Since the early 2000s international development agencies have actively promoted social protection as a new global public policy. This process can be understood as flowing from related shifts within the global political economy and of development ideology, and involved international development...

Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The existing literature on social assistance, or...

This paper examines the rise of the social protection agenda in Zambia, and demonstrates that this has two alternative drivers: shifting dynamics within Zambia's political settlement and the promotional efforts of a transnational policy coalition. We compare the cases of social cash transfers...