Pushing for Policy Innovation

In the early 2000s, there was low elite commitment to social protection in Tanzania. Yet, in 2012, the government officially launched a countrywide social safety net programme and a year later announced the introduction of an old-age pension. This chapter explores what explains the change in elite commitment to social protection between the early 2000s and 2015. The analysis takes an ideational approach, and it is shown how the promotion of social protection has been driven by international and domestic institutions with the resources, expertise, and authority to present policy solutions fitting the elite’s general ideas about Tanzania’s development challenges and possible responses thereto. Thus, ideas play an important role in policy development but they may also be vulnerable to political interests that can challenge the long-term sustainability of promoted policies.

Building a Conservative Welfare State in Botswana

Of the African countries that initiated social assistance programmes prior to the 2000s, Botswana stands out in that its policy-making was not the result of settler or immigrant populations. Reforms in Botswana stemmed instead from the imperatives of drought relief in an agrarian society, fuelled by the ruling party’s concern first to establish the authority and legitimacy of the post-colonial state and then to ensure re-election in the face of electoral competition from opposition parties. State-building was made possible also by extraordinary economic growth. The result was a system of social assistance that covered a large part of the population but was also distinctively conservative in terms of the value of benefits, a preference for in-kind over cash transfers, and the prioritization of workfare. Botswana’s path to social assistance prefigured the path followed by many other African countries in the 2000s.

Policy Diffusion, Domestic Politics, and Social Assistance in Lesotho, 1998–2012

Lesotho is a small African country that has introduced two national cash transfer programmes, the universal old-age pension, and the child grant programme. This study indicates that the initiation of the social pension was not the result of cross-national policy diffusion in line with the ‘South African model’, but rather facilitated by a transition to political stability and a dominant government led by then prime minister, Mosisili. The child grant programme for orphaned and vulnerable children was initially driven by international organizations, yet the Lesotho government quickly took ownership of the initiative. Unlike in many other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, these reforms were not resisted by domestic political elites. Both programmes were rooted in socioeconomic changes such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and a political shift after an extended period of political competition, with the (possibly short-lived) restoration of democratic competition in the early 2000s, opening up for programmatic reform.

The Politics of Promoting Social Cash Transfers in Zambia

This chapter examines the rise of social cash transfers in Zambia, going beyond the focus on elections and institutions within mainstream accounts of how social protection is likely to emerge in Africa to demonstrate that there are two alternative drivers: shifting dynamics within Zambia’s political settlement and the promotional efforts of a transnational policy coalition. The extensive efforts of this policy coalition helped get social cash transfers onto the policy agenda, but they only gained political traction when the balance of power within Zambia’s ruling coalition shifted and key actors perceived there to be a crisis regarding the distributional strategies deployed to maintain the stability and legitimacy of the political settlement. Social protection has yet to displace existing interests, ideas, and rent-allocation practices; however, cash transfers are gaining localized support. What matters now is the way in which such transfers become integrated within Zambia’s distributional regime.

The Politics of Promoting Social Protection in Uganda

The success of efforts to promote social protection in Uganda since the early 2000s has varied considerably, with cash transfers progressing much further than social health insurance. Using original primary research and a process-tracing methodology, we show that external actors were able to form a coherent policy coalition around cast transfers and promote them in ways that became aligned with the dominant ideas and incentives of powerful actors within Uganda’s political settlement. In contrast, proponents of health insurance struggled to mobilize a coalition capable of overcoming actors with greater holding power, particularly the President and private sector actors. Whereas ‘just giving money to the poor’ fits with Uganda’s increasingly personalized-populist political settlement, the hard work of building a credible health system, and formally requiring citizens to contribute to their own healthcare, requires a commitment and capacity to promoting a new social contract that seems to be lacking in Uganda.

Distributional Concerns, the ‘Developmental State’, and the Agrarian Origins of Social Assistance in Ethiopia

Existing research tends to focus on the proximate drivers of social assistance expansion in developing countries—including donor advocacy and electoral incentives. This work risks neglecting deeper continuities with longstanding mechanisms by which states distribute resources and the broader political economic context. This chapter examines Ethiopia, home to one of the largest social assistance programmes in Africa, highlighting the deep roots of social assistance within state distributional strategies, particularly regarding land access and food insecurity. Analysis shows how changing political interests and ideology have resulted in the evolution from an ‘agrarian’ distributional regime—which sought to provide welfare through land access—to a ‘productivist-pauperist’ model as part of Ethiopia’s ‘developmental state’ strategy. This model targets social assistance narrowly to specific groups, yet seeks to ensure that support is put to productive use. The chapter draws on seventy key informant interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, and donor representatives conducted from 2009–18.

Understanding Elite Commitment to Social Protection

This chapter examines the political economy of the adoption and evolution of Rwanda’s Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme (VUP), concluding that strong government commitment to the VUP was shaped by the characteristics of the political settlement that was established around 2000. For the Rwandan government, the VUP has never been just a social transfer programme, but a key part of the development strategy that aims to promote social stability and the legitimacy of the ruling coalition through rapid socioeconomic development. In particular, the VUP originates in an emerging distributional crisis in the mid-2000s in which rapid economic growth alongside low rates of poverty reduction threatened the government narrative of inclusive development. While donor social protection ideas have also been influential, these are purposely adapted by government with a view to meeting its developmental and political goals.

Social Assistance, Electoral Competition, and Political Branding in Malawi

Whilst partisan competition has fuelled the expansion of social assistance across much of Africa, social assistance has generally been a valence issue. In Malawi, unusually, the competing presidential candidates and their parties in the 2014 election staked out starkly contrasting positions on social assistance as part of their attempted supra-regional and supra-ethnic political ‘branding’. The incumbent president, Joyce Banda, championed social assistance for women, children, and the poor, whilst her rivals denounced ‘handouts’ and emphasized instead economic growth and support for peasant farmers. Banda’s defeat suggests that there are limits to the efficacy of social assistance for political branding. Nonetheless, the fact that she used this brand at all suggests that social assistance has grown in political significance as an expression of pro-poor priorities.

Who Should Get What, How, and Why?

The proliferation of social cash transfers (SCTs) across much of sub-Saharan Africa since the mid-2000s resulted from interactions between international organizations and national governments. In this chapter we employ Tania Li’s framework on how development ideas travel to understand the political economic context for the rising enthusiasm for transfers amongst international organizations, the ideational contestation over these, and the strategies of governmentality deployed to ‘render technical’ problems of poverty and vulnerability. We show how international organizations developed diverse approaches to transfers in terms of who should get what, how, and why. Through a close analysis of the UK’s Department for International Development, we show that this process of policy transfer was often approached in explicitly political terms. An ideological convergence between transnational actors and African elites around a particularly liberal perspective on poverty helps explain the relatively parsimonious forms that SCTs have taken in sub-Saharan Africa to date.

The Negotiated Politics of Social Protection in East and Southern Africa

Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The existing literature on social assistance, or social protection more broadly, offers little in explanation of this variation. Drawing on the literature on political settlements and democratic politics, we argue that variation results from the political contestation and negotiation between political elites, voters, bureaucrats, and transnational actors. The forms of politics that matter at each of these inter-related sites of negotiation include struggles over ideas as well as material interests and reflect the ways in which social assistance is being used to advance certain political as well as developmental projects in sub-Saharan Africa.