Gender Equality and Developmental Social Welfare in South Africa

Mainstream welfare-state literature identifies four welfare-state regimes: liberal, social democratic, corporatist and state-socialist. More recently, a fifth category has emerged: the developmental welfare state. As with research on Esping-Andersen’s categorization of ‘three worlds of welfare capitalism’, early research on developmental social policy is revealing enormous variants within this category as well (Mkandawire 2004). Feminist studies of developmental welfare are poorly developed, and thus far we have very few analyses of how gender is conceptualized. Yet, like other welfare state regimes, developmental states are regulatory in nature: they ascribe meaning to the social category of gender and create a normative framework within which needs are adjudicated and considered to be worthy of attention. While welfare states in the north traditionally redefined the relationship between work and family, developmental states operating in the context of informalization of labour markets redraw the boundaries between and responsibilities of state, community, families and individuals. Analyses of developmental states have focused on the types of need that ought to be prioritized, and the extent to which these needs could be satisfied within a range of fiscal and global constraints. However, there has been less attention to the ways in which different types of developmental states interpret needs and particularly to the gendered nature of needs interpretation.