SPC 2023

Contemporary social protection regimes in the Global South have been criticized for failing to cater to the needs of the socially excluded segments of the population. An uncritical acceptance of the social protection recipes from elsewhere often results in contradictory ideological positions and limited toolkits of preferred interventions. Pakistan’s social protection model, working alongside serious fiscal policy imbalances, is under severe stress. It has struggled to connect work with social protection and offered very little to the elderly and Persons with Disabilities. After the steep erosion of the consumption smoothening function of income transfers due to continuously high inflation and interruption of the national health insurance programme, most of the Pakistanis have been left to the mercy of a rather disorganized philanthropy and debt sharks.

Acutely cognizant of the fact that serious social consequences of the increasing joblessness and the deepening of poverty are expected to continue in the foreseeable future, Social Protection Resource Centre and its friends seeks to initiate new conversations on the kind of social policy framework needed to constructively reform the current social protection approaches and initiatives in the 2^nd SPRC Social Protection Conference 2023. Poorly designed social protection policies and initiatives in informality dominated economies are a common occurrence in the Global South. The Conference seeks to share insights from other countries in the South in designing nationally relevant and locally appropriate social protection systems, with special reference to the alternative development models being discussed elsewhere. The 2^nd SPRC Social Protection Conference 2023, being organized in close collaboration with the newly found Pakistan Association of Economic Sociologists, also aims at juxtaposing Pakistan’s own experience of the past 15 years of building modern social protection system with critical thinking emerging in other parts of the global South.