Social Contracts in Sub-Saharan Africa : Concepts and Measurements
In 2019, an Independent Evaluation Group review on the growing use of social contracts terminology by the World Bank concluded that social contract diagnostics are useful analytical innovations with relevant operational implications, particularly i...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/undefined/205501633362482731/Social-Contracts-in-Sub-Saharan-Africa-Concepts-and-Measurements http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36339 |
| Summary: | In 2019, an Independent Evaluation
Group review on the growing use of social contracts
terminology by the World Bank concluded that social contract
diagnostics are useful analytical innovations with relevant
operational implications, particularly in situations of
transition and social unrest. But it also found that the
World Bank had no formal, conceptual framework or shared
understanding of social contracts, leading to uneven quality
of use. This paper proposes a framework and quantitative
measures to describe social contracts. First, the paper
presents a literature review on social contract theory and
its applications in development. Second, it proposes a
conceptual framework based on three core aspects of social
contracts: (i) the citizen-state bargain, (ii) social
outcomes that form the contents of the social contract, and
(iii) resilience of the social contract in terms of how
citizens’ expectations are being met. Third, an empirical
measurement strategy is described to quantify these aspects
through six dimensions and 14 subdimensions using available
indicators from multiple sources. An empirical analysis then
successfully tests some of the framework’s predictions and
finds indicative evidence for an operationally interesting
result: that state capacity without civil capacity is often
not sufficient to generate thicker and more inclusive social
contracts, and that these better outcomes lead to less
misalignment with expectations and to less social unrest.
Fourth, the quantitative measures are used to present three
comparative maps for the general characterization of social
contracts at the cross-country level. |
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