The Politics of Varying Social Investment Strategies
Description
Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policy-makers' main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented social investment policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive variance in the development of social investment strategies.
The World Politics of Social Investment: Political Dynamics of Reform is the second of two volumes of the World Politics of Social Investment (WOPSI) project, which systematically maps and explains different welfare reform strategies in democratic countries around the world. This volume traces the development of social investment reforms across the regions of Nordic, Continental, and Southern Europe, as well as Central and Eastern Europe, North and Latin America, and North East Asia. The chapters in this volume study the impact of different structural drivers for social investment (e.g., demographic, poverty, demand for skill, or lack of an available workforce), the salience of social investment in the public debates, and the different political coalitions that led to or prevented the adoption of social investment strategies. The chapters are written by leading social policy scholars from different world regions. They all apply a joint theoretical framework (developed in the first of the two volumes) to explain the politics of social investment in a range of contexts and policy fields. Jointly with the first volume, the WOPSI project offers the first worldwide analysis of social investment reforms around the globe.
Social Policy for Institutional Change
Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru
Nora Nagels, Jane Jenson
Latin America developed experiments with the social investment perspective as the neoliberal Washington Consensus faltered. This chapter tracks the dynamics of reform in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru. Change processes in the three were similar and involved a central policy instrument of social investment, the conditional cash transfer (CCT). Protagonists of reform intended these transfers to advance human development goals via creation of human capital in childhood, while also serving as anti-poverty measures. They targeted extreme poverty while emphasizing early childhood development and well-being. Those who promoted these instruments intended to do more than reform social protection, however. CCTs and other interventions were part of ambitious projects to reform the state and its institutions. Technocrats in particular sought to use the instruments of the social investment perspective to confront entrenched policy legacies, breaking with past practices, institutional supports, and supporting actors that for years had allowed clientelism and even corruption to drive social policy.