Everyday sense making and the discursive delineation of social policy space in Zambia

Abstract This article connects the notions of policy space and social contract in order to understand the importance of everyday discourse for the perceived legitimacy of social policy choices and emerging responsibilities in Zambia. Based on a Grounded Theory analysis of interview and document material, the article reconstructs common sense ideas about the limited resources of the state, from which modalities in the Social Cash Transfer programme, especially the requirements for targeting and graduation, are derived. It moreover explores how from these limited means also follows the sharing of responsibilities between the state and the recipients themselves, giving way to a self‐responsibility discourse. Thereby, the attempt by implementing officers and the wider community to rationalise distributional choices in light of wide‐spread poverty, shape the social contract between the state and citizens in Zambia and ultimately also delineate the space of what becomes possible to imagine within social policy. The article concludes with an argument for broadening social policy visions away from the individual level towards tackling the underlying structural causes of poverty by connecting social with economic interventions.