Even though borders have always been porous to some extent, certainly ethnically and culturally but also economically and even politically, in the 2020s the influences shaping mature welfare states are supranationalized, and the economy is globalized. For those countries where welfare state development is in its early stages (emerging economies such as India and Brazil), where it has yet to gain a stable institutional and bureaucratic foundation (such as Honduras and Nigeria), where conflict has devastated social systems (El Salvador, Syria, Somalia) or where society has been subject to a significant political intermission that has halted one trajectory and left the door open to an onslaught of possibilities (such as in Central and Eastern European countries), the traditional comparative understanding of ‘how’ welfare arrangements are brought to life and subsequently sustained is challenged. In this context, hierarchical categorizations based on whether a country has more or less of something – public spending as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP), public administrative bureaucracy or social democratic cabinet seats, for example – are not only bound to emphasize difference rather than commonality, but in focusing on state-level institutions are also unable to capture the complexity of social policy actors and interests and their interaction amid and beyond the state. An approach which attempts to view social policy from a global perspective therefore requires a recognition that not all national social policies involve the state, and that not all social policies within states are state policy. It also reflects a looser understanding of the mixed economy of social policy and directs attention to a range of often unconnected programmes and projects with welfare objectives (see Deacon, 2007) as much as the overarching policy environments in which they exist (see Seelkopf and Starke, 2019).
One of the difficulties in mapping a world of social policy in this way, however, is the availability of data and, where data are available, the scope and scale of its detail. The picture provided by international comparative data is very mixed, and biased towards the richer nations. Data on ‘welfare states’ relating to levels of spending, participation in markets such as labour and housing, and indicators of outcomes, inequalities and diswelfare are accessible through international organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union statistical service (Eurostat). The databases managed by these organizations provide important sources of information for comparative research among countries in the global North, that is, Europe (Eurostat) and the OECD – high- and middle-income countries which have passed the membership tests relating to economic and political values. OECD data routinely cover the current thirty-six member countries, although not all data are available for all countries because the databases rely on national statistical office submissions (Coicaud and Zhang, 2011). Outside of the richest states, Mexico and Chile are OECD members and both Colombia and Costa Rica are progressing with membership applications. While the scope of OECD data is considerable, and the organization is a prolific publisher of working papers and annual reviews of economic and social issues, OECD data clearly also have a geographical disadvantage in attempts to present a global perspective.
To answer questions about the worldwide state of welfare, ‘global’ social policy-related data are therefore generally drawn from the key IGOs: the World Bank; the agencies of the UN; the International Labour Organization; and sometimes the IMF. This ‘official’ data can be supplemented by so-called grey literature such as survey reports from international non-governmental organizations and private organizations that undertake mainly economic research. As a result, analysis that aims to produce global comparisons is limited in two key ways. Firstly, in databases that hold data for all nation states, depth is traded for breadth. Many countries with limited resources for data collection are only able to meet the collection of headline data targets and missing data are prevalent at the more granular level and across time. More importantly, in terms of robust analysis, international organizations such as the World Bank do not operate in a political vacuum and are themselves policy makers. As scholars of global policy making have shown, data collection is itself a political process, as issues are constructed and defined and the ways in which they are subsequently measured are determined by these organizations and their results feed into the wider policy agendas of both the IGOs and their member countries. In this way the IGOs have ‘social construction power’ (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004) and are able to assert ‘cognitive authority’ (Broome and Seabrooke, 2012) in relation to the social problems faced around the world, how they should be understood and what kind of responses are required.
Reflecting on the capacity for assessing the world of social policy, therefore, it is necessary to accept that due to limitations of data, depth of knowledge, sources of evidence and breadth of coverage, in practice scholars tend to work towards a global-comparative perspective rather than achieving like for like comparison wherever analysis goes beyond headline counts of key socio-economic indicators. To some extent, due to space constraints, qualitative depth is traded for quantitative breadth in this book too, and the balance of evidence in the chapters to follow also tends towards the use of statistical data rather than evaluation of the rich and significant qualitative research that informs social policy study.
The world of academic social policy study
In a third meaning, this book draws upon the world of social policy scholarship in the sense of exploring the parameters of the discipline (or field of study, as some scholars prefer). This is not to claim that the book is comprehensive in its range of analysis, or that it offers a definitive approach to social policy as an academic subject. The aim here is not to provide an encyclopaedia of international social policy (see Fitzpatrick et al., 2010 for such a publication) or a reference work (see Castles et al., 2010 and Greve, 2013). Instead the chapter contents aim to present an international analysis of the essential concerns of social policy, an examination of the policy domains generated to address these concerns and discussion of the contemporary challenges to policy makers in the twenty-first century brought by social and economic change.
The book is thus a contribution to the expansion of study in social policy and its understanding as an international and global endeavour. As noted earlier, the shape of social policies beyond established welfare states is often subject to influences that are neither ‘national’ nor ‘state’. This is highlighted in many of the chapter discussions, but in focusing on particular themes and challenges in areas of policy it is not possible to also do justice to the depth of insight drawn from analyses in global social policy that provide a more forensic examination of the politics and practices of international actors and organizations. This can be found both in more generalized accounts of social policy at the global level (for example Deacon, 1997; Deacon and Stubbs, 2013; Kaasch and Martens, 2015) and in work which is focused on specific policy areas in a global context (for example Kaasch, 2015; Verger et al., 2018). Similarly, while the policy domain chapters, in particular, aim to consider the subject matter beyond the concerns of advanced economies, space restricts detailed integration of the full breadth of perspectives from development studies on these concerns. Such integration of traditional social policy approaches with those from social development studies is emerging, both in academic research and in the work of organizations such as the UN (for example Mkandawire, 2016). The work of James Midgley has been particularly influential in establishing these disciplinary connections (Midgley, 1995; Hall and Midgley, 2004), which are further elaborated by others (Surender and Walker, 2013; Copestake, 2015), and they extend to more recent work on world regionalism and its emergent forms of social policy making (Deacon et al., 2010).
All these literatures help to inform the overarching analytical approach of this book, which recognizes the ways in which history, politics and economics matter, not just in terms of how institutions develop, but also in how national and global historical processes affect the way that people treat each other in bounded locations and across boundaries, the variety of ways in which policy operates vertically and horizontally and the kinds of material concerns that shape collective responses. The analysis also recognizes questions about whether and how all these dimensions are comparable, and which theoretical frameworks enable us to understand them better. Thus, although the comparative dimensions are important in all of the chapter analyses presented, an open understanding of social policy underpins the book, which recognizes that comparative frameworks developed in the context of advanced welfare states in the global North can do no more than