UNRISD Director to give a presentation on social policy at the ISS Seminar in The Hague

UNRISD Director, Thandika Mkandawire, will give a presentation at the ISS Seminar in The Hague on 18 September 2008.

In his presentation, titled “Lessons from the UNRISD Research Project on Social Policy”, Thandika outlines the challenge to construct developmental, democratic and socially inclusive societies. He argues that social policy has to address multiple tasks such as redistributive effects of economic policy, protection for people from the vagaries of the market and the changing circumstances of age, enhancing the productive potential of members of society, and reconciling the burden of reproduction with that of other social tasks, as well as sharing the burden of reproduction.

Thandika states that the pursuit of only one of these goals to the exclusion of others can cause problems, which might undermine the pursuit of the one chosen goal. The pursuit is also dependent on the emphasis placed on the different goals by the welfare regimes, while considering the effects of globalization, ideologies, gender issues, macroeconomics and democracy.

Finally, Thandika concludes that social policy should be formulated within a policy regime framework that includes social policy, economic policy and political regimes, while recognizing sectoral affinities or complementarities between institutions located in different spheres of the political economy.