Over the last few years, universal social protection and the government responses to the Covid-19 crisis has generated important debates in the field of social protection.

The Universal Social Protection 2030 framework, for instance, has gained support from a variety of key social protection stakeholders, including national governments, the ILO, IMF, World Bank, and other United Nations agencies, as well as global civil society organizations.
However, certain key principles and actions remain contested in practice at both the level of global financial institutions and within the roll-out of schemes at national level – which highlighted the importance of the role of the ideas.

Much of the contestation over the desirable nature and role of social protection has its roots in implicit assumptions underpinned by neo-classical economic theory, resulting in powerful policy ideas which counteract the key principles of Universal Social Protection 2030, and ultimately undermine the extension of fair, equitable and sustainable provision of social protection to informal workers.
In order to unpack, shed light into these assumptions and help us understand these dominant ideas and the actors behind it, we invited Florian Jurgens-Grant.

Florian is leads, at WIEGO, the project “Challenging the global orthodoxies which undermine Universal Social Protection”. Before joining WIEGO, he worked on social protection for the ILO and HelpAge International.


*Our theme music is Focus from AA Aalto (Creative Commons)

References

Blog: Are Unfounded Assumptions About the Informal Economy Undermining Universal Social Protection?, by Florian Jurgens-Grant https://www.wiego.org/blog/are-unfounded-assumptions-about-informal-economy-undermining-universal-social-protection

Blog: World Bank’s Push for Individual Savings Provides Little Protection for Crisis-hit Workers, by Florian Jurgens-Grant https://www.wiego.org/blog/world-banks-push-individual-savings-provides-little-protection-crisis-hit-workers

Op-Ed: The World Bank and IMF are using flawed logic in their quest to do away with the informal sector, by Mike Rogan, Max Gallien and Vanessa van den Boogaard https://theconversation.com/the-world-bank-and-imf-are-using-flawed-logic-in-their-quest-to-do-away-with-the-informal-sector-170325