Advancing regionalism and a social policy agenda for positive change: From rhetoric to action

In the context of deepening poverty, growing inequalities within and between countries and the uneven impacts of economic and financial globalisation, we need to consider how social development, underwritten by a people-centred approach, can influence existing and emerging regional processes and change the regional social policy agenda. Moreover, there is a new urgency given the scale of poverty and social exclusion experienced in countries in Africa and in the global south, to move away from the belief that regionalism both as a policy agenda and as a development project should be limited only to issues of economic integration, trade negotiations and the pursuit of national and regional security.