Introduction

This chapter argues that the poorer regions of the world do not comfortably conform to the two key assumptions upon which the OECD model of welfare state regime relies: a legitimate state; and a pervasive, formal sector labour market. This immediately sets up the two key interactive issues of governance and the socio-economic circumstances of the common man (and woman). These circumstances are understood in this chapter through the metaphor of the peasant (to capture the significance of reproduction, family and household-level inter-generational transfers) and the analysis of clientelism as pervasive adverse incorporation (comprising hierarchical rights; meso-level intermediation with the national-level polity and economy; and quasi-public goods social capital, organised through unequal relationships). These political, economic, social and family dimensions are brought together in this book, for policy analysis purposes, as the institutional responsibility matrix with global as well as domestic dimensions. These four institutional domains are presented as permeable, which can have positive or negative outcomes for different societies. The world's poor regions are characterised by negative permeability in which the level of personal objectives penetrates the level of public aims to produce poor governance and insecurity for the majority of their populations, thus removing any prospect of the corrective principle, in which the state regulates the market for social objectives. Only partial compensation for this absence of the corrective principle is offered by global discourses, conditionality and debt remission leverage.