Read more
Social protection serves as an important development tool, helping to alleviate deprivation, reduce social risks, raise household income and develop human capital. This book brings together an interdisciplinary team of international experts to analyse social protection systems and welfare regimes across contemporary Latin America.
The book starts with a section tracking the expansion of social assistance and social insurance in Latin America through the state-led development era, the neoliberal era and the pink-tide. The second section explores the role played by local and external actors modelling social policy in the region. The third and final section addresses a variety of contemporary debates and challenges around social protection and welfare in the region, such as gender roles and the empowerment of CCT beneficiaries, and welfare provision for rural outsiders. The book touches on key topics such as conditional cash transfer programmes, trade union inclusionary strategies, transnational social policy, state-led versus market-led welfare provision, explanatory factors in the emerging dualism of social protection institutions, social citizenship rights as a consequence of changing social policy architecture and different poverty reduction strategies.
This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians working on social protection in Latin America, or interested in welfare systems in the global south.
List of contents
Part I Social Policy and Welfare regimes in Contemporary Latin America 1. Comparative Social Policy in Contemporary Latin America: Concepts, Theories and a Research Agenda 2. Welfare Regimes in Latin America: Thirty Years of Social Reforms and Conflicting Paradigms 3. Social Protection in Latin America: One Region, Two Systems 4.The Reforms of Welfare Regimes at the Turn of the Century in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay Part II Politics of Social Protection in Latin America: Stakeholders and Institutions 5. Making Foreign: Legal Identity, Social Policy and the Contours of Belonging in the Contemporary Dominican Republic 6. Trade Unions Strategies and the Expansion of Pension Systems: The Cases of Argentina and Uruguay 7. Domestication of Global Policy Norms: Problematisation of the Conditional Cash Transfer Narrative 8. Social Dimensions of the EU–Colombia Free Trade Agreement Part III Contemporary Debates in Latin American Social Policy 9. Private Welfare Provision in Rural Bolivia: Contrasting Visions of Social Protection 10. Cash Transfer Programs as a Means to Women Empowerment? The ‘Oportunidades’ Case In Tulancingo, Mexico (2002-2014) 11. The Future of Social Protection in Latin America in a Context of Accelerated Changes
About the author
Gibrán Cruz-Martínez is a Juan de la Cierva Researcher at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain.
Summary
This book analyses how social protection systems and welfare regimes are applied in contemporary Latin America, and how they can help promote development, and reduce poverty and inequality. This interdisciplinary volume will interest economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians working on social protection.
Additional text
"Latin America is a fascinating region for the study of social policy: it combines past inequalities with a recent expansion, struggles with segmented social programs and presents diverse policy outcomes. The contributors from this book—a combination of renowned experts and exciting early career scholars from different parts of the world—offer many examples of the region’s richness. After reading the book, you will understand better how difficult it is to build more equitable social programs, but also how urgent it is in today’s world." -- Diego Sánchez Ancochea, Professor of the Political Economy of Development, University of Oxford, UK
"This edited collection brings together a group of young and established academics in the field of Latin American social policy to explore recent advances in the welfare regimes and the national and global actors shaping social protection systems. The case studies and comparative analyses in this book expand our knowledge of welfare systems in the Global South." -- Luis Moreno, Research Professor, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain
"We needed a volume that, in a comprehensive and rigorous way, investigated the study of welfare regimes and social policies in Latin America. This work successfully satisfies this need by offering a comparative perspective and integrated view of the main debates and challenges of the social dimension of the State." -- Gemma Ubasart-González, Professor of Political Science and Vice-dean of the Faculty of Law, Universitat de Girona, Spain
"Bringing new research and analytic perspectives, Welfare and Social Protection in Contemporary Latin America engages key debates over the history, economics and politics of Latin America’s welfare systems, and proposes new ways of classifying and comparing them. A wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection of quality contributions makes this book a most welcome addition to the field. It deserves wide readership within both policy and academic communities." -- Maxine Molyneux, Professor of Sociology, UCL Institute of the Americas, UK
"This excellent edited book brings together scholars from numerous countries and disciplines in presenting a comprehensive analysis of welfare regimes in Latin America. They discuss how both national and global actors shape social policy in the region and examine the most salient issues in current debates surrounding welfare systems in Latin America. Theoretically rich and empirically rigorous, this book is an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of social protection and welfare regimes in Latin America. It will be widely read, assigned and cited." -- Nora Nagels, Professor of Development and International Cooperation, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
