fully in the next thrilling sequel: “The Revisiting Revisited”. We can only hope so!

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.

Basic Income: a BIG disappointment

The original version of this blog appeared on Development Pathways

Anyone who has come across any of my earlier blogs probably knows that I have a marginal preference for inclusive life-course approaches to social protection! I have always assumed, therefore, that when eventually the conditions were right for universal basic income, I would be an avid supporter of basic income grants (BIG) and the like. But that time now seems to be approaching, and I find that I am not a BIG fan!

CoViD-19 has sparked a mass of interest in “basic income”. South Africa’s Minister of Social Development has advocated it; Spain has promised it on a permanent basis; UNDP has argued for it globally (at least on a temporary basis); South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore have used universal cash transfers as a response to the pandemic, with Japan apparently also planning to do so; Tuvalu is paying a monthly grant to every one of its citizens for the duration of CoViD. The social protection world is abuzz that basic income’s time has finally come, some 500 years after Thomas More wrote, in his “Utopia”, that “it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody’s under the frightful necessity of becoming, first a thief, and then a corpse.”

But the more you look at basic income, the less attractive it seems, at least from a social protection perspective.

Let’s begin with what we mean by “basic income”. At least that’s straightforward: you just give money to everyone. But actually it turns out not to be so straightforward. The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), probably the foremost global forum, proposes that “A Basic Income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement”.

The first thing to note about this definition is that “basic income” is synonymous with universal basic income: the “universal” in “universal basic income” is tautologous, since “basic income” is already paid to “all”. Wikipedia confirms this: “Basic income, also called universal basic income (UBI), citizen's income, citizen's basic income, basic income guarantee, basic living stipend, guaranteed annual income, or universal demogrant…”. But it creates an inconsistency. If we think of an alternate type of social security, say a “child benefit” or a “social pension”, then a “universal child benefit” would be definitionally distinct from a “child benefit”, and a “universal social pension” from a “social pension”, by virtue of necessarily being paid to all members of that category rather than just some. By contrast, in theory, there is an absolute requirement that basic income must be paid to all individuals of all ages in a particular society.

BIEN expands its definition to separate out five key characteristics of basic income:

·       Periodic: it is paid at regular intervals (for example every month), not as a one-off grant.

·       Cash payment: it is paid in an appropriate medium of exchange, allowing those who receive it to decide what they spend it on. It is not, therefore, paid either in kind (such as food or services) or in vouchers dedicated to a specific use.

·       Individual: it is paid on an individual basis – and not, for instance, to households.

·       Universal: it is paid to all, without means test.

·       Unconditional: it is paid without a requirement to work or to demonstrate willingness-to-work.

The World Bank’s comprehensive “Exploring Universal Basic Income: a Guide to Navigating Concepts, Evidence and Practices” (Gentilini et al, 2020) begins by observing that: “The debate on a UBI is often chaotic and without precise definitional contours”. It goes on to characterise basic income along three different axes of social protection: that it is cash, rather than in-kind; that it is universal, rather than targeted, and that it is unconditional. These three criteria map well to three of BIEN’s five. The Bank is not explicit in its classification that payments should be to individuals rather than households, nor that they should be made at regular intervals. But in its subsequent categorisation of different programmes, it does add an additional consideration: that basic income should be state-led.

However, when you reflect more on these characteristics through a social protection lens, it becomes clear that they are still incomplete:

·       Frequency – from a social protection perspective, the frequency of payments matters. It is not enough to say (as BIEN does in its definition) that payment must be “at regular intervals (for example every month)”. Paying once every decade is “regular”…but useless for providing social support. So, we need to be clear: the frequency of transfers should be monthly, or at worst every two months.

·       Flat-rate – the concept of paying something to everyone is clear, intuitive and appealing (at least to a universalist), but the definitions above are coy about whether this should be at a flat rate to everyone. But surely, logically it should? Otherwise, a basic income becomes rather less simple and basic. Because if you then need to differentiate to give different amounts to young children, older persons, those with disabilities, those who are employed and so on, then you are not really solving the problems of existing life-course social security. So, rationally, basic income should be paid at a flat rate.

·       Coverage – The definition suggests that basic income should be “paid to all”. But “all” of what? BIEN and the World Bank are silent on this. But Wikipedia boldly ventures that it “can be implemented nationally, regionally, or locally”, with nothing to define the scale of what might be meant by “local”. But, surely, we need to be clear that we are not talking about providing income support just to a single village (as a number of basic income pilot programmes do): it has to be national in coverage, either to every citizen or to every resident.

·       Duration – Especially from a social protection perspective, income transfers have negligible value unless they are delivered consistently over a sustained period, so that individuals can be confident of making plans around them. So basic income, in common with all forms of social security, must be multi-annual.

So, we find that we now have ten necessary characteristics of basic income:

·       regular payments

·       at monthly intervals

·       in cash

·       universally

·       to individuals

·       at a flat rate

·       with full national coverage

·       unconditionally

·       by the State

·       on a pluri-annual basis.

Based on these characteristics, there has only been one operational example of true basic income anywhere in the world: the Subsidy Reform Programme in Iran, from 2010 onwards.

And this definition makes a mockery of many of the current claims of providing basic income. Looking at programmes in the recent past, the Basic Income Experiment in Ontario, Canada, was limited to a particular age group (18-64), was household-based, was means tested, had a variable rate, and didn’t provide cash (it was essentially a negative income tax); Finland’s KELA-run programme targeted only unemployed adults, and only a small sample of those; and Barcelona’s B-MINCOME is highly selective (even within its limited geographical neighbourhood) among only those already having a file with social services, and it is means-tested, household-based, age-restricted (25-60), variable-rate and conditional (at least in some of its treatment arms)! Finally, the many renowned basic income pilots (such as SEWA in India, GiveDirectly in Kenya, BIG Coalition in Namibia) are by definition not national in coverage (or anywhere near it – most cover less than 2000 individuals) and are not state-led.

Post-CoViD enthusiasm shows similar incongruity. South Africa’s Minister rowed back fairly swiftly to clarify that she was only talking about basic income for the 18 to 59 year age group (or perhaps as a priority just “the most vulnerable groups of our population … the youth between 18 and 24 and the elderly between 50 and 59”). Spain’s “basic income” proposals are household-based and tightly poverty-targeted. UNDP’s is explicitly “temporary”. South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan are only initiating one-off (or two-off, in Singapore’s case) payments: furthermore, South Korea’s is household-based, Hong Kong’s excludes under-18s, and Singapore’s is only for over-21s. Even Tuvalu is proposing payments to its 11,500 citizens only for the duration of CoViD-19. So, no imminent prospect of true basic income.

Perhaps basic income has a useful role in distributing dividends generated by national resources and assets, such as the ongoing Alaska Permanent Fund, the short-lived Human Development Fund in Mongolia, Macau’s Wealth Partaking Scheme, the casino profits of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nations, or the one-off Scheme $6,000 in Hong Kong. But surely social protection requires a more nuanced approach? This is because good social protection (by which I mean inclusive rights-based life-course social protection!) should reflect the vulnerabilities faced at each stage of the life-course and should be designed in such a way as to help achieve the government’s objectives for that stage. A flat-rate transfer to everyone is far too blunt an instrument.

In most countries, for example, existing old age pensions are significantly higher than existing child benefits, reflecting their different objectives: a pension to allow people to live in dignity, to meet the increased costs of healthcare and to contribute to supporting others in the household; a child benefit to meet the objectives of good nutrition (for mother and child), early childhood development and access to education. Support to persons with disabilities often entails a higher transfer still, to compensate the additional costs involved in participating fully in society (which is not taken into account by a basic income). And transfers to people of working age should be designed primarily to support their engagement (or re-engagement) with the labour market, to recompense them for unemployment or unpaid work, for example in the care economy, or when they are sick. These different sets of objectives at different life-course stages require different programmes, often with different funding mechanisms, for example through a mix of contributory and tax-financed schemes.

What governments have an opportunity to do now, in response to CoViD-19, is not to introduce basic income across the board, but to fill the gaps that have been revealed in their existing programmes to move towards universal life-course coverage. Child benefits, old age pensions and disability allowances should be made universal, and integrated systems should be put in place to provide income support to all those of working age who need it (which in many countries has emerged as the most glaring lacuna). This could conceivably be in the form of a universal flat-rate transfer to all in that age group (though this would still not count as basic income by the strict definition). But it could also be achieved through judicious integration of contributory and tax-financed approaches to ensure that everybody receives such support when they need it.

That would indeed be a BIG step in the right direction, and – for social protection purposes at least  – a much better option than More’s utopian vision!