Celebrating 25 years of Global Social Policy , this article reflects on the evolution of global social policy as a field of research and practice. We trace the field’s origins in debates on globalisation and the influence of international organisations on national welfare systems, highlighting how successive crises and policy agendas have shaped global social policy scholarship and practice. We review key policy themes such as pensions, health, social protection, cash transfers, migration, gender and universalism, while also identifying emerging concerns around climate change, eco-social policy, digitalisation and artificial intelligence. The article further assesses GSP ’s contribution to theoretical and conceptual debates, including policy diffusion, ideational approaches, and multi-scalar analyses of social policy change. We conclude by reflecting on persistent challenges, notably the need to strengthen Global South perspectives and decolonise the field, while arguing that global social policy remains essential for addressing increasingly transnational risks and inequalities in an era of geopolitical uncertainty and multilateral retrenchment.
Platform work has attracted global policy attention as part of efforts to extend decent work. Such work is critiqued for fostering insecurity by obscuring employer-employee relationships, but in development contexts it also offers accessible employment, especially for excluded groups. This article examines South African platform workers' experiences of wages, security, and responsibilities and considers implications for reimagining the social contract. Drawing on 19 interviews with location- and web-based workers, the study highlights the paradox of platform work: it reproduces informality yet engages formal businesses and offers inclusion. Findings reveal how workers view themselves as independent contractors, report generally positive pay, but express concern about risk responsibilities shared between platforms and the state. Their perspectives challenge narrow notions of formalisation as the sole route to decent work. The study prompts thinking about alternative social policy approaches to decent work, especially in Global South contexts with high unemployment and informal employment.
Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Nigeria, this article aims to offer an explanation for why private provision and out-of-pocket payments remain the dominant features of Nigeria’s healthcare system. It does so by illustrating how the interaction between healthcare system performance and ‘material cultures’ (understood as shared practices and meanings associated with healthcare) shapes and reproduces healthcare consumption patterns. Using Fine’s Systems of Provision approach, the study shows that persistent underinvestment in public healthcare has produced a highly privatised and unequal system. In this context, pragmatic healthcare consumption practices persist, including normalised private payments, routine reliance on private providers and the de-prioritisation of public healthcare amid competing livelihood pressures. These practices reflect constrained choice rather than preference, yet they reinforce dependence on private healthcare. The findings suggest that effective health policymaking must address structural conditions as well as socially embedded practices to advance equity in health outcomes.
This article examines the EU’s discursive governance of the green-digital-social nexus through Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to be?”’ (WPR) approach. By scrutinizing key European Commission documents, the study interrogates how “problems” are constituted within these intersecting agendas, identifies strategic silences, and traces the construction of subject positions. Findings suggest that the ecological modernization discourse elides deep-seated socio-environmental conflicts by framing technology as the sole driver of sustainable growth, while the digital transition narrative constitutes systemic crises as technical hurdles remediable through the promise of constant innovation. These tensions extend to the EU’s social agenda, revealing a discrepancy between formal inclusion commitments and a narrative of empowerment that effectively privatizes social risk. Ultimately, a fundamental misalignment emerges: the pursuit of market dominance sits in growing tension with the EU’s normative identity, creating a dual threat to its social agenda at home and moral authority abroad. The analysis establishes a framework for reconsidering EU governance structures, prioritizing the re-centring of social equity.
This article examines how gender mainstreaming as global social policy is translated within Vietnam's post-socialist education bureaucracy. Drawing on interviews and documents from a 2010-2011 IIEP-UNESCO study with ministry and university leaders, reread alongside 2020s Vietnam-focused scholarship, it shows how equality becomes administratively visible without becoming decision-making power. Findings identify three mechanisms that reproduce inequality despite parity commitments: moral economies of carework, gendered professionalism and respectability, and temporal bias in retirement, training, and promotion rules. The article also theorizes gender mainstreaming as an epistemic infrastructure-focal points, templates, trainings, reporting mechanisms, and state and quasi-state actors-that standardizes evidence while narrowing which remedies appear institutionally "realistic." Vietnam thus highlights a broader contradiction: recognition expands as redistribution stalls. The article concludes with implications for reforms that redistribute time, transparency, and authority.
Existing literature highlights significant gaps in the access to maternity protection for informal women workers across the Global South. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has identified seven components of adequate maternity protection necessary for safeguarding child well-being, maternal health and income security. However, informal women workers are systematically excluded from both employment-linked protections due to the absence of a recognized employer-employee relationship as well as state-led benefits, which are often inadequately designed and covered. In response to these challenges, several non-governmental organizations (NGO) in India have developed worksite-based approaches that integrate maternity protection components for informal workers, using the infrastructural space of childcare services as an entry point. This article examines the pathways through which these NGOs create access to maternity protection - including direct delivery methods, facilitating access and negotiations and bargaining with employers and the state. These pathways reveal that engagement with employers is essential for worksite-based informal women workers, despite its boundaries, and also highlights that the state has an irreplaceable role in fulfilling its regulatory duties and designing and implementing schemes that address the specific needs and conditions of informal workers.
Across many countries, the design of social protection for informal workers - particularly in response to shocks - is often shaped by assumptions about their limited agency. This article examines how the COVID-19 pandemic and the introduction of South Africa's Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant influenced the agency of informal traders. The SRD was the country's first cash transfer made available to able-bodied, working-age adults. Drawing on structuration theory, the article explores how informal traders responded to crisis within a constrained structural environment. The findings challenge prevailing narratives that depict informal workers as passive recipients or deviant economic actors. Instead, traders demonstrated a strong agentic identity and a desire to be recognised as legitimate workers. The article argues that shock-responsive social protection can support informal workers' own efforts to sustain livelihoods, if it offers stable, appropriately designed benefits linked to broader labour protections. These insights have broader relevance for inclusive global social protection policy.
This Forum brings together a set of papers examining how social protection systems are adapting to transformations in labour markets driven by technological innovation and the expansion of non-standard forms of work. Despite progress, major coverage gaps persist, particularly among informal and self-employed workers. The contributions in this Forum explore emerging policy responses to these challenges, with a particular focus on financing. McClanahan analyses comparative international experience in extending social security to self-employed workers, identifying affordability as a critical determinant of success. Cetr & aacute;ngolo and Sirisena draw on a global survey of social security contribution subsidies to show that such mechanisms are widely used policy tools to improve access. Castel-Branco, Cook, Ewinyu and Madonko examine how globalisation, neoliberalism and digitalisation have constrained domestic revenue mobilisation, while assessing the potential of innovative tax instruments to finance social protection. Pellerano and Juergens-Grant analyse how automation, financialization and declining labour shares are eroding the contributory foundations of social insurance and explore for financing models that extend social security obligations beyond employment and towards to capital. Together, these contributions demonstrate that there is significant awareness among policy makers of the need to adapt social security systems to evolving labour markets, and that social security systems already show a remarkable degree of adaptation.
Cash benefit programs have increasingly emphasized conditionality in recent decades. Linking benefits to certain behavioral requirements has become a prominent feature of reforms of unemployment benefits (UBs) and related out-of-work benefits in high-income Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, but it has also been a defining feature of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in many emerging economies. This is notably the case in Latin America, where CCTs have accounted for growing shares of cash support programs targeted to households facing severe material deprivation and systemic exclusion. Existing research of conditionality patterns and trends has considered the two regions separately, limiting our understanding of key differences but also commonalities. We take a first step to resolve this by comparing core elements of benefit conditionality rules within and across the OECD and Latin America. We analyze conditionality provisions across both regions using a common measurement framework and discussing implications for the study of conditional social policy from a global perspective.
Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) are a prominent social policy in the Global South. Indonesia's Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH), introduced in 2007. The paper reconceptualizes policy transfer by treating adoption and adaptation as mutually constitutive mechanisms. We specify two mechanism bundles. Using a qualitative case study with 15 semi-structured interviews and document analysis of government and international reports, we show that adoption without adaptation would have lacked local fit, while adaptation without adoption would have lacked legitimacy and financial support. Their interaction produced a recognizably global yet distinctly Indonesian PKH that weathered administrative fragmentation and infrastructural constraints. Our main contribution is to specify four testable interaction mechanisms linking adoption and adaptation: (1) targeting and the DTKS working with facilitators, (2) conditionalities working with Family Development Sessions and phased sanctions, (3) bank transfers working with staged digitalization, and (4) a maternal and child focus working with coverage expansion; we show that their joint operation accounts for PKH's survival and concrete design. Theoretically, this advances a tractable framework of hybridization as a transfer outcome, moving beyond coercion versus adaptation dichotomies and yielding observable implications for program survival and design. Future work should test these mechanisms comparatively and quantify the effects of Family Development Sessions and digitalization on compliance and inclusion.
This article examines the impact of armed conflicts on the expansion of old-age pension systems in the Global South. Using new longitudinal data on pension coverage and focusing on 82 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America between 1900 and 2014, the study combines descriptive analyses and logit regressions to assess the timing and likelihood of pension expansion during war and post-war periods. The analysis reveals that the probability of pension expansion increases during and particularly after war. Interestingly, the association is especially robust for civil wars. Post-war pension expansions are typically directed towards dependent workers, while self-employed groups benefit less. The results suggest that governments often use pension reforms as instruments of stabilisation and legitimacy in war-torn societies. The study contributes to comparative welfare research by highlighting the warfare-welfare nexus beyond the Western world and across different types of conflict.
Over the last decade, there has been growing global pressure to build digitised social protection systems as a means of enhancing access to welfare. This article explores one such case: 'e-Shram', a digital registration platform introduced in India in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Emerging as a direct consequence of the hardships faced by informal workers during the pandemic, the article examines e-Shram in this context. It observes that while e-Shram is increasingly portrayed as the first step towards a comprehensive formalisation programme, it fails to address the main gaps and issues highlighted by the pandemic; it provides some registration but maintains substantial deficiencies in service provision. This case study underscores why formalisation should be understood as a multidimensional process, and consequently, why it is important to separate it from particular instances of 'narrow formalisation' - commonly formalisations of governance, but not necessarily of work. This analysis carries broader implications for countries pursuing formalisation through digital platforms, emphasising the need for policies that align state objectives with genuine improvements in social and economic protections for informal workers.
Domestic workers, a labour sector overwhelmingly constituted by women from racially and caste-minoritized groups, sustain middle- and upper-class households yet remain among the least protected workers. Comparing Brazil and India, this article explains why legal recognition alone fails to transform their labour conditions. Brazil has ratified ILO Convention 189 and extended near-parity labour rights; India's protections remain fragmented. Despite these differences, we show that in both settings relationships within private households reproduce embodied hierarchies that mark domestic tasks as 'dirty work' and position workers' bodies as naturally available and surveyable. Drawing on an analysis of legal and policy texts and a critical review of ethnographic and historical studies, we argue that domestic workers' rights gains are filtered through the household's normative order, that is an intimate, status-based regime that routinely displaces contract - the 'law of household workplace'. We develop a three-part critique of the limits of rights: a translation gap (household opacity and 'like-family' tropes undercut enforcement), a scalar mismatch (statutes govern dyads while valuation regimes are societal), and a value lock-in (dirty-work coding depresses workers' wages and voice regardless of formal parity). Rights matter for recognition, mobilization, and baseline protections, but they do not, on their own, revalue domestic work. We conclude by outlining a programme that couples rights with institutional 'non-reformist reforms' that revalue domestic work, resite care beyond private live-in dependency, and revoice workers through institutions capable of reaching inside or bypassing the household.
