Building equality and opportunity through social guarantees : new approaches to public policy and the realization of rights

In the past decade there has been growing interest in the linkages between social policy and the enhancement of citizenship and equality of opportunity. As a result, a discourse that proposes more comprehensive models of social policy has recently emerged in the development community. The social guarantees approach, discussed in "Building Equality and Opportunity through Social Guarantees – New Approaches to Public Policy and the Realization of Rights", advances this area of practice by offering a concrete operational framework for the design and/or monitoring of public and private services according to principles of equity and redress. Social guarantees are defined as legal and administrative mechanisms that determine entitlements and obligations related to certain rights and ensure the fulfillment of these obligations on the part of the state. The social guarantee approach has been explicitly applied in the health sector in Chile. However, as illustrated by the rest of the case studies in the book from Latin America, the Caribbean and South Africa, the social guarantees framework can be of benefit to the monitoring of public policy and progressive realization of social and economic rights in a range of contexts. This work is the result of an extensive collaboration between the World Bank, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Chilean Foundation for Overcoming Poverty (FUNASUPO). It is based on original research by in-country scholars from eight Latin American, two Caribbean states and South Africa, who are also co-authors of the respective chapters in this volume.