Systematic approaches to social protection

Studying a set of social protection instruments as belonging to a system clarifies the role of each of the relevant components and discloses how the defined collection of instruments answers underlying social problems. The analysis of a set of social protection instruments, through a systems lens, reveals the content and scope of the (implicit) social contract that a society is willing to accept, and/or indicates how the promises made in the social contract, which regulate societal solidarity, can be better served by improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the policy instruments. A systematic approach to social protection provides a technical analysis of how the components of a social protection policy fit together, revealing, on the one hand, how much the members of a society are willing to pool their risks and their resources, and on the other hand, how effectively and efficiently that is actually done. The social protection system analysis can, however, not formulate an answer to the ideological and political questions about how much and what type of social protection a society should offer to its members; it only facilitates the discussion about how to organise the political choices in an effective and efficient way. A set of social protection instruments applicable to a country can be regarded as a system: a systematic approach to social protection describes and analyses the elements of the social protection ‘system’ in a comprehensive way. When comprehensively done, a systematic analysis reveals the underlying ideology of a set of social protection instruments (or how much and how solidarity in a society is organised) and at the same time also reveals how well the organisation functions in terms of effectiveness (reaching the objectives set) and efficiency (reaching the objectives at the lowest possible cost). A social protection system description (or mapping) provides an overview of the components of the social protection system at a certain point in time for a particular country. Moreover, it provides details on each of the components in terms of eligibility, benefits, financing, organisation and administration. A social protection system analysis studies whether and how these components fit together in a technocratically harmonious way: it draws attention to potential contradictions, inconsistencies, coverage gaps and coverage duplications and it compares target groups, risk coverage, administrative procedures, benefit levels, replacement rates and eligibility conditions across the components of the system.1 Besides these straightforward approaches to social protection systems, the scarce literature referring to systematic approaches to social protection often adopt a normative approach implying what a social protection system ‘should’ or ‘needs to’ be. For example, the definition