Constructing Social Rights for the Poor

Abstract

Abstract Universal social rights are the core of the welfare state. However, in the Global South, until recently only the minority of workers in formal employment and public sector employees enjoyed the right to social security. This has changed since the 2000s through the rise of non-contributory ‘social cash transfers’ (SCT) for the poor. We investigate what entitlements to SCT have been created, and how close they come to human rights standards, based on a self-constructed dataset that covers the entire Global South. In conjunction with the analysis of SCT, the chapter also makes a more general contribution to the conceptual analysis of social rights. We argue that rights-based social security has a multidimensional and systemic nature that requires complex institutional designs, and these may be elusive in many countries of the Global South. First, multidimensionality: the right to social security is multidimensional, and social security must be designed in a way to meet human rights standards in all dimensions. Universal coverage, on which policymakers focus (‘universal social protection’), is only one of these dimensions. Second, systemic design: the ensemble of all programmes in a country (the national SCT system or ‘regime’) counts when it comes to assessing the human rights quality of social security. Therefore, the challenge is to design composite systems rather than only single programmes, on which policymakers focus. Third, institutional designs must be systemic also in normative terms: to be accepted as socially just, a national SCT system needs to combine diverse normative principles, and these must be rooted in citizens’ beliefs and attitudes as well as national politics—reference to broad global ideas such as universalism, inclusiveness, or even human rights is not enough. These three requirements are demanding, and we find that most SCT designs do not meet human rights standards. At the same time, we argue that the right to social security is only broadly defined and can be realized through a variety of institutional designs, thereby creating leeway for rights-based policies.