Within the growing ‘global agora’ (Stone, 2008) of public policy-making, social protection gained a prominent position on the agenda in the 2000s in response to emerging social policy concerns, including global poverty and inequality. Cash transfers have attracted widespread attention based on positive evaluation results, and have been actively promoted in various forms across sub-Saharan Africa by the World Bank and other international organisations.
In their efforts to shape new forms of welfare in Africa, these transnational actors have engaged a range of strategies, including financing, evidence-based advocacy and coalition-building, with the UK’s Department for International Development framing social protection as ‘an African success story’. Moving beyond the promotion of these social protection policy ideas to their reception in national contexts, specifically Zambia, this paper examines the interaction of global ideas with domestic policy-making processes, including implementation, at both national and local levels.
Zambia’s social cash transfer scheme started as a donor-driven initiative in 2003, with international organisations influencing the various targeting models tested through pilot programmes. Initially the cash transfer idea itself encountered significant resistance, mainly from the powerful Minister of Finance at the time, whose objection was that ‘handouts’ encourage dependency and laziness. When the policy was later adopted by the government, there was a further clash of ideas during implementation. This time it was between a centrally designed targeting model, based on an assessment of the transnational pilot schemes, and local ideas of deservingness, based on labour capacity, which led to the rejection of eligible fit-for-work recipients and subsequent changes to the targeting criteria.
Adopting an actor-oriented approach, emphasising the agency of actors at every level (Mosse, 2005), this paper argues that the ideas and actions of Zambian elites and citizens have played a significant role in determining the uptake of global policy ideas and re-shaping the design of models introduced by transnational actors. The changes made to Zambia’s social cash transfer scheme in order to increase political and social acceptability demonstrate that the iterative process of policy formulation continues as social protection programmes play out on the ground.