Welfare Regimes and Social Actors in Inter-Regional Perspective: The Americas, Africa, and Asia

April 20-21, 2006

This conference seeks to build a constructive dialogue revolving around the challenges that social policy provision faces at the beginning of the new millennium in different regions of the world, including Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Our goal is to extend knowledge about the various ways in which welfare can be enhanced by using a comparative national framework of analysis and by conceptualizing social policy as a dynamic arena. From this perspective, social policy is the outcome of actors' interactions bounded by the particular national political, economic, social, and cultural conditions in which all of these interactions are framed. The current international emphasis on the virtues of administrative decentralization and community participation in welfare programs means that states and markets now share important spaces with other actors, such as communities, social movements, multinational corporations, and secular and religious nongovernmental organizations in terms of social policy and welfare provision. Therefore, we see it as necessary to reassess the traditional roles of the state and the market in welfare provision by taking account of the potential contributions of these other actors in the provision of social welfare and the implementation of social policy.

One of our principal goals is to consolidate a research network to further theoretical and empirical developments in the area of comparative national social policy. The conference will examine specific forms of social security, antipoverty programs, and other forms of welfare provision to evaluate the effectiveness of social policy in different countries. Moreover, participants will look both at the predominant instruments of social policy in these countries and to variations in state, market, household, and community involvement in welfare provision.

The conference seeks to understand the different roles states, markets, communities, and social movements are playing in the provision, design, and implementation of social policy and welfare. Therefore, our comparative work will be framed by two major questions. The first one is whether we can identify alternative and equally effective ways in which governments can provide welfare in terms of the mix in provision between state, market, and civil society. Indeed, there is substantial variation in this respect since developed countries rely mostly on state and market protection mechanisms, while developing countries depend more on informal networks of support. The second, related question is what are the dangers and possibilities of transferring successful social policy innovations from one national or subnational context to another. Both questions aim to explore the extent to which we can learn from comparative national social policy analysis. The nations to be compared using this framework tentatively include Argentina, Brazil, Peru, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa. As points of reference, we will have two papers on social policy in the developed world, one re-examining the concept of welfare regimes, and the other taking up the specific issue of trends in U.S. social policy.