Transformative Social Protection: The Currency of Social Justice

Social protection emerged as a critical response to the ‘safety nets’ discourse of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the World Development Report 1990, for example, safety nets were very much the third prong of the World Bank’s three-pronged approach to ‘attacking poverty’ (World Bank, 1990), and were conceptualized as minimalist social assistance in countries too poor and too administratively weak to introduce comprehensive social welfare programmes. During the 1990s, as new thinking emerged in areas such as ‘rights-based approaches’, ‘sustainable livelihoods’, and the multidimensional nature of poverty and vulnerability, safety nets began to be criticized as residualist and paternalistic, and more sophisticated alternatives began to be proposed. As this agenda has evolved, the broader potential of social protection began to be recognized, and bigger claims are now being made for what social protection can and should strive to achieve.