|
|
AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Show panel list
Welfare State-Building in Southern Africa
| Panel |
10. Theorizing African State Trajectories
|
| Paper ID | 654 |
| Author(s) |
Seekings, Jeremy
|
| Paper |
No paper submitted
|
| Abstract | Little attention has been paid to the welfare state component of state-building in Africa, largely because most colonial and post-colonial states in Africa have prioritized ‘development’ – whether agricultural or industrial – over ‘welfare’ (or have prioritized neither of these, as Bevan argues in her analysis of ‘insecurity regimes’). But many late colonial states had some concern with ‘social welfare’ policies (as Lewis, Cooper, Fourchard and Burton have shown), and some states (notably South Africa and Mauritius) built substantial welfare states in the early and mid-twentieth century. Namibia and Botswana also embarked on welfare state-building in the late twentieth century. This paper examines these moves towards welfare state-building, tracing both the broad historical trend and the contemporary politics of reform, and asks how welfare state-building demands revisions in the analysis of the ‘African state’. The paper will comprise three major sections:
• An analysis of the politics of ‘development’ and ‘welfare’ in the 1940s and early 1950s, examining how most late colonial states explicitly rejected the models of welfare state-building that were applied in the imperial powers themselves (Britain and France) and mirrored, with modifications, in South Africa, and developed an alternative emphasis on ‘development’ and the use of ‘social welfare officers’ as part of a strategy to police urban society and help restructure rural society; it will examine the impact of the ILO model of social insurance, and the reasons why Mauritius deviated from the general pattern
• An analysis of the growth of social assistance programmes in Namibia, Mauritius and South Africa in the late twentieth century, in the context of social and economic changes that were widespread across Africa
• An analysis of the character of the South African welfare state at the beginning of the twenty-first century, paying particular attention to the dynamics of further reform, and possible implications for welfare state-building in other parts of Africa
If time and space permits, I shall include also some analysis of welfare state-building in North Africa, especially in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt.
|
|