The First Instance of Decentralised Social Policy Innovation in South Africa?
On the 11th of May, Western Cape MEC for Social Development Albert Fritz announced the planned initiation of a pilot ‘work-for-food' project to be rolled out in the Province from July 2012. As is the depressing norm in South Africa, the story was buried beneath headlines about corruption and the disgusting racist tweets made by two models. However, Fritz' announcement has the potential to have a tremendous impact on social policy development in South Africa, and thus warrants attention. Here's why.
In my previous blog post, I attempted to illuminate the argument that South African social policy has become passive and that it is relegating citizens to subjects. I used the case of Brazil as a comparison to show that they had achieved tremendous success in reducing poverty through the use of innovate social policies, while levels of poverty and inequality continue to rise in South Africa. The main causes of this deviation are the fact that Brazil emphasizes investment in the human capital of its impoverished citizens, and that it views them as partners with co-responsibilities, while South Africa does neither.
There are two main reasons why Brazil has been able to develop these successful programmes. The first is the highly competitive political system and the second is the context of decentralisation. Both of these factors spur competition between political parties and state and municipal governments. The Bolsa Família programme is a textbook case, as it grew from two very modest municipal pilot projects. The pilots were established during the same week in January 1995, under the direction of two different political parties.
The Bolsa Escola (School Grant) programme was launched in the Federal District of Brasilia by the Workers' Party (PT) Governor Cristovam Buarque, while the Governor of Campinas, José Roberto Magalhães Teixeira from the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), separately launched the Guaranteed Minimum Family Income Programme. By 2012, the seeds sown by these two Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes (CTPs) had grown exponentially into the Bolsa Família, which currently serves 45 million impoverished people and has managed to lift more than 5 million people out of poverty in only eight years.
It is plain to any observer that South African social policies do not operate within the same context of political competition and decentralisation. However, there is undoubtedly still space for innovation, and the announcement by the Western Cape Government may very well be the first example of such innovation. The programme aims to task able-bodied unemployed people between the ages of 17 and 45 with participating in work projects like the clearing of alien vegetation, cleaning up their communities and possibly starting vegetable gardens and assisting at soup kitchens.
It will initially be piloted in Nyanga and Atlantis, which are both part of the municipality of the City of Cape Town. The most exciting part of the announcement was that it explicitly cited the Brazilian case as an example where similar policies have succeeded in reducing poverty and inequality, because it encouraged community members to become active participants in the social contract underpinning the policies.
In Brazil, the Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) programme serves as the umbrella for all social policy initiatives. In addition to housing the biggest policy intervention, namely the Bolsa Família, Fome Zero also includes programmes to encourage family farming, as well as a system of low-cost restaurants for impoverished people, commonly known as ‘people's restaurants'. Fritz mentioned that the planned project was based on this aspect of the Fome Zero programme, and that it ‘came about from a meeting between [him] and Brazil's Deputy Social Welfare Minister, Romulo Paes de Sousa, in Pretoria last month'.
Even though the scale of the proposed programme will initially be modest, scale is not the most important factor it introduces. The factor of social policy innovation is what matters. The fact that the Western Cape is run by a different party than the rest of the country has opened-up space for social policy innovations that simply cannot come about in an environment dominated by one political party. As is so vividly demonstrated by the Brazilian case, innovative social policies, backed-up by the necessary political will, have the potential to rapidly expand and can literally assist millions of people as they attempt to move out of poverty.
The challenge now is for the Western Cape Government to successfully implement this innovation. It needs to prioritise this project and manage it effectively, to the point where it is able to eventually expand and incorporate many other impoverished areas within the Province. It is a perfect example of the type of grass-roots interventions which are required to eventually change the dangerously unsustainable overall direction of South Africa's social policies.
I believe that there should be a good deal of excitement surrounding this project, because it could be the first step in moving South Africa away from the chokingly passive social policies which are slowly suffocating the country. Of course, what is ultimately required is to reach conditions which are more akin to the situation in Brazil, namely a competitive political system combined with enough decentralisation to promote innovation.
And we are certainly still a very long way from such a situation. But this is a very significant first step, and should South Africa eventually achieve success with its social policies, we may very well be able to point at Fritz' announcement as the point where it all began, just as Brazilians are now able to point at the announcements made by Governors Buarque and Teixeira during that fateful week in January 1995 as the moment which ultimately improved the lives of millions of (formerly) impoverished Brazilians.
*Leon Schreiber is a South African PhD student in Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany. The views expressed are his own. This article first appeared on his blog at http://theschreiberei.wordpress.com/. He can be followed on Twitter here.
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