Between affordable welfare and affordable food: Internationalized food subsidy reforms in Egypt and Tunisia

Abstract

The public subsidization of food is an important element of North African welfare states, guaranteeing access to affordable nutrition and maintaining food security even in times of economic downturns. Since the 1970s, universal food subsidy schemes have come under growing international pressure, and North African countries have selectively adopted policy recommendations and adjusted their subsidy schemes. Comparing the empirical cases of Egypt and Tunisia before and after the 2010/11 uprisings, we analyze the linkages between international organizations, national governments and local welfare demands and explain what kinds of reform alliances emerge between these actors. We find that until 2010, internationalized social policy reform was structured by governments' brokerage of international and domestic pressure and adaptation of reform aims. Since then, two modes have unfolded: in militarized Egypt, coercive closure secured an alliance and the respective subsidy reforms, whereas in Tunisia, polarization disconnected domestic and international policy goals.

Causal mechanisms in the analysis of transnational social policy dynamics: Evidence from the global south

“…As Kaminska et al (2021) argue, the limited ideational influence of IOs on healthcare financing reforms challenges the idea that there is a social policy vacuum in non‐OECD countries that simply has to be filled with foreign ideas. In fact, IOs are more frequently confronted with strong social policy legacies, for example food subsidies, which have been described as a key component of social policy in Northern Africa (Thyen & Karadag, 2021), or provident funds for retirement savings in former British colonies (Kuhlmann & Nullmeier, 2021). In other cases, national actors have their own ideas on how their social policy system should be reformed or maintained (Müller, 2021; Safuta, 2021).…”

“…The methodological debate on causal mechanisms has often focused on strengthening causal inferences in single case studies. Several articles in this Regional Issue however show how the concept of causal mechanisms can also be applied in comparative analyses (Henninger & Römer, 2021; Kaminska et al, 2021; Thyen & Karadag, 2021) and how mechanisms can be traced inductively in one case and then be applied to another case, thereby linking theory‐building and theory‐testing process tracing (Kuhlmann & Nullmeier, 2021).…”

“…Notably, at all stages of the policy process, transnational actors can (and often do) play a role. Likewise, Thyen and Karadag (2021) in particular depict a number of mechanisms at play throughout the different stages of the policy process, and argue that combining these mechanisms into a causal chain can help to explain contemporary social policy dynamics such as food subsidy reform in Northern Africa. What partly follows from this is that the output of social policy-making is complex and can often not be explained by a single mechanism.…”

“…The article by Thyen and Karadag (2021), Between affordable welfare and affordable food: Internationalized food subsidy reforms in Egypt and Tunisia , focuses on food subsidies in Northern Africa. Here, despite a growing transnational critique on general food subsidies, subsidy reforms have remained heavily contested from below.…”