Combating poverty and inequality through social policies: Reflections on the UNRISD report

Abstract

changing public-private interactions in terms of their implications for universalism or targeting.Deacon and McNeill both raise questions from a global perspective -in terms of the politics of poverty reduction. Noting a lack of reflection from UNRISD on its position in this constellation of actors, Deacon draws attention to implications beyond the nation-state -the focus of most social policies -to the issue of global contestation over such policies and the need for global public goods and financing mechanisms. McNeill provides a slightly contrasting stance on UNRISD's position within this global politics of social policy, observing its relative freedom from political constraint, which enables the more direct engagement of the report with inequalities, the exercise of power and the structure of exclusion.Global Social Policy hopes UNRISD's Combating Poverty and Inequality: Structural Change, Social Policy and Politics and these and other responses to it will help stimulate further discussions and eventually lead to a higher priority being placed on dealing concretely with these issues that blight the existence of so many citizens of our planet.

Tracing Poverty and Inequality in International Development Discourses: An Algorithmic and Visual Analysis of Agencies’ Annual Reports and Occasional White Papers, 1978–2010

“…Thus, policies aimed at reducing within-country income inequality seem critical to any international development agenda. Yet, while ‘for the past 30 years the dominant discourse in international development has been the “global politics of poverty alleviation”’(Deacon and Cohen, 2011: 234), ‘inequality has remained a neglected policy issue’ (Cook and Yi, 2011: 135). International campaigns against global poverty supported by donor governments (e.g., ‘Make Poverty History’, ‘ONE campaign’, ‘Stand Against Poverty’) have given little attention to inequality, neither as a dimension of poverty nor as an exacerbating exogenous force, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – ‘the fulcrum on which development policy is based’ (UN, 2005: 2) – show a similar bias.…”