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Markets, Citizenship and Social Exclusion
Author: Charles Gore
Date: 1995
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9 pages
(5.5 MB)
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Summary
What are the advantages of adopting a social exclusion approach to issues of citizenship rights? Section II.2 of this chapter, published by the International Labour Organisation, argues that the condition of citizenship must be a clear part of development policy analysis. Citizenship rights appear to be severely limited in many low-income countries, with civil and political rights often as reduced as social rights. Human rights conditionality prods governments to provide certain rights to their citizens, but macro-economic conditionality undermines countries’ actual capacity to do so.
Despite there being no single framework for understanding citizenship, the case studies referred to avoid a participatory model in favour of a notion of citizens as rights-bearing individuals. The framework for citizenship developed by Marshall, largely on the basis of the British historical experience, stresses a division into civil rights, political rights and social rights. Social exclusion is seen as a kind of incomplete citizenship, caused by deficiencies in the possession of normal citizenship rights.
Further work extends Marshall’s analysis by citing further national cases of rights and patterns of inequality and by analysing the macro-dynamics of rights extension, contraction or negotiation. Other new studies inspect the effects of market-based globalisation on citizenship rights in different contexts.
Programmes of structural adjustment, unsurprisingly, have often impaired the capacity of states to provide key services. In Peru, for example, per capita government spending on education, health and other key services in 1992 equalled only 30 per cent of 1980 levels. Such structural adjustment programmes attempt to bind developing economies to the world economy, typically involving multiple conditionalities. A social exclusion approach to citizenship rights applied to numerous case studies from around the world also yields the following findings:
- Poverty creates a gap between the provision and the realisation of citizenship rights. Negotiation between individuals and groups is critical to that realisation, as shown by the micro-dynamics of property rights in Russia and Thailand.
- With increasing international mobility, whether or not one has the status of a national citizen has more and more to do with possible social exclusion.
- Persons defined as “aliens” of various types, often refugees or migrant workers, may be denied the rights of typical citizens and live under a cloud of expulsion.
- Ambiguity over how the “national community” is constituted is typical in many countries. Citizenship may have as much to do with dominant cultural codes and political behaviour as with formal status.
- With the globalisation of markets and international strictures, many governments no longer control the basis of their economy, the very source of their ability to provide citizenship rights.
- The realisation of social rights also depends on negotiating the rules of access to public goods such as education and health, as explored in Schaffer’s work.
- Further studies should examine the macro-dynamics of social rights. One relevant area is the interplay between local community-based systems of rights and obligations and the rights involved in national citizenship.
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Source:
Gore C., 1995, 'Markets, Citizenship and Social Exclusion', in Rodgers, G., Gore, C. and Figueiredo, J. 1995, 'Social Exclusion, Rhetoric, Reality, Responses', A contribution to the World Summit for Social Development, International Institute for Labour Studies, International Labour Organization, Geneva
Author:
International Labour Organisation, http://www.ilo.org/
