The global politics of social protection

Since the early 2000s international development agencies have actively promoted social protection as a new global public policy. This process can be understood as flowing from related shifts within the global political economy and of development ideology, and involved international development agencies deploying strategies of governmentality to 'render technical' social protection, and cash transfers in particular, as the logical solution to myriad development problems, including within Africa. The paper places this move in historical perspective and examines the role that a particular aid agency played in shaping the transfer of cash transfers to Africa

The politics of promoting social cash transfers in Uganda

In 2015 the Government of Uganda agreed to start rolling out a social pension programme, and increasing its own contribution to it. This was driven by the highly politicized efforts of a transnational policy coalition, led by international donors and national bureaucrats. It was a struggle over ideas as well as resources, with this coalition having to overcome strong resistance from Finance Ministry tendencies until the policy coalition started 'thinking and working politically' to help align the social protection agenda with Uganda's shifting political settlement dynamics. Government's apparent commitment to social protection remains meagre; only a tiny proportion of Uganda's poor will benefit. The evidence presented here raises serious concerns regarding the developmental character of Uganda's contemporary political settlement and the costs of the 'going with the grain' motif of the new 'thinking and working politically' agenda. Aligning policy agendas with dominant interests and ideas may render interventions politically acceptable while further embedding clientelist logics and doing little to address distributional problem

Social protection in sub-Saharan Africa: Will the green shoots blossom?

This paper provides an overview of the recent extension of social protection in sub-Saharan Africa. It identifies two main ‘models’ of social protection in the region: the Southern Africa and Middle Africa models. It then assesses the contrasting policy processes behind these models and examines the major challenges they face as regards financing, institutional capacity and political support. It concludes that, for an effective institutional framework for social protection to evolve in sub-Saharan African countries, the present focus on the technical design of social protection programmes needs to be accompanied by analyses that contribute to also ‘getting the politics right’social protection, poverty, transfer programmes, sub-Saharan Africa

Thermodynamics of Quadrature Trajectories in Open Quantum Systems

We apply a large-deviation method to study the diffusive trajectories of the quadrature operators of light within a reservoir connected to dissipative quantum systems. We formulate the study of quadrature trajectories in terms of characteristic operators and show that in the long time limit the statistics of such trajectories obey a large-deviation principle. We take our motivation from homodyne detection schemes which allow the statistics of quadrature operator of the light field to be measured. We illustrate our approach with four examples of increasing complexity: a driven two-level system, a `blinking' three-level system, a pair of weakly-coupled two-level driven systems, and the micromaser. We discuss how quadrature operators can serve as alternative order parameters for the classification of dynamical phases, which is particularly useful in cases where the statistics of quantum jumps cannot distinguish between such phases. The formalism we introduce also allows us to analyse the properties of the light emitted by quantum jump trajectories which fluctuate far from the typical dynamics.Comment: 17 pages, 20 figure

Thinking about the politics of inclusive development: towards a relational approach

Moving beyond the mantra that ‘politics matters’, a range of conceptual approaches have recently emerged within international development thinking that seek to capture the specific ways in which politics shapes development. This paper critically assesses whether these approaches, including work on ‘limited access orders’ and ‘political settlements’, can underpin research into how developmental forms of state capacity and elite commitment emerge and can be sustained. It suggests that these new approaches offer powerful insights into certain elements of this puzzle, particularly through a focus on the relational basis of elite behaviour and institutional performance. However, these approaches are also subject to serious limitations, and insights from broader and (in particular) more critical forms of political theory are also required in order to investigate how the politics of development is shaped by ideas as well as incentives, popular as well as elite forms of agency, transnational as well as national factors, and in dynamic as well as more structural ways. The paper proposes an initial conceptual framework that can be operationalized and tested within a programme of primary research to be established by the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre