Source: Adapted from UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CoreInstruments.aspx
(Reproduced with the permission of the United Nations.)
Intersectionality has become the watchword in the media, while academic work in this field continues to facilitate a deeper understanding of advantage and disadvantage as praxis and for the possibilities of politics and policy, human rights, equal rights and anti-discrimination (Collins, 2007; Collins and Bilge, 2020; Williams, 2021).15 ‘Race’, class and gender as citizenship categories disadvantage many groups in society, and yet age straddles all of these categories. Young people’s experiences of social problems are more intensified, young people around the world know that jobs for teenagers and young people are scarce (unacceptably high numbers of young people experience poor education, employment outcomes and poverty: UN DESA, 2019c).16
Finally, there is a lack of a critical scrutiny over the social – or conceptions of the social – in the arguments of international institutions and regional bodies, who are in the business of constructing and promoting new and alternative ideas and visions for social policy (Jolly et al, 2009; Mahon, 2010, 2015, 2019; Jenson, 2010a, 2017; Béland and Petersen, 2014; Deeming and Smyth, 2018).17 It is certainly true that there has been a discernible trend towards a common language of the ‘social’, ‘inclusion’, inclusiveness’ and ‘sustainability’ in global social policy discourses and the policy instruments of global social governance (a common conceptual grammar, it would seem), accompanied by a growing trend towards greater collaboration and cooperation amongst international institutions and policy networks and epistemic communities, and the formulation if not the fulfilment of the SDGs arguably represents an unprecedented shared common motivation and global social policy objective. Needless to say, this does not mean long-standing academic and global policy debates have now finally been settled or are diminishing. The extent to which global and regional social policy is still caught up in the ‘neoliberal’ era of market generating inequality, for example, or whether we have now entered an era after neoliberalism, is an issue that is receiving much scholarly attention (Gore, 2000, 2015; Craig and Porter, 2005; Rodrik, 2006; Clarke, 2007, also writing in Chapter 2; Kaasch and Deacon, 2008; Jenson, 2010a; Mahon, 2010, 2011, 2013; Babb, 2013; Deeming and Smyth, 2018).
What is clear, however, is that international organizations like the World Bank have certainly been shifting their policy positions, as is evident in recent political discourses. The World Bank’s reframing of global social policy is well captured in its annual flagship publication, the World Development Report (WDR). In 1996 it was claimed that virtually all solutions to social problems were to be solved by markets, the 1996 WDR strongly advocating the move away from ‘plan’ (state) to ‘market’ (World Bank, 1996). A year later, the tone had changed and the talk was now about bringing the state back in again, about ‘rethinking the state’ and the importance of ‘good government’ (World Bank, 1997). More recently, we find the demand for a more effective investment state, with the Bank championing ‘public investment’ in human capital, universal education, and vocational training and health services in order to promote social and economic wellbeing (World Bank, 2006). Past mistakes and policy shortcomings are also openly acknowledged, notably the overly aggressive market-making policies deployed in many parts of the developing world, due in no small part to the Bank’s ‘structural adjustment’ loans of the 1980s and 1990s (World Bank, 2005: 17, 93; 2007: 138).
Ideological battles continue to rage between global social policy actors, however, and also within them (Deacon, 2005; Kaasch and Deacon, 2008; Kaasch, 2013). Contestation and struggle in global policy making is well documented, policy positions continue to evolve and adapt, policy instruments and policy processes are complex, social policy remains largely the responsibility of nation states and national governments; there are also transfer and cultural effects and lived experiences and human voices that are all too often overlooked or excluded in policy-making processes (Narayan et al, 2000a, 2000b; Narayan and Petesch, 2002; Weiss et al, 2005; Evans and McBride, 2017). In the realm of ideation, then, international institutions and the experts that serve them diffuse their evidence and their ideas, and they define the social questions that influence and shape global, regional and domestic policy agendas. Their ideas often serve as policy blueprints, while their policy prescriptions on national social policy constitute powerful ideological weapons that seek to convince policy makers, interest groups and the population at large that change is necessary, or even desirable (Deacon et al, 1997; Béland and Orenstein, 2013; Stone, 2020).
It is clear we are in need of such fundamental reflections on the ‘social’ of social policy in global political discourses, and considered work interpreting social struggle and contestation, which often represents moral conflict and symbolic struggle. The claims being raised in fierce and complicated struggle usually centre on the social. Social justice demands due recognition and respect for differences as well as fair distribution, as Honneth ([1992] 1995b) and Fraser and Honneth (2003) maintain, and such demands and struggles are increasing under conditions of economic globalization and increasing inequality and stratification in society (Dean, 1996;