Social Policy in the Middle East and North Africa: The New Social Protection Paradigm and Universal Coverage

275 Pages·2019·3.251 MB·English

by  Rana Jawad (editor), Nicola Jones (editor), Mahmood Messkoub (editor)

© Rana Jawad, Nicola Jones and Mahmood Messkoub 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
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permission of the publisher.
Published by
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
The Lypiatts
15 Lansdown Road
Cheltenham
Glos GL50 2JA
UK
Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.
William Pratt House
9 Dewey Court
Northampton
Massachusetts 01060
USA
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946816
This book is available electronically in the
Social and Political Science subject collection
DOI 10.4337/9781786431998
ISBN 978 1 78643 198 1 (cased)
ISBN 978 1 78643 199 8 (eBook)
Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
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Contents
List of contributors vii
Acknowledgements ix
1 Introduction 1
Rana Jawad, Nicola Jones and Mahmood Messkoub
2 Theoretical and policy contexts of social policy in MENA 16
Rana Jawad, Nicola Jones and Mahmood Messkoub
3 Social protection schemes in the Middle East and North Africa:
not fair, not efficient, not effective 35
Markus Loewe
4 A business-as-usual approach to social policy? The North
African experience 61
Hicham Ait Mansour and Rana Jawad
5 The Egyptian social protection system: coverage gaps,
challenges and opportunities 84
Irene Selwaness and Mahmood Messkoub
6 Cash transfer as a social policy instrument or a tool of
adjustment policy: from indirect subsidies (to energy and
utilities) to cash subsidies in Iran, 2010–17 116
Mahmood Messkoub
7 A pathway to social justice? Social protection and disability in
the State of Palestine 134
Bassam Abu-Hamad, Nicola Jones, Elizabeth Presler-Marshall,
Paola Pereznieto and Mohammed Shaheen
8 Linking humanitarian assistance to social protection in MENA:
the case of Syrian child refugees 157
José Azoh Barry and Rana Jawad
v
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vi Social policy in the Middle East and North Africa
9 Interrogating the potential of a “cash plus” approach to tackle
multidimensional vulnerability in humanitarian contexts: the
case of Syrian refugees in Jordan 178
Bassam Abu-Hamad, Nicola Jones, Elizabeth Presler-Marshall,
Fiona Samuels and Ingrid Gercama
10 Social protection, political mobilization and Muslim Shi’a
NGOs in Iraq post-2003 198
Janan Aljabiri and Rana Jawad
11 Social accountability, citizenship and social protection in the
MENA region: exploring the linkages 220
Sylvia I. Bergh
12 Conclusion: synthesis and a way forward for scholarship, policy
and practice 243
Rana Jawad, Nicola Jones and Mahmood Messkoub
Index 255
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Contributors
Bassam Abu-Hamad has a PhD in Human Resource Management and is an
Associate Professor of Public Health at Al Quds University in Gaza City.
Hicham Ait Mansour is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mohamed V
University in Rabat, Morocco. His main research interests include, among
others, child poverty (and inequality) measurement, political participation
of youth, social protection policies in North Africa as well as knowledge
production in social sciences in North Africa. He is a member of Social
Policy Network based at the University of Bath (UK).
Janan Aljabiri is a labour and women’s rights activist. She has a PhD in
Social Policy from the University of Bath. She is a freelance consultant
supporting the work of international NGOs in the Middle East and local
civil society organizations in Iraq. She has engaged in producing research
about internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Iraq. She chairs the Kurdish
and Middle East Women’s Organization based in the UK (http://www.
kmewo.com/).
José Azoh Barry is a freelance consultant with Investigación & Acción,
A.C., Mexico, and has worked extensively on the ground in humanitarian
situations including in Africa and the MENA region.
Sylvia I. Bergh is Associate Professor in Development Management and
Governance at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus
University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on local governance issues in
the MENA region, particularly in Morocco. Before her academic career,
she worked at the World Bank, and she also regularly teaches and consults
on evaluations of development projects and programmes.
Ingrid Gercama is an applied anthropologist with a long-term interest in
social cohesion, accountability and health in humanitarian crisis. She has
worked with migrant and host communities on youth engagement and
cash transfers in a number of countries in the Middle East, usually using
creative participatory research tools.
Rana Jawad is senior lecturer in social policy at the University of Bath. She
is founder and convener of the MENA social policy network (http://www.
menasp.com). She has extensive research expertise on social policy issues in
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viii Social policy in the Middle East and North Africa
the MENA region, focusing in particular on the institutional and political
analysis of social policy provision. In addition, she has an interest in social
care, social safety nets and the role of religious welfare organizations.
Nicola Jones has a PhD in Political Science and is a Principal Research
Fellow in the Gender and Social Inclusion Programme at the Overseas
Development Institute. Nicola is the Director of the longitudinal research
programme Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE).
Markus Loewe is research team leader at the German Development
Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), Bonn. He
studied economics, political science and Arabic in Tübingen, Erlangen
and Damascus and wrote his PhD thesis on micro-insurance schemes in
Heidelberg.
Mahmood Messkoub is currently senior lecturer at the International Institute
of Social Studies (ISS, the Hague, Erasmus University Rotterdam). As an
economist he also taught and researched at the universities of London and
Leeds. His current research interests are in the areas of economics of social
policy and population ageing, migration and universal approach to social
provisioning. He has acted as a consultant to ESCWA, ILO, UN (DESA,
UNFPA).
Paola Pereznieto is an economist with an MSc in Social Policy and is a
research associate with the Overseas Development Institute.
Elizabeth Presler-Marshall has a PhD in Sociology and is a research
associate with the Overseas Development Institute.
Fiona Samuels has a PhD in Anthropology and is a Senior Research
Fellow in the Gender and Social Inclusion Programme at the Overseas
Development Institute.
Irene Selwaness is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Faculty of
Economics and Political Science at Cairo University. Her current research
focuses on social security systems, informality, school-to-work transition,
marriage and employment issues in the Middle East, informality and
international trade. She holds a PhD in Labor Economics from University
of Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne (France), and a master’s degree in
Quantitative Economics with specialization in Labor and Demographic
Economics from the same university.
Mohammed Shaheen has a PhD in Sociology and is the co-founder of
the School of Public Health and the Center for Development in Primary
Health Care, and an Associate Professor of Public Health at Al Quds
University in Ramallah, West Bank.
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Acknowledgements
Rana Jawad would like to thank the British Council Researcher Links
Programme and the UK Economic and Social Research Council for
funding the MENA social policy network conferences at which some
of the chapters included in this book were first presented. Some of the
research reported by Rana Jawad in this book was funded by the UK’s
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under grant number
RES-062-23-1803 and the Carnegie Corporation (New York, USA) under
grant number BC-SMSP-MENA-017. Nicola Jones would like to thank
UNICEF Palestine for funding part of the research that underpins the
chapter on the State of Palestine, and UNHCR and UNICEF Jordan
similarly for funding preliminary research that formed the basis of the
chapter on the Syrian refugee community in Jordan.
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1. Introduction
Rana Jawad, Nicola Jones and
Mahmood Messkoub
“Standard development indicators failed to capture or predict the outburst of
popular anger during the spring of 2011. What could explain this conundrum,
which we refer to as the ‘Arab inequality puzzle’? Was economic inequality
much higher than suggested by household expenditure data? Or were the
grievances linked to factors other than economic inequality, such as decline
in the overall quality of life, growing corruption, and lack of freedom, among
others?”
(Ianchovichina, Mottaghi and Devarajan, 2015:11).
Countries of the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) have long
traditions of formal and informal social welfare provision. These include
mainstream programmes such as employment-based social insurance and
targeted, non-contributory social assistance, as well as more culturally
attuned programmes including marriage services, housing allowances and
orphan sponsorship programmes. As elsewhere in the world, these social
welfare programmes are not just systems of service delivery, but also reflect
political, cultural and institutional orientations that have wider political
significance for national identity and belonging, wealth redistribution and
subjective perceptions of personal wellbeing. In other words, it is critical
to go beyond a narrow technical emphasis on social welfare programmes
and focus on social policy encompassing broad political and cultural signi-
fiers. As noted by the veteran British sociologist and social reformer Peter
Townsend (1975:6) “social policy is the underlying and professed rationale
by which social institutions and groups are used or brought into being
to ensure social preservation or development . . . all societies have social
policies”.
Indeed, this is the core idea that forms the basis of this book: that the
study of social policy in MENA countries offers a valuable but as yet
under-used conceptual framework for linking macro-economic concerns
and geopolitics to systems of governance and rule to final social welfare
outcomes at the micro-level of citizens and residents. On the one hand,
such a focus is of intrinsic value as it highlights issues of human rights
and social welfare in the MENA countries. On the other, a social policy
1
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2 Social policy in the Middle East and North Africa
perspective sheds new and essential light on our understanding of the
causes of the major socio-political phenomena in the MENA region that
occupy mainstream policy and academic analysts: namely, major security
and political questions ranging from the 2011 Arab uprisings to the growth
of Islamic social movements to the absence of accountable democracy in
many Arab countries.
A 2015 World Bank report (Hassine, et al., 2015) analysing the reasons
for the 2011 Arab uprisings makes clear why social policy matters for
enhancing social cohesion and perceptions of social welfare. The report
argues that it is the autocratic bargain of the MENA countries which is
to blame: authoritarian political regimes in MENA have frustrated the life
prospects of citizens and increased their sense of unfairness in not being
able to access decent jobs and an adequate standard of living. According
to the report, in the run-up to the 2011 uprisings, the major poverty and
expenditure data relied upon by the global financial institutions indicated
that the MENA countries were performing well: the ratio of expenditures
of the bottom 40 per cent to the average was higher than all regions except
Latin America and the Caribbean; MENA had reached the Millennium
Development Goals related to poverty reduction and access to infra-
structure services (especially drinking water and sanitation and internet
connectivity); expenditure inequality, measured by the Gini index, had not
worsened in most MENA economies in recent years and remained low to
moderate by international standards.
It was in effect the worsening subjective perceptions that middle-class
populations (“the middle 40 per cent”) in MENA had of their future
quality of life that was the main trigger for the uprisings that took place
(Hassine, et al., 2015:29). Quality of life encompassed a range of matters
such as control of corruption and the quality of future jobs and public
services, as well as political rights. These kinds of variables are not,
however, accounted for in the traditional expenditure and consumption
data (Hassine, et al., 2015). Data discussed in the report showed high dis-
satisfaction rates with housing, for example, among MENA populations.
Since the uprisings, the social situation of the MENA countries has
worsened with conflict and continued migration. Some quick facts and
figures help to highlight the urgent social consequences of the above
trends. On average, the MENA region has the highest rate of unemploy-
ment in the world and poverty rates have remained largely unchanged
for more than two decades (UNDP, 2014). What is especially noteworthy
is that economic growth did not create new employment. Currently,
unemployment is estimated to be 12 per cent in the region (Devarajan and
Mottaghi, 2015) and female labour force participation stands at 21.6 per
cent, which is the lowest in the world (Devarajan and Mottaghi, 2015).
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Introduction 3
The poverty headcount, using $1.25 per day, is estimated at 2.2 per cent in
the MENA region (Ianchovichina, Mottaghi and Devarajan, 2015:15). It
is also well known that 53 per cent of MENA populations are estimated
by the World Bank as living on under $4/day, which confirms the high
level of income precariousness in the region (Vishwanath and Serajuddin,
2012). Observers of the MENA context are also increasingly concerned
by the links between poor economic performance and social conflict with
inequality, and not least the high levels of youth unemployment in this
region (Ncube, Anyanwu and Hausken, 2014).
Noteworthy too is the fact that the above situation is not commensurate
with overall public expenditures or income per capita wealth in MENA
countries, bearing in mind some of the world’s highest-income countries
are in the Arab Gulf region. For instance, the World Bank has highlighted
how spending on food and fuel subsidies in MENA countries inflates
their spending on social safety nets and accounts for the most significant
discrepancy among countries’ social expenditures (da Silva, et al., 2012),
whereby “non-subsidy spending has a very narrow range: from 0.04 per
cent of GDP in Kuwait to 1.9 per cent of GDP in Iraq”. On the other
hand, subsidy spending ranges widely, from 0.4 per cent of GDP in
Lebanon to 13.7 per cent of GDP in the Republic of Yemen (da Silva, et
al., 2012:110). Based on a sample of countries, da Silva et al. (2012:110)
argued that “Subsidy spending in the region is much higher in both abso-
lute and relative terms than other countries. The average Middle Eastern
and North African country spends 5.7 per cent of GDP on food and fuel
subsidies, as opposed to 1.3 per cent of GDP in the average benchmark
country.”
Thus, many of the MENA region’s problems are “social” in nature
and whilst the academic literature has been quicker to acknowledge the
social welfare function of Islamic religious groups (Benthall and Bellion-
Jourdan, 2003; Heyneman, 2004), much less attention has been given to
the role of other actors and institutions in social welfare provision, such
as formal state provision, secular civil society groups and trade unions
(Messkoub, 2006; Jawad, 2009). Hence, there are many reasons why a
social policy analysis is relevant to the MENA region and they form the
subject matter of this book. Nevertheless, this book does not appear in an
academic vacuum.
It has been over a decade now since the first publications concerned
with social welfare or social policy in MENA emerged: Moghadam and
Karshenas (2006) and Jawad (2009). Though modest in number and
written from a diversity of international development, political science
and sociology perspectives, these texts offered a mosaic of historical and
contemporary analyses of MENA social policies, often highlighting the
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