Global Social Policy

With the proliferation of supranational trade agreements and the deregulation of national labour markets, calls for representative international organizations and international mechanisms aimed at improving the conditions of workers are growing. One outcome of these developments is that international organizations, like the International Labour Organization (ILO), are rethinking their roles under globalization. This article examines the ILO's new platform of action known as Decent Work, exploring whether it represents a challenge to the hegemonic order characterizing the organization historically. It finds that Decent Work is emblematic of the evolving hegemonic order in the ILO yet struggles over the platform reveal counter-hegemonic forces at its margins. Decent Work thus represents an effort at mediating tensions inside the ILO between global capital, member states, trade unions and NGOs and its two leading initiatives reflect this role: the Social Declaration and the commitm...

This short contribution to a Forum discussion on climate change in the journal Global Social Policy outlines how and why the climate solution requires turning away from fossil fuel dependence and how the main official approach to the climate crisis worldwide -- building a single, liquid global carbon market worth trillions of dollars -- is likely to make climate change worse, not only exacerbating its social impacts but also generating negative impacts of its own.

This article draws a conceptual map of the mechanisms, dynamics and consequences of transnational social protection (TSP) for low-skilled labour migrants and their family members. While migrants' social needs have also a transnational side, the responses of welfare institutions, if available at all, are typically territorialised. This brings to the fore the prospects for TSP of those affected by migration – most notably, here, migrants' dear ones in home societies. TSP can be analysed as a field of evolving interactions between a formal, thinner dimension and a more substantive, informal one. The latter builds on the circulation of remittances and transnational care practices, primarily within migrants' kinship networks. Informal TSP is then discussed as a privileged terrain to assess, first, the promises and pitfalls of migration as social protection and, second, the social consequences of emigration on welfare arrangements in home communities. An analytical framework is eventually advanced, with a view to systematising research on migration-driven transnational needs, on the ways of addressing them, on the dilemmas of informal social protection across state borders.

Progress of the World's Women is UN Women's flagship report. It tracks progress on gender equality around the world, with each edition focusing on a particular theme. The 2015-2016 report is about women's economic and social rights, with chapters on paid and unpaid work; social policies; and macroeconomic policies. It also develops a conceptual framework for understanding substantive equality, looking at how it can be applied to policymaking.

This chapter discusses the historical development of ‘rights’ and how these transformed into ideas about ‘universal human rights’. It shows how the concept of rights developed historically from notions of legal through to political, social/economic and cultural rights and from individual to group rights. It describes how thinking about rights has developed from identifying rights solely with clans, tribes, communities, ethnic groups and then nation states, to linking them to all humanity - including minorities - through concepts of universal human rights. It recognises the contribution of philosophical ideas about humanity, equality, democracy and social justice, as well as the impact of human agency on the development of a range of rights, and argues that such developments do not take place in a vacuum (Donnelly, 2013: 75-92). Social, economic, ideological, cultural and geo-political influences engender our power to change society and ensure that human rights are a contested site. Rights are contested in their conceptualisation and in the development of oversight mechanisms. They are also contested in their implementation, enforceability and realisability on the ground (Freeman, 2017). In essence, it is argued that humans make human rights. As Karl Marx (1851-52) wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx, 1851: 103).

In the present policy environment in Finland, labour migration is portrayed as a solution for the sustenance of the ageing welfare state. Research shows, however, that foreign professional qualifications are generally less valued than those of native-born citizens, particularly for racialized migrants coming from outside the ‘west’. Such devaluation of human capital is prevalent in nursing, where the more menial basic care has turned into a ‘migrant’s job’, whereas clinical work is left for those considered as ‘natives’. In this chapter, we examine how the Filipino registered nurses’ professional skills are systematically devalued, as they are recruited to Finnish eldercare as enablers of the future welfare state. We demonstrate how Filipino nurses are produced as highly skilled export commodities in the Philippines, only to be deskilled upon their entry to the Finnish labour markets as embedded in the EU. In conclusion, we outline the policy measures that would make the transnational recruitment processes more ethical.

This article examines global social policy formation in the area of skilled migration, with a focus on the Gulf Arab region. Across the globe, migration governance presents challenges to multiple levels of authority; its complexity crosses many scales and involves a multitude of actors with diverse interests. Despite this jurisdictional complexity, migration remains one of the most staunchly defended realms of sovereign policy control. Building on global social policy literature, this article examines how 'domestic' labour migration policies reflect the entanglement of multiple states' and agencies' interests. Such entanglements result in what we characterize as a 'multiplex system', where skilled-migration policies are formed within, and shaped by, globalized policy spaces. To illustrate, we examine policies that shape the nursing labour market in Oman during a period when the state aims to transition from dependence on an expatriate to an increasingly natio...

Page 1. Patients beyond borders: A study of medical tourists in four countries ... Abstract This exploratory study assesses the experiences of medical travelers seeking out of country health care in four destination countries: India, China, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. ...

The remarkable dynamism of government welfare provision in Africa and in Latin America and the Caribbean is embedded in a broader context. As a legacy of the colonial past, social protection for old age and health care was generally the privilege of the rather small group of formal sector workers. French colonialism emphasized an active role of the state in social protection and had a quite uniform focus on the nuclear family and especially family allowances. In British colonies, social protection programs were more heterogeneous. Former Spanish colonies used the colonial montepíos as the starting points for their pension systems. In addition to this, there are global influences. For social protection in old age, a growing focus on social pensions replaced recently the two longstanding competing global models of the ILO and the World Bank. In contrast, there is no clear model in the domain of health care. However, in recent years, a certain consensus emerged regarding the question of user fees.

In 1993, the Shanghai government introduced a minimum income security program, causing contagious imitative behaviors in scores of local pilot projects in China. Invigorated by such local policy experiments, the central government in 1999 set up a Minimum Living Standard Scheme covering all urban regions and, from 2007, rural areas. In the process of designing this scheme, the Chinese epistemic social policy community translated foreign ideas into the national context to facilitate the social assistance reform through policy experimentation and reinterpretation of external ideas. This article argues that Chinese actors in the field of social assistance have synthesized disparate ideas from two world regions – the United States and Western Europe – and from Chinese traditions to forge a Chinese model of social assistance. It thus complements the existing literature on diffusion, which tends to assume that countries import or adapt a ready-made policy model from another country or fro...

The term ‘network’ has become prominent in many areas of public policy, including international development and global social policy. In these subject areas it is generally used to refer to the mechanisms by which those levels of governance that extend beyond the state can transmit influence and ideas, exercising power and shaping economic, political and social change. This article explores the role played by the Latin American solidarity network represented by ALBA in Bolivia’s National Development Plan, particularly in the areas of health and education. The article argues that ALBA offers a new perspective from which to understand this process of international solidarity, its effects in Bolivia’s development and the creation of a new post-neoliberal paradigm in human development.

In May 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) set up the Commission on Social Determinants of Health to explore social and struc-tural factors that lead to ill health and influence the ability of people to lead healthy lives or gain access to necessary health care. The concept of ...

The increasing liberalization of trade, which has been accelerating apace as we move into the new millennium, has come at considerable cost to the enforcement of global social policy. Despite strenuous efforts to build social clauses into trade agreements, the governments of ...

In May 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) set up the Commission on Social Determinants of Health to explore social and struc-tural factors that lead to ill health and influence the ability of people to lead healthy lives or gain access to necessary health care. The concept of ...

Maintaining adequate pension levels throughout the entire retirement phase is a persistent challenge in old-age protection. Most public pension schemes in OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries provide for some form of indexation for pensions in payment. These mechanisms have been object of frequent revisions for different purposes, in particular across Europe. This article explores the social and financial policy objectives linked to standard indexation parameters in public pension schemes, and offers a rough taxonomy of additional factors used to modify traditional indexation arrangements, with a special focus on changing rules and practices adopted in the European Union (EU) area after the 2008 international economic and financial crisis. Analysis suggests that early responses were mainly driven by cost containment ideas, whereas more recently, a subtle shift towards adequacy-oriented interventions can be noticed. The article argues that restricti...

ABSTRACT This article argues that the Economic Adjustment Programmes (EAP) that came with loans to peripheral Eurozone members Greece, Ireland, and Portugal are very similar to the loans with conditionality, also known as Structural Adjustment Programs, that international financial institutions have used as a policy tool in the 1980s and 1990s. It defines structural adjustment programs and then shows how Eurozone rules plus the Economic Adjustment Programmes resemble them. It then canvasses the literature evaluating structural adjustment in the developing world in order to formulate expectations for its performance in Europe. The null hypotheses from the large literature on structural adjustment policies suggest that the EAPs will: be badly implemented; be neutral or bad for growth; be bad for equity and the poor; have unpredictable policy consequences; and will allow incumbent elites to preserve their positions. Preliminary evidence from the three peripheral countries confirms that the same problems are afflicting EAPs.