Suchergebnisse

Designing a social protection system is of course not only a technical exercise but a very political affair. A systems approach to social protection is shaped by the political elites and the respective coalitions of change, the political institutions as well as the political system of a country. This explains why also seemingly similar countries in terms of their risk profile, poverty situation and economic situation can adopt very different social protection systems or make very different progress with respect to social protection expansion. Not only are the established welfare states of the Global North but also the nascent social protection systems in the Global South a testimony of this variety.

By the early 1970s, the West German Protestant churches became involved in the increasingly bitter conflict surrounding the production and use of nuclear energy. While the nuclear issue remains as controversial and divisive as ever in Germany today, no historical analysis has yet been offered to explain the reasons that the churches especially in West Germany have become avid participants in this debate for decades.

Social cash transfers have been identified as one interesting option in low-income countries to combat poverty. Whether the cash should come with any conditions attached has been controversially debated by academics and policy-makers. Drawing on uniquely designed experiments, survey and qualitative data, this dissertation critically analyses the appropriateness of conditionality for the low-income country context. Using Zambia as a case study, it discovers that conditionality proves not only to be a politically powerful tool but also to empower, rather than patronize beneficiaries. Conditionality, however, comes at a price: it excludes households from the program, foregoes poverty reduction effects, and overburdens the administration.