Editorial

This standard issue of global social policy (GSP) brings together five articles and the GSP Digest that all speak to important scholarly and political debates in various fields of GSP.

By looking at current developments in the world of global social governance, the GSP Digest (compiled by John Berten and his team) provides another piece of evidence that social policies and environmental policies are increasingly interlinked and understood in how they relate to each other (across many different fields of GSP). We must now refer to eco-social policy concepts if we want to achieve a better understanding of the nature of global inequalities and global poverty. Among other things, Charles Fonchingong Che illustrates that in his article in an innovative way by focussing on indigenous knowledge and actors that—through their own knowledge systems and institutions—address complex social problems and turn social justice into practice in their very own ways. Water, land, and local resources to address poverty, food security, and coping with climate change are dealt with by these communities reframing social justice.

Tara Patricia Cookson, Nina Ebner, Yardain Amron, and Kritika Kukreja provide us with a review of evidence on gender responsive or transformative social protection systems. The thematic trends in the reviewed literature were perspective and conceptual framings; cross-cutting institutional features that enable system functioning; and benefits offered by the system and system-wide performance goals related to equity and inclusion. What the authors identify as gaps in the literature can be connected to what is reported in the GSP Digest: Recent developments in the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women show that the right to be free of poverty cannot be realized without ending the discrimination of women, and the relevance of adopting a new feminist rights-based approach to address inequalities, and to support socioeconomic and environmental justice. Nevertheless, the GSP Digest also reports about little achievements regarding SDG5, and that—according to an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and United Nations (UN) Women report—there is no improvement regarding the adoption of policies promoting gender equality caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The role of growth and its dependence on government transfer is discussed in Sebastian Sirén’s article addressing the question of whether or not government transfers moderate the effect of economic growth on absolute and relative child poverty. Focussing on emerging economies, the article not only reports important findings on the effect of growth on child poverty and the role of government transfer systems, as well as on direct and indirect effects of transfers on poverty reduction, but also brings social exclusion and relative poverty into the debate about social development in emerging economies. It argues for the important role of government transfer schemes for the eradication of child poverty.

With a view on Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries specifically, and with a comparative perspective on the Nordic states, Leszek Morawski and Mahmut Zeki Akarsu look at changing disability benefits in the context of the European social model. They show that the tax and benefit systems in the CEE countries are more complicated and emphasize means-tested benefits and targeted instruments. However, the changes within national systems of disability benefits are related to global policy models and may lead to a more streamlined and generalized approach across countries.

Speaking to one of the key academic discourses in GSP, Lauri Heimo addresses the question of traveling policy models looking at the Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) model in Chile. The interest of this article lies in asking how the CCT model could be embraced in Chile by ideologically opposing coalitions. It addresses the question of how it could have had such an appeal to different policy makers. It is argued that there are ‘points of confluence’ in the argumentation of MPs that allow the model to survive changing political leadership. This leads to the argument that the concept of discursive malleability is very fruitful in examining the qualities of concrete policy models.

I can recommend any of these articles and the GSP Digest to GSP readers and hope you find many new insights when reading!