This paper summarizes new scientific evidence supporting the hypothesis that among the many factors contributing to international development, the combination of education and health stands out as a root cause on which other dimensions of development depend. Much of this recent analysis is based...

This paper explores whether South Africa’s social security policies offer consistent, synergistic and long-term positive impacts on poverty and gender, by interrogating the redistributive and transformative outcomes of three different kinds of social security instruments. The instruments...

In the last decade, social protection has risen in prominence as a strategy to address poverty and vulnerability in developing countries (Barrientos 2011). International organizations such as the United Nations and development banks have adopted strategies and policies on social protection.1 To...

Innovation in social policy in Rwanda has placed the grassroots at the forefront of policy formulation. Escobar (2011) notes that development, to be enduring and effective, ought to be based in the assessment of local realities, which are the lived experiences and past history of a people, as...

Despite the promise in the Constitution of India (1950) to establish universal elementary education within a decade, for many years this goal received neither the attention of politicians nor the resources for its achievement. This began to change in the early 1990s with several innovative...

The broader question addressed by this paper is whether social policy can still be understood as the outcome of sociopolitical forces exclusively rooted in and playing out through domestic spheres of governance. This question points to deep-rooted and difficult analytical and methodological...

This paper reports the ideational and expertise roles and positions of global social policy actors. A particular emphasis is on the role of international organizations in supporting social policy development in Indonesia. These agencies include the World Bank, ILO, WHO, UNDP, UNICEF and FAO. It...

This paper considers the complementarity of social, economic and environmental policy in South Africa, using the mining sector as a case study. The mining sector has been chosen due to its unique position as a backbone of the South African economy, its historical significance and impact on...