Assets, Livelihoods and Social Policy

In the past two decades poverty focused policy has changed remarkably in the South. This can be summarized as a shift from residual welfare poverty-alleviation strategies, commonly associated with ‘safety nets’, to social protection poverty-reduction policies. The latter in principle has a far broader mandate incorporating risk prevention and mitigation strategies, as well as the perennially necessary safety nets. Despite such advances, in practice however, social protection still tends to focus on income/consumption protection of the poor through the provision of cash transfers and other safety net provisions. The concept of sustainable livelihoods (SL), while linked to issues of social protection, alters the focus from income and consumption to directly address the critical role that assets and capabilities play in improving individual and household social and economic well-being. Yet the emphasis on livelihoods per se means that the importance of asset building (AB) – the accumulation and longer term consolidation of assets – is often not given sufficient emphasis. In addition, to date both sustainable livelihoods and asset building have been primarily identified as frameworks or approaches to poverty reduction – rather than as key components of social policy. This paper compares and contrasts these two approaches and identifies their potential contribution both conceptually and operationally to a new agenda of social policy. The paper proposes that a framework based on an asset-institutions-opportunities nexus has the potential to locate social policy in the centre of mainstream poverty reduction development debates rather than as a residual concern for the ‘excluded’ ‘other’. The paper concludes by describing the contribution of an asset building approach to a number of new ‘cutting-edge’ development issues. These include the asset-building opportunities associated with international migration; the contrasting constraints in asset building relating to insecurity in failing states, as well as the largely ignored asset accumulation aspects of human settlements. They also refer to the identification of the role of institutions in asset building and the comparative advantages of state and non-state actors. This is intended to demonstrate the ways in which asset building provides the entry point for a ‘new social policy agenda’ – namely an asset-based social policy.