In Search of Inclusive Development: Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the research project on Social Policy in Late Industrializers: Sub-Saharan Africa and the Challenge of Social Policy. Eight studies were commissioned, focusing on four regional and linguistic clusters, and organized around two sets of thematic concerns. East Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa formed the regional cluster, but this was supplemented by a study of selected francophone West and Central African countries. The thematic foci of the studies are education and labour market issues on the one hand, and health, water, and sanitation issues on the other. The concern of this chapter is not so much to summarize the findings from the studies; it is more concerned with tying together some of the themes that have emerged from the studies, and reconnecting these to the conceptual issues in social policy broadly, and between social policy and development concerns, specifically. The concerns are tied up in section 1.4 of this chapter with a reflection on six essential elements or imperatives in rethinking social policy in sub-Saharan Africa. The imperatives, as is our research project, are based on three normative concerns: inclusivity, development, and democracy – where ‘public reasoning,’ as Amartya Sen (2004) puts it, is foundational to the ordering of public and civic relationships.