Developmental Welfare States in Africa: Conceptualisation and Classification

The concept of welfare state based on the criteria that G. Esping-Andersen elaborated for developed capitalist economies - OECD member-states. The problem of the possibility of implementation of this concept in African states forms the key research question of the paper. We study various theoretical and empirical classifications of approaches adapting and transferring the methodology of welfare states towards developing countries and Africa, in particular, including the ones introducing the notions of developing welfare state and meta-welfare regimes. The limitations of the implementation of this concept in Africa are connected to the absence of democratic regimes, low level of economic development and certain weakness of state as a political actor. Precommodification happening in Africa in the late 20th century while commodification was giving way to decommodification in the developed economies is in fact the main peculiarity of Africa from the viewpoint of welfare state criteria. The adapted criteria enable the usage of new terms within the academic discourse like productive, protective and dual regimes; informal security regimes and insecurity regimes; labour reserve economies and cash crop economies; Middle African and Southern African models of social protection, etc. Comparing these theoretical approaches to an empirical classification of states according to the level of Human Development Index, and taking into consideration the known worldwide rise of the index for the last decades together with the presence of state social protection programmes in Africa, we can argue that an original developing welfare state exists on the African continent which we suggest to name ‘welfare state with adjectives’. The diversity of its representations under the conditions of the absence of any unite African model of welfare state depends on the heritage of the colonial past and postcolonial transition, religion, the level of economic development, differentiated dependence on the international community and capacity of state to fulfil social functions on its own.