Social protection: from handouts to social justice
Stephen Devereux – Social protection is not only about installing safety nets and reducing poverty, it also affects the social contract between governments and citizens. The social protection discourse has been dominated by efforts to demonstrate and measure its poverty-reduction impacts, and to deflect criticisms from the right and left. But social protection is not only about installing safety nets and contributing to the millennium development goals – important though these are – it also has profound implications for governance and social relations in implementing countries. A conference hosted by the Institute of Development Studies in April addressed a perception that insufficient attention has been paid to the politics of social protection, ans its relation to social justice
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