Rediscovering the Developmentalist-Productive Roots of Welfare State Policies

Persistent calls for social investment-oriented social policy suggest that existing social policies are unsustainable and need radical rethinking. Instead, this paper argues that we need to better understand how long-standing policies have enabled society’s adaptation to socioeconomic changes and forestalled experiences of marginalization, poverty, and acute vulnerability. Inspired by the historical success of Nordic-style social policies, I reconsider the relation between development studies and welfare state studies, synthesize ideas from both, elaborate on the inclusive strand of welfare developmentalism, and introduce a conceptual framework for explaining why existing social policies may be simultaneously protective and productive. Applying social developmentalist ideas from the Global South to the traditional welfare state literature of the Global North, this paper advances a theoretical explanation for why what I term “developmental welfare state policies” defy standard economic assumptions through preventive investments that inhere in existing policy variants. It cautions against promoting separate social investment policies or characterizing policies as exclusively passive or activating.