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Nicola Yeates, Open University
Nicola Yeates is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the Open University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Dublin City University since 2005. She is a member of the Social Policy Association executive committee and co-convenes the SPA HYPERLINK "http://www.globalwelfare.net/" International and Comparative Social Policy group. Nicola is also co-editor of Global Social Policy: an interdisciplinary journal of public policy and social development (Sage).
Nicola works on transnational and global processes and their implications for social policy as a field of academic study and as a practice. She is interested in how social diversity, divisions and inequalities are constructed, manifested and contested through these processes. Recent areas of interest include globalisation(s) ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, including the development of global governance and its relationship to national social systems, state and non-state strategies of internationalisation, including labour migration and the development of transnational networks.
Speech
Scene setting
Peter was a pioneer of Global Social Policy. In the 1960s, some three decades before globalist analyses emerged outside Marxian social science, he was developing a global analysis of world poverty combining the insights of global sociology with those of development studies with those of social policy. This work was published in The Concept of Poverty in 1970 where he set out an ‘approach to development and stratification [to explain] how poverty arises, and is perpetuated, in low income and high income countries’. It was this work that formed the basis for his theory of poverty, including the seminal Poverty in the UK (1979).
The ‘domestic’ and ‘the international’ were, for Peter, inseparable realms of analysis and action. When it comes to explaining the production – and reproduction – of poverty, he maintained that an international analysis is not an optional add-on but an essential part of any coherent programme of research and action. Well known is his argument that poverty and wealth are directly related to one another. But less recognised is that this was articulated in global terms from the outset. The riches of (those living in) high income countries are, he argued, inextricably linked to poverty (of those living) in low income countries. This idea that poverty at home and abroad are directly connected is best articulated in the following quote: “A wealthy society which deprives a poor country of resources may simultaneously deprive its own poor classes through maldistribution of those additional resources” (The Concept of Poverty, 1970, p. 42).
The core of Peter’s work at this time and subsequently was directed towards relating national and international systems of social stratification. This, he argued, necessitates looking ‘outwards’ beyond the UK or national context of social policy, and in two key ways.
First, it means attending to the extra-national dimensions and effects of government policy. Peter was always clear about the role of the policies of advanced economy governments in perpetuating world poverty. In the 1960s and 1970s he was especially concerned with the adverse effects of their trade, aid and development policies on poorer countries, and with how former British colonies were urged to reproduce subsistence social security and poverty relief policies. In the 1980s he was scathing of the shameful participation of the British government in helping forge a version of European integration that contributes to world poverty by both propelling social polarisation and poverty within the EU and worsening the terms of production, trade and labour in poorer Non-EU countries.
Second, Peter was also clear that social policy analysis also has to focus more extensively on policy formation in cross-border spheres of governance. He recognised that a progressive national (specifically) UK politics of poverty necessarily has to engage with the poverty and wider social policies of these international organisations, and felt that not enough attention was being directed towards these organisations. The social and economic policies of multilateral bodies, whether the EU, the World Bank, IMF or the UN, became a specific focus of Peter’s scholarship from the 1990s. Addressing the ‘new’ global context of social policy and development, he highlighted the rise of global markets together with the role of policies and practices of international organisations and transnational corporations in perpetuating world poverty. The policies of international organisation actively shape the distribution of resources between and within countries, and are as such an intrinsic part of the problem of poverty, whether in rich or poor countries.
He was particularly scathing of the World Bank, whose poverty policies amount to a global poor law. In the debate between those who wish to abolish global institutions such as the World Bank and those who wish to reform them, Peter was on the side of the latter - but he was no co-optee. What is needed, he argued, is root-and-branch restructuring for democratisation, a reorientation of policies to embrace collectivism and public service, and to establish comprehensive systems of social protection worldwide. Instead of the haphazard collection of arrangements that passes for global governance, what is needed instead is development-oriented global social planning.
While Peter was scathing of the World Bank, he took heart in some developments within the UN, such as the 1995 Copenhagen Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals, and the growing interest of UNICEF and the ILO in a human rights approach to child poverty. But he was never complacent, and continually pressed them to do more and to do it better. The failure of these organisations - and the rich countries that control them - to adopt a progressive social policy, to establish what Peter called an ‘international welfare state’ that institutionalises fairer systems of distribution and redistribution, would inevitably mean adding hundreds of millions more people to the billions already impoverished.
Peter was committed to a global analysis of poverty and to the eradication of poverty wherever it was manifested. Part of his legacy is to have us understand better how the logics that inform the treatment of poverty at one scale also realise themselves at other scales, and to challenge the intellectual myopia that sees issues of poverty in ‘developing’ countries as unconnected with poverty in ‘developed’ countries. He made no distinctions between the worth of human lives based on national origin or country of residence. An articulate and passionate supporter of scholarly and political campaigns for a coherent global social policy based on equality and human rights, his commitment to a materialist analysis of world poverty and his advocacy of global social planning, though often unpopular among the political left and political right, found him many more friends and allies worldwide.
What remains to be done?
Major advances in globalising social policy in the ways that Peter advocated have already occurred. The stranglehold of the methodological nationalism against which he railed has been loosened, and the methodological transnationalism that he both advocated and practised has gained much ground. Global Social Policy is now established as a dynamic field of international study and research with a strong advocacy tradition. But there remain major challenges ahead.
Academically, it is still the case that social science generally and social policy particularly all too often fail to look outwards, to relate national systems of social stratification to international ones and global processes. The body of academic theory revolving around welfare regimes, for example, is being internationalised in the sense of being applied to Africa, Asia and South America. But it largely remains preoccupied with the business of endlessly typologising and categorising national welfare systems and thus concerned with the national and local causes of poverty, exclusion and polarisation. In this it diverts attention from the interaction of national and international systems of stratification, and from the policies of international organisations and transnational corporations in shaping the maldistribution of resources within and between countries.
If we take Peter’s analysis in way seriously, more extensive and thorough engagement with global social policy is needed; in his words “global policy analysis must now attract the predominant part of academic analysis of economic and social structural change” (Foreword, Understanding Global Social Policy, ed. N. Yeates, 2008). Taking this forward must begin with challenging distinctions between what is ‘national’ and what is ‘international’, what is ‘global’ and what is ‘local’, what is ‘domestic’ and what is ‘foreign’. More needs to be done to connect the maldistribution of resources in the context of individual countries with contemporary macro-structures of the global economy and its governance. There needs to be more engagement with issues of international trade, aid and investment policy as well as more familiar terrains of health, education, employment and social protection. There needs to be a concern with issues of distribution and redistribution within global social policy. And, true to the indefatigable spirit of Peter, we need to be asking awkward questions about international organisations and transnational corporations - about how their policies and practices affect who in the world get what resources, by what means and with what effects. “It is the potential harms and not only the benefits of global restructuring that needs to be brought more regularly and more forcefully into the frame of attention.” (Foreword, Understanding Global Social Policy, ed. N. Yeates, 2008)
Peter was always clear that scientific analysis is a means to an end, that end being effective political action to eradicate world poverty. And a sense of the task ahead and how to achieve it is especially apparent in the Manifesto for International Action to Defeat Poverty (co-authored with Dave Gordon). Amongst the various steps set out in the Manifesto include the implementation of existing international human rights conventions and the introduction of new – and enforceable – rights where necessary. It also includes the curtailment of the powers of TNCs as part of any strategy of global redistribution. Here, the preoccupation with corporate self-regulation must be replaced by the introduction of new mandatory legal powers to regulate TNCs. Effective systems of global redistribution requires effective sources of global funding, and here Peter advocated two sources of international finance: an increase in development assistance from 0.7% target to 1% of GNP, and the introduction of new cross-border taxes to fund cross-national subsidies for social services and social security for children in all low-income countries and regions. A tall order, it may seem. But at a time when the political elite have injected unprecedented amounts of public money to prop up the banking industry and bankers’ bonuses, and are prepared to contemplate further massive cross-national subsidies to support the greening and cleaning of industry in the Global South, the time may never be better to demand that such issues of international financing for social policy be a matter of the first priority.
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