In its tracking of trends in human development, the UNDP (2010) identified improvements in health and education as being the key drivers of progress.1 On a practical level, the notion that health and education are essential propellants for human development has underpinned the emergence of social provision throughout history, driving household strategies, the actions of social collectives and public intervention in state development. In theory and research, the significance of health and education is at the core of generalized theories of ‘need’ (for example Doyal and Gough, 1991) and in expanded debates on basic/human needs and capabilities (for example Sen, 1985), as well as measures of need satisfaction developed to improve and expand on the HDI (see Klugman et al., 2011, for a discussion of these). Education and health represent the core of the earliest welfare measures in the longest-established welfare states (i.e. those whose welfare arrangements have become determined by formal national politics and institutionalized bureaucratic structures). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, public sanitation and compulsory schooling, alongside health insurance to meet needs related to illness and incapacity, laid the foundations of modern Western welfare states. In countries such as Brazil, South Korea and South Africa, publicly funded provision for health and education is similarly significant. These two needs represent an obvious intersection between conditions (‘health’ and ‘understanding’) that are essential for human flourishing, and potential (‘capacity’ and ‘ability’) that are essential to economic growth (and where national interests are concerned, competitiveness). What this intersection highlights, is the way in which social progress is coupled with both economic development and the role of the state.
There is an additional element of need that is directly associated with the interests of states: that of security. Security as a condition is usually conceptualized as concerning the absence of harm or the threat of harm. In broad terms, security incorporates physical, psychological and social dimensions of harm and extends beyond the personal security of individuals to the collective interests in security that pertain to states and, at their most universal, global security. For social policy, the significance of civil rights in guarantees of ‘security’ are essential (although they still remain only partially realized from a global perspective), but guarantees of security of livelihood are far more political. In essence, this difference has its roots in philosophical beliefs around the nature of human rights and freedoms, and while freedom from harm has gradually been recognized formally as something that sovereigns have the duty to protect over many centuries, the freedom to participate fully in society is much more contested. As industrialization – and, in the advanced economies, deindustrialization – takes place, pre-existing systems of householding and exchange are supplanted or reshaped, and this socio-economic change generates new needs, new demands for meeting those needs and the expectation, if not the reality of new responses to those demands.
The emergence of citizenship in the global North has rendered states important guarantors of both the rights and the freedoms associated with autonomy, health and security, the last of which Doyal and Gough (1991) argue is a prerequisite for the first two. However, even in countries that are regarded as well-established democracies in the global North, these rights and freedoms are fragile, and currently in both Europe and North America they are threatened by retrograde political forces (Szikra, 2014; Buzogány and Varga, 2018). Looking back less than a century, it is clear that even in established democracies, states also have the capacity to oppress people, limit freedoms and rights and control populations. Historically social policy has been an important tool by which social harm has been inflicted as well as a means to achieve social progress (King, 1999). There are instances where social policy has been used to deliberately disadvantage certain groups, but it is also the case that even where social policy is intended to guarantee rights, it operates in a world structured by many forms of social division, and while policies may seek to redistribute resources and opportunities, there are always risks that policy will effect no change, displace advantage or aggravate existing inequalities.
The many international declarations which now exist to commit states to guaranteeing rights in the realms of health, labour standards, gender equality and the treatment of citizens, refugees and children for example, act as both the political acceptance of need, and the basis for legitimate claims on collective resources. Nevertheless, while the world’s welfare is better served by having them than not, being a signatory of an international declaration is a relatively soft option for national governments, which weigh the political costs of meeting obligations against other competing interests. States can therefore be unreliable actors, irrelevant in practice and, at worst, destructive powers that produce greater diswelfare than welfare.
Given that states have a relatively short history as purveyors of welfare progressivity, and one that is also, globally, relatively limited in terms of geographical expanse and depth of intervention, it is not surprising that the provision of welfare is largely undertaken by non-state actors, even in countries with the longest-established formal institutions. The mixed economy of welfare characterizes all provision in all countries; what differs is the balance of activity, responsibility and obligation attributed to informal, state and market actors.
There is a substantial body of literature which explores ‘the family’ within the welfare mix, how families interact with wider informal means of welfare support and, related to this, the gendered operation of these activities in households, communities and the third sector. In the context of advanced economies, these studies necessarily account for the interaction between citizens and states, while in a development context the state is far less present and therefore the role of informal actors in care and welfare support is bound up with a focus on wider ‘household strategies’. Non-governmental welfare actors, agencies and organizations also have far greater involvement in modelling the welfare arrangements in the global South than the North, and the private sector too has a different shape depending on the extent to which states have the capacity to engage in regulatory and enabling policy making. It is well established that the boundaries between the state/market and third-sector actors are often blurred in practice, and in the contemporary global policy context these distinctions are becoming less and less clear. The CEOs of corporate giants such as Microsoft and Amazon, for example, are able to channel billions of dollars to charitable ventures which directly influence the nature of welfare provision and the ‘informal’ formation of policy goals in areas of health and security.
Discussion in this chapter has considered some of the universal themes which bind human commonalities in relation to welfare needs. It is clear that, as Titmuss (1974, p. 22) proposed when social policy study was in its academic infancy, social needs and problems are common, but they are approached differently in different times and places. The remaining chapters in this book seek to explore these commonalities and differences and to offer explanations for differentiation drawing on theoretical insight from a range of disciplines.
The chapters to follow are divided into two parts. The first part sets out three key frameworks of analysis used to understand and explain the shape (that is the design, development and outcomes) of social policy within the global context. These chapters draw on social scientific theories, concepts and themes developed across sociology, political science, political economy and economics that apply to the concerns of social policy and welfare states. Chapter 2 focuses specifically on the key historical problematic of social policy: inequality. This is because it is the existence and impact of inequalities and the political approach to these that shape the variety of policy responses to welfare needs. Chapter 3 considers ways of assessing difference and similarity in welfare arrangements in order to understand better their heritage, principles and survival. The final chapter in this section explores the mechanics of policy making in order to explain how things have been, and can be, done in the world of policy design and development.
The concerns of these chapters are also reflected