Socially development has its roots in both social sector and social welfare models, and historically developing political claims based around identities, and their translation into policies protecting the rights of social groups such as women, ethnic minorities or people with disabilities. However, the evolution of social development policies since the setting up of the main global development institutions in the second half of the 20th Century has seen a change in emphasis from narrower conceptions of social sector development, to a broader, socially sensitive development approach, which attempts to place social transformation at the centre of development interventions across all sectors.


This module will explore the historical evolution of social policy as a sphere of intervention, to reveal its diversity in terms of: understandings of the scope and remit of ‘social’ policy vis-à-vis economic policy; its coverage in terms of the groups of women and men reached by social policy; its objectives, ranging from instrumental approaches, through those focused on human well-being, and those striving to promote social rights, and; the ways in which the policy process attempts of involve grassroots women and men and their representatives in identification of policy goals, as well as the ways in which women and men influence these policy goals through active citizenship processes.


Term 1 of the module introduces a framework to analyse the social content of development policy, and uses this framework to evaluate the social, or socially sensitive, development policy models, that have predominated in the different periods since the establishment of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods organisations in 1945.


Term 2 then goes on to explore how actors from the public sector, the private sector and civil society interact and contribute to the delivery of socially sensitive development policy in practice through the (re-)negotiation of a social contract. It looks specifically at different models of citizenship to analyse the relationships between different development actors, and to examine the spaces available to different groups of citizens to define and claim their rights, in the context an increasingly globalised society.