Recommendations on Social Protection Floors: Basic Principles for Innovative Solutions

Recommendation on Social Protection Floors: Basic Principles for Innovative Solutions assesses the catalogue of principles included in the ILO Recommendation on Social Protection Floors from a legal perspective. Despite the international community’s recognition of social protection as a human right, the vast majority of the world’s population still has no access to social protection. In a major effort to address this situation, the International Labour Conference unanimously adopted the Social Protection Floors Recommendation 202 of 2012. However, because of the wide variety of possible schemes (and techniques that can be employed to administer them), there is a genuine risk that important values relating to social protection will be overlooked in implementing the Recommendation. This book, a collection of essays, contains an in-depth analysis of the Recommendation and sets forth a clear and practicable set of principles that can be used both as a policy tool and as an assessment framework for the creation, maintenance, and supervision of a national social protection floor.

What’s in this book:

This book pays detailed attention to each of the Recommendation’s key principles, including the following:

• state responsibility;
• universality of protection;
• entitlement based in law;
• adequacy and predictability of benefits;
• non-discrimination;
• financial solidarity;
• good governance;
• coherence of policies; and
• social participation.

A special feature of this book is its inclusion of case studies that display innovative social protection schemes focusing on children and families, persons of working age (particularly workers from the informal sector), and elderly persons. A concluding section offers useful insights into the measures that can be taken and lessons learned.

How this will help you:

As a deeply informed and practical guide to ways in which states can (and do) establish and maintain a social protection floor as a fundamental element of their national social protection systems, this book has no peers. This book provides up-to-date input for the current political and academic discourse on social protection floors and thereby fills the existing gap in this literature. Thus, this book aids jurists, academics, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations to identify deficits and implementation failures and to solve complex problems concerning social protection floors.