CDSA Seminar Series at the Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur Formalisation of Nepal’s child welfare regime and expanding the occupational mini welfare state. Venue: Central Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Tribhuvan University Humanities Building Room No. 117, TU, Kirtipur Date: Sunday, 20 July 2014 Time: 1:30 p.m. Abstract: Critiquing the conventional ‘Development’ and the ‘Rights’ framework including the UN-Child Rights Convention for analyzing social policies in the South, political economy approach offered by Welfare State (Esping-Anderson, 1990) and Welfare Regime (Gough and Wood, 2004) theories, which focus on commodification and clientelisation respectively, were used to study Nepal’s children’ welfare regime. Despite the usefulness of WSF in combating absolute child poverty in the West these frameworks are rarely applied in the ‘developing’ world. The study used mixed methodology; primarily qualitative and it included interviews and documentary analysis. The study finds that Nepal’s social policy comprises a myriad of ad hoc welfare services that fail to secure children’s welfare. Nepal can be classified as a less effective liberal informal minimal-State welfare regime where four welfare institutions (State, market, informal networks and households) interact to produce a regime of commodification (dependence on the private sector) and adverse informalisation (dependence on informal providers) of welfare services due to the minimal-universal or selective-residual role of the State. On the other hand a small group of people, primarily from the formal sector and certain occupations (army and police), access better services. The outcome is that children are highly stratified, primarily along employment type (formal versus informal) and income, and secondarily along English speaking versus Nepali speaking and those using private versus Government services. The study finds that informalisation of child welfare services in protection was reflected in a laissez-faire approach to children’s policy which has created the informal status of children, a de-facto citizenship-less status where children are not monitored for support. The study confirms that application of the theories of both Esping-Anderson (1990), designed for advanced capitalist countries, and Gough and Wood (2004), developed for semi-capitalist countries, were useful in the case of Nepal, a semi-capitalist country. However the social policy agenda is not simply about de-commodification or de-informalisation but about combining both such that Nepal moves towards a social democratic welfare state model in the long run while pursuing a social capitalistic welfare regime model in the interim. In particular, the focus should be on ensuring egalitarianism in services rather than changing providers, formalising informal networks and making private services affordable. In the case of child protection, policy needs to be State-paternalistic and parentalist. The existence of a ‘mini’ welfare state (the army’s health and education model) reconfirms a desire for and the possibility of using it as a role model. Researcher’s Bio: Suman Khadka, PhD Candidate, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia I am in the final stage of completing my PhD on social policy for children in Nepal from Monash University, Australia. Previous to my academic studies on these issues I enjoyed a decade long professional career working as a ‘development’ practitioner and a child rights activist on social, economic and children’s rights at local and national level; my latest work involved working with children affected by Maoist armed conflict. My work on child rights advocacy and programming during Nepal’s Maoist conflict and post conflict had a significant influence on the selection of my PhD topic. I have been regularly contributing Op-ed pieces on socio-political and social policy issues to the Kathmandu Post.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 02:45:51 +0000
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