On 10 February 2020, Professor Jimi O. Adesina, the DST/NRF SARChI Chair in Social Policy at the College of Graduate Studies, University of South Africa, gave a compelling lecture on ‘Degrading Development, Subverting Democracy: Social Assistance and Policy Merchandising in Africa’.
The lecture, which was attended by over 50 people, focused on the what Professor Adesina calls the policy merchandising of social assistance or safety net schemes in Africa.
He argued that the mechanisms for selling or enforcing donor policy preferences to African governments subverts deliberative governance in these countries – which he referred to as ‘client states’ – and thereby undermines the deepening of democracy. He also emphatically argued that in re-characterizing the essence of development as the relief of poverty, policy merchants degrade the notion of development and offer an impoverished vision of social policy.
In concluding his lecture, Professor Adesina called for a return to a wider vision of social policy and development, one in which development is understood as the structural transformation of economy and society, and requiring a transformative approach to social policy, in which the social policy architecture and policy instruments are underpinned by the norms of solidarity and equality.
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The lecture was hosted and sponsored by the ERC-funded AIDSOCPRO research project at ISS (Aiding Social Protection: the Political Economy of Externally Financing Social Policy in Developing Countries), as part of an International Workshop convened by the project on ‘Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Social Policy in Developing Countries’, held on 10-11 February 2020.
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