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

Reconceptualizing the Politics of Pockets of Effectiveness: A Power Domains Approach

This previous chapter argued that existing studies of PoEs have struggled to specify the forms of politics that shape how PoEs emerge and perform PoEs over time. To help address this problem, this chapter outlines the new conceptual and methodological approach developed for this project, which constitutes the first systematic investigation of PoEs across different types of political context. In conceptual terms, the authors argue that an alignment of political settlements analysis with critical theories of state power and African politics can help reveal how PoEs are shaped by underlying relations of power and politics. However, PoEs also need to be located within the particular ‘policy domain’ that they operate within, and which defines the political role they play, the policy challenges they face, and the organizational characteristics they require to perform effectively. The chapter identifies how this integrated ‘power domains’ approach can generate researchable propositions and how these were investigated through a mixture of within- and across-case analysis. It summarizes the results of the expert surveys that undertaken in Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia, which were chosen to represent different types of political settlement. These surveys identified state agencies that operated within the domain of economic governance, namely ministries of finance, central banks, and revenue authorities. The chapter discusses how in-depth mixed methods investigations of these fifteen organizational case-studies were undertaken, tracking performance from the early 1990s through to the late 2010s, and locating each within shifting political settlement dynamics and the changing transnational political economy of development

Political Settlements and Development

Few concepts have captured the imagination of the conflict and development communities in recent years as powerfully as the idea of a ‘political settlement’. At its most ambitious, ‘political settlements analysis’ (PSA) promises to explain why conflicts occur and states collapse, the conditions for their successful rehabilitation, different developmental pathways from peace, and how to better fit development policy to country context. Yet despite the meteoric rise of the term and its tremendous promise, not all is well in the world of PSA. Rival definitions of the concept abound; there are disagreements about its scope and the way it should be used; a growing schism between conflict specialists and economists; basic concepts are ambiguous; and little progress has been made on measurement. This book consequently has three main aims. The first is to argue for a revised definition of a political settlement, capable of unifying its diverse strands. The second is to put the concept on a more solid theoretical and scientific footing, providing a method for measuring and categorizing political settlements, using both qualitative case studies and a large-n statistical analysis to illustrate its potential. And the third is to examine the implications of the findings for mainstream social science analysis and for policymakers