Overcoming Extreme Poverty by Social Protection Floors – Approaches to Closing the Right to Social Security Gap

Kaltenborn Markus ()
Additional contact information
Kaltenborn Markus: Professor of Public Law at the Faculty of Law, Director of the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy (IEE), Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany

The Law and Development Review, 2017, vol. 10, issue 2, 237-273

Abstract: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development contains a very ambitious poverty reduction schedule: According to Sustainable Development Goal 1 extreme poverty shall be completely eradicated within the next 15 years (SDG 1.1), and also other forms of poverty shall be reduced within the same period at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages (SDG 1.2). Governments are requested to “(i)mplement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, and by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable” (SDG 1.3). The authors of the Agenda refer to the concept of so-called social protection floors which has been identified as an important instrument in the fight against extreme poverty and therefore has attracted much attention in recent development policy debates. In June 2012 the General Conference of the International Labour Organization (ILO) had adopted the Social Protection Floors Recommendation. In this document ILO members are urged, as a first step, to establish basic social security guarantees, including access to essential health care and basic income security for all residents of their countries and, as a second step, to systematically extend these basic social security guarantees into more comprehensive strategies. If we look for legal answers to the global challenge of extreme poverty, then social protection law – and in particular the human right to social security – deserves special attention. Based on the research framework which has been presented by Haglund and Stryker in their book Closing the Rights Gap. From Human Rights to Social Transformation (2015) this article will try to analyze which role the legal systems in the Global South will play in implementing SDG 1 at the national level and in closing the “right to social security-gap”. Haglund and Stryker describe, inter alia, two models for social rights realization which represent alternative approaches to the MDG/SDG concept: (a) the so-called multistage spiral model whose main focus lies on the different phases which new norms have to go through when they are implemented in a state’s society, and (b) the “policy legalization model” which highlights the role of litigation in ensuring social rights compliance. Furthermore the article will deal with the responsibility of the international community in this area of development policy.

Keywords: right to social security; social protection floor; 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ldr-2017-0014 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:lawdev:v:10:y:2017:i:2:p:237-273:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ldr/html

DOI: 10.1515/ldr-2017-0014

Access Statistics for this article

The Law and Development Review is currently edited by Yong-Shik Lee

More articles in The Law and Development Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().