Putting human rights into social protection
Policy-makers and development practitioners have a new tool to help them devise dynamic social protection programmes - a book co-authored by AUT’s Professor Marilyn Waring.
A modern-day approach to social protection
‘Anticipatory Social Protection: Claiming dignity and rights’ explains the Commonwealth Secretariat’s modern-day approach to social protection. (Social protection programmes typically include labour market interventions, social insurance and social assistance.)
Professor Waring and her co-authors Anit N Mukherjee, Elizabeth Reid and Meena Shivdas analyse and discuss a framework for social protection, models of good practice across the Commonwealth and innovative ways of ways of providing social protection.
Human rights principles
The authors argue for a more dynamic approach to social protection that uses human rights principles to address social inequities.
“This book explores ways of providing social protection that are not only based on the ideology of men and women being in full-time work in the formal economy. Instead we look at how social protection can become a tool to transform society so that human rights are available to all, including marginalised groups, in an anticipatory, as opposed to reactive, framework. It is important to challenge the social and political factors that can contribute to poverty and disadvantage, rather than just providing a ‘safety net’ that reinforces a mainstream ideology,” says Professor Waring.