GLOBAL COOPERATION NEWSLETTER
November 2015
In this issue:

Feature article:
 What Kind of International Support for Social Protection Floors?
by Barry Herman
 Inter-Agency collaboration on social protection: heated discussions, some
practical outcomes and a quest for new vigor by Sergei Zelenev
 Parliamentarians to galvanize action on climate change
 Useful resources and links – the find of the month
Feature article:
 What Kind of International Support for Social Protection Floors? by Barry
HermanAfter almost 30 years of service, Dr Barry Herman retired from theUnited Nations Secretariat in December 2005. Professor Herman now
teaches in the international affairs Masters' program at The New School
in New York and works as a consultant on financing for development
issues. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan
and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

The proposal for the establishment of a new global fund for social
protection was made in 2012 by the two then Special Rapporteurs of the
UN Human Rights Council, Olivier de Schutter and Magdalena Sepúlveda.
In their view, while “the costs of providing basic social protection may be affordable whenestimated globally, for many countries the domestic costs still may be beyond their capacity,even if they were to devote their maximum available resources to that objective”. In that lighta special, solidarity-based financing mechanism guaranteeing the support of the international
community to countries that may be in need of such support to introduce or complete nationalsocialprotections
floorsshouldbecreated.
(UNHCHR
BriefingNote7
http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Food/20121009_GFSP_en.pdf ).
This brief article represents a personal reflection on the proposal to create such a fund.
The proposal received a sympathetic hearing among some international organization staff,
for instance at the ILO, the UNHCHR and the FAO, and was advocated by the Global Coalition
for Social Protection Floors at the International Conference on Financing for Development in
Addis Ababa in July of this year. However, it does not appear that the fund proposal, as such,1has attracted any interest from potential donors, at least not for the time being. While that
may not be surprising in the current international economic and political environment, I thinkthat the aims of such a solidarity-based financing mechanism are worthy and should be
realized.
While de Schutter and Sepúlveda proposed the creation of a single entity that they called the
Global Fund for Social Protection (GFSP), the authors were actually proposing to cluster a setof activities together that might be able to fit under one roof, or not. The authors’ real concern
is properly on increasing social protection of those in need, not on creating a new international
bureaucracy. And none is needed.
The proposal would boost international support to least developed countries (LDCs).
Undoubtedly, the LDCs are not the only countries requiring assistance to raise their social
protection floors to an acceptable standard that accorded with their governments’ human rights
obligations. They are, however, a well specified country grouping to which the international
community already provides special international trade and financial benefits owing to theirpoverty and vulnerability. The focus on them is understandable, but the proposal should offer
international support to any country in need.
De Schutter and Sepúlveda sought to increase two kinds of international support for social
protection services. The first would supplement the financing that an LDC could mobilize
domestically for social protection under normal (or average) circumstances. The second would
provide special international financing to meet additional social protection obligations createdby extreme natural or economic shocks. This note argues against the first and for the second.
Assistance to social protection floors in “normal” times
Funding social protection is a basic obligation of governments everywhere. ILO
Recommendation No. 202 calling for social protection floors says that they include “essential”
health care and “basic” income security for children, older persons and those in the active
population unable to earn “sufficient” income, in each case subject to national definitions. Thatmay be as precise as it is politically possible to be in an internationally negotiated definition ofsocial protection floors.
However, it is doubtful that prospective donors would simply accept national definitions ofneed. One fear might be that recipient countries would set the target for their minimum need
too high so as to take advantage of the donors’ generosity. On the other hand, de Schutter
and Sepúlveda also said that the international support to individual LDCs should be phased out
over time, including specifying a date when the support would end. That means that whatever
the level of social protection provided, there would be a political constituency that would press
to continue at least that level of protection once the international support ended. That might
be an incentive to set the floor too low.
In the end, the recipient country and its donors would have to agree on the targeted content
of the social protection floor. It would also have to be offered to all persons in the country,
regardless of gender or ethnic identity or location. Furthermore, the recipient should have toopen its accounts on social protection programs to donor scrutiny, as well as its tax revenue
and fiscal expenditure accounts, since the international support would only cover what was2needed beyond the “maximum available resources” that could be mobilized by the government
and that would be made available for social protection. Those accounts should anyway be open
to public scrutiny in the receiving country, as transparency is a necessary condition for thegovernment’s accountability, although that is often not the case. In short, international
financial assistance specifically to cover a financing gap in the full set of social protection
services requires substantial international inspection and inevitably high conditionality.
The proposal is also quite complicated because much of social protection is provided as
insurance, paid for by some combination of tax revenue and payments by beneficiaries as
insurance premiums and/or as co-pays for the services. It could be that the international
support scheme would only apply to the poorest people in the poorest countries, in which caseone may assume both the premiums and co-pays would be zero. That would simplify theestimation of the need for international support, but also might excessively limit the numberof people covered.
For example, unemployment insurance is one type of social insurance in a social protection
floor. The poorest of the poor are more likely than not to be working in the informal or
subsistence economy and not be covered by formal unemployment insurance. And yet,unemployment is likely to push many non-poor people into the ranks of the poor. So, should
an international subvention be made available to a national unemployment scheme so that alarger percentage of a worker’s wages would be paid during spells of unemployment? Or ascheme that would extend the number of weeks of unemployment that would be covered? Are
these decisions that foreign governments or multilateral institutions should make?
In the best of circumstances, the international community would have a tough job deciding
how much of which types of social protection services and when and for how long to financially
supplement services and in which countries. Similarly, recipient countries would have to decide
how much international scrutiny they would wish to invite of their domestic social, tax andoverall budgetary expenditure programs in order to qualify for the international support.
That does not mean that campaigns for an internationally supported social protection floor
are wrong-headed, only that the transfer of international funds specifically to cover overall
gaps in social protection floors is unworkable. Additional technical assistance to help countries
design or improve their systems of social protection is fully warranted. And to be sure, there
are already a number of funds that address specific pieces of a social protection floor, such as
aspects of essential health care, including combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB. However,such funds are not the solution. They encourage governments to distort domestic policy
priorities in order to capture the money offered for specific services on what are global—but
not necessarily each country’s—priorities (see United Nations, World Economic and Social
Survey, 2012).
A preferable solution is to assist all aid-receiving countries to qualify for general budget
support, convincing donors that it is time to switch more of their assistance to this form of
support, and then increasing the funding enough to help countries meet their social protection
obligations.

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Assistance to social protection floors in difficult times
The second type of activity that de Schutter and Sepúlveda envisaged for the GFSP would tohelp countries deal with temporary surges in need. Their main proposal was reinsurance; thatis, since much of domestic social protection is operated as insurance programs, those programs
could, in turn, insure themselves against unexpected surges in demand for their services
through international reinsurance schemes.
The reinsurance schemes could be specified for individual social protection programs, suchas a surge in health-care expenses needed to fight an Ebola epidemic or to rebuild housing
devastated by a hurricane. National health insurance or flood insurance programs could bereinsured against sudden higher obligations owing to some such unfortunate event. Such
schemes can even be self-financing as long as the insured events happen in only a limited
number of insured countries at the same time.
In a similar spirit, the authors refer to “catastrophe bonds”, in which the government raises
funds by issuing bonds whose interest and/or principal are waived if a named catastropheoccurs (for which reason, the interest rate on the bonds is usually higher than normal). The
World Bank is already supporting governments that want to issue “CAT bonds”, even issuing
its own in 2014 to reinsure the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility for 16 countries.
It is possible to design additional reinsurance schemes or issue additional catastrophe bonds
for national insurance programs and subsidize them when the market does not want to assume
the risk at reasonable premiums or interest rates. There is already considerable international
expertise on such matters that could be mobilized for an additional effort. That would reduce
the need to draw on additional budget revenues in emergencies or issue more government
debt or sell more foreign exchange reserves.
However, there is a broader financial strategy that would give the government more flexibility
in using the additional funds whatever specific emergency it faced. Such a strategy was
implicitly followed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1960s and 1970s throughits Compensatory Financing Facility (CFF). It provided semi-automatic and quickly disbursed
foreign exchange loans to developing countries that were impacted by economic “shocks”. Twokinds of triggers opened access to the CFF. One was loss of export revenue caused by thecollapse of export commodity prices (or domestic crises like plant disease or hurricanes). The
other was surges in cereal import costs. Those funds could be disbursed in weeks following aquick assessment of the losses incurred and decision on the share that IMF was willing tocover.
The CFF was meant to address temporary needs arising from volatility. The analyticaldifficulty was in knowing whether a country had a temporary shortage or a structural challenge,
as from a secular decline in its export prices. The latter would require an economic adjustment,e.g., switching production from export crops with declining price trends to ones with rising
prices. However, the demise of the CFF as a distinct policy tool was not caused by the analyticalchallenge but an ideological one, namely, the market fundamentalism and shrunken economicrole of the state that arrived in the 80s with Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK.

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The IMF today has a variety of lending facilities, but none that operates like the original CFF.
However, with a new global commitment to Sustainable Development Goals, perhaps thepolitical winds can once again change. IMF has the capacity to manage a renewed CFF(subsidizing interest payable on poor country drawings) and countries would have no need tonegotiate an adjustment program under the terms for drawing from it.
One reason to suspect that it might be time to try to resurrect a CFF is that general financeas part of the international response to crises has become more common. Thus, the Paris Club,
consisting of developed country government creditors, has adopted a practice of jointly offering
unilateral postponement of debt servicing owed to them following natural and man-madecatastrophes (http://www.clubdeparis.org/en/communications/page/exceptional-treatmentsin-case-of-crisis). IMF has also created a program of special support for poor countries
experiencing shocks, which provides grants to cover debt servicing owed to IMF (Catastrophe
Containment and Relief Trust). It has been used by countries fighting Ebola. And on November
19 the Paris Club announced in its debt restructuring for Grenada a first-ever “hurricane
clause”.
The governments benefiting from such measures are not constrained in how they use thefunds freed by debt relief. An obvious priority would be to help finance their crisis-related social
protection needs. The principle thus seems internationally agreed. A reformed and enlarged
CFF would be a way to further implement it.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and may not necessarily reflect
the position of the ICSW Management Committee. The writer may be reached atherman@socdevjustice.org.

Inter-Agency collaboration on social protection: heated discussions, some
practical outcomes and a quest for new vigor by Sergei Zelenev

The Seventh Meeting of the Social Protection Inter-Agency Cooperation Board (SPIAC-B) took
place in New York on 24 November 2015. The participants, who represented the UN agencies,
bilateral and intergovernmental institutions, national development assistance agencies,
member states and other stakeholders, covered a broad range of political and technical issues.
In accordance with the established procedures, the meeting of the Board was co-chaired bysenior representatives from the ILO and the World Bank. The ICSW is a member of the Boardand actively participates in its work since the inception.
It was noted that the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in September
2015, as well as the preparatory process leading to the Agenda, provided a boost to the social
protection discourse, moving it forward on both the national and the international levels. Theinternational community recognized the most important role played by social protection ineradicating poverty and achieving various sustainable development goals. Social protection
was referred as a fundamental element contributing to outcomes across the area of health,gender, decent work and inclusive growth and inequalities. The Universal Social Protection
Initiative, launched recently by the ILO and the World Bank, was highly appreciated as animportant collaborative effort to support countries in their quest for providing universal

5coverage. (Please go to the July 2015 Global Cooperation Newsletter for more details).
According to the concept note prepared for the meeting by the SPIAC-B Secretariat,“international organizations and other stakeholders are adjusting their strategic plans, scaling
up existing initiatives and launching new ones to respond to demands related to theimplementation of the 2030 Agenda”.
The participants of the SPIAC-B meeting not only presented specific information and analysesof the ongoing programmes conceived by the respective agencies in response to the 2030
Agenda, but also made an attempt to explore synergies and other ways to enhanceintergovernmental collaboration in the area of social protection in the longer run.
Addressing the Board, the Executive Director of the ICSW noted that the policy space createdby the adoption of the 2030 Agenda signifies a new window of opportunity for all stakeholders
in finding innovative solutions to the most pressing development challenges, including
universal social protection. In this light a new high-level political “push” at the international
level aimed at upholding social protection as a stand-alone issue would be highly desirable,
particularly in the context of the intergovernmental policy dialogue and negotiations conductedat the United Nations in the wake of the adoption of the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable
Development. Such an outcome of the multilateral negotiations would make it possible tocapitalize on the growing recognition of the significant role that social protection plays insociety.
The adoption of a dedicated UN resolution on social protection would be most important infocusing attention to some key issues pertinent to universal social protection, including floors,and its multiple benefits for society, thus reinforcing a political impact of ILO Recommendation
No. 202 adopted in 2012. Such a dedicated resolution would become a testimony to the highlevel political commitment to advance social protection at all levels.
At the same time the UN-negotiated resolution would address a different political constituency,
also entailing a system-wide consistent monitoring of the agreed conclusions. In that vein, a
proposal was put forward by the ICSW to the members of the Board representing the Member
States and working within the remit of the forthcoming 54th session of the Commission forSocial Development, namely, to consider elaborating a draft ECOSOC resolution on national
floors of social protection as a necessary political step towards universal and comprehensivesocial protection for all, taking into account that once social protection floors are establishedand become operational at the national level, the achievement of several core targets of theSDGs comes within reach.
There was an encouraging response to that proposal by the diplomats as well as from the UN
Secretariat staff present at the meeting. What specific outcomes could be achieved if suchnegotiations on a dedicated resolution take place is a matter of political trade-offs. Obviously,
further advocacy work on the part of civil society organizations is required to start the ballrolling.
The representative of the International Trade Union Confederation underscored the importanceof the coordination work done in the area of social protection at the international level but
warned against complacency. He also put forward a suggestion that the Global Coalition forSocial Protection Floors should be more closely involved in the Board work, particularly

6regarding the ongoing joint efforts of the ILO and the World Bank aimed at social protection
assessment and other pertinent practical tools.
In an effort to unpack the social protection deliverables contained in the outcome documentof the Third International Conference on Financing for Development convened this year in
Addis Ababa, the participants in the meeting shared their plans and strategies to support theimplementation of the Addis Ababa Conference commitments to a new social compact thatwould include a provision of fiscally sustainable and nationally appropriate social protection
systems and measures for all, including social protection floors. Given that member statescommitted themselves in Addis “to strong international support for these efforts”, including
exploration of ”coherent funding modalities to mobilize additional resources for these efforts,building on country-led experiences”, the participants sought to elaborate measures andschemes to facilitate the support of the international community for social protection financing.
The issues of capacity-building and knowledge-sharing were also discussed at length. In thatlight the most illuminating was the presentation to the participants of some outcomes of thejoint effort to develop the Inter-Agency Social Protection Assessment (ISPA) Tools. This may
be considered a quite impressive international effort overseen by the SPIAC Board to develop
and test in country contexts specific machinery aimed at supporting government efforts todevelop social protection systems. ISPA tools not only highlight current provision and analyze
existing gaps, but also provide cost estimates. The tools are still under development, and giventhat there is no “one-size-fits-all solution” and the needs in different countries will inevitably
vary depending on specific circumstances, further efforts are required to provide a morenuanced approach. A progress report by the ISPA Tools team was presented to the meeting,accompanied by a visual presentation of a set of tools on social protection assessment anddelivery that are being developed; the announcement was made that the ISPA Tools team isdeveloping a web site and planning for a launch on 24 February 2016.
Social protection capacity-strengthening was one of the important aspects of the Board's
deliberations. The European Union Social Protection Systems Programme (EU-SPS) cofinanced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and theGovernment of Finland was unveiled. The aim of the new programme is to support low- andmiddle-income countries in building sustainable and inclusive social protection systems. As
was noted by the representatives of Finland, this programme will be implemented from 2015
to 2018 in partnership with national and regional social protection authorities, think-tanks andexpert institutions in ten countries (Cambodia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Mozambique,
Namibia, Tanzania, Togo, Vietnam and Zambia). Given the growing emphasis put on capacitydevelopment and/or capacity-strengthening, there is a need for greater coordination andbetter use of the emerging synergies. There is also a clear need for consistent and systematic
monitoring, evaluation and lessons-learning.
Dr Sergei Zelenev is the Executive Director of ICSWParliamentarians to galvanize action on climate change

More than 500 parliamentary delegates, including close to 300 MPs from across the world, willseek to galvanize parliamentary action to deal with the global threat posed by climate change
by implementing a potentially landmark global agreement after they meet in Paris next week.

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Organized by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and the French Parliament, the meeting on
5-6 December is expected to adopt an outcome document and endorse a parliamentary action
plan on climate change to support solution-focused global measures to curb greenhouse gas
emissions and combat climate change. With a global deal on the issue hanging in the balance,
the MPs will urge world leaders at the 21st session of the Conference of Parties to the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 11th session of the Conferenceof Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP21/CMP11), taking place in parallel to the parliamentary
event, to agree on specific means by which their pledges will be turned into reality. The MPsfrom more than 80 countries, including 26 Speakers and Deputy Speakers of Parliament, areexpected to stress the urgency with which the climate change threat must be addressed andthe vital role of parliaments and parliamentarians in delivering change on the issue. The
parliamentary meeting will take place at the French National Assembly on 5 December and theFrench Senate on 6 December. During the two days, the MPs will cover issues relating to thegreen economy, green energy, moving from climate science to parliamentary action andpriorities for global action. “There has been no time to lose on climate change for a long time.
More than ever, the world needs a binding agreement to come out of COP21. And it needs
parliaments to take that agreement and translate it into effective laws, properly resourced for
implementation and follow-up,” says IPU President Saber Chowdhury.

The MPs will urge

COP21 to add the outcomes of their meeting to those of the UN summit. The parliamentaryaction plan on climate change is also expected to be formally adopted by the IPU membershipat its next Assembly in Lusaka in March 2016.
For more details please go to: http://www.ipu.org/press-e/pressrelease201511261.htm



Useful resources and links – the find of the month

1) Falling through the Net? Gender and social protection in the PacificAuthors/editor(s): Margaret Jolly, Helen Lee, Katherine Lepani, Anna Naupa and Michelle
RooneyNew York, 2015
This paper prepared by the UN-WOMEN examines the gender dimensions and implications ofsocial protection in relation to rapid transformations in the globalizing economies in the Pacificregion. Analyzing the dynamics of gender and social protection, the authors explore how best
to approach social protection so as to promote gender equality as well as the need to movebeyond bipolar divisions of customary and commodity economies or informal and formal
economies to consider the everyday realities of making a living.
See more at: http://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2015/9/dpsgender-and-social-protection-in-the-pacific#sthash.aLfH8N8g.dpuf

82) Value for Money analysis of DFID-funded WASH programmes in six countries
Synthesis Report by Sophie Trémolet, Marie-Alix Prat, Lucrezia Tincani, Ian Ross, Ana
Mujica, Peter Burr and Barbara Evans. DFID, London, 2015
This report presents summary findings from the Value for Money (VFM) analysis
conducted for six programmes funded by the UK Department for International Development(DFID) between September 2013 and April 2015. Based on those findings, the reportformulates insights on how VFM analysis can be used to improve Water, Sanitation and Hygiene(WASH) programming. Focus programmes were implemented by the country’s government,by large organizations such as UNICEF or by small NGOs. See the project website for more
information: http://vfm-wash.org
Forfurther
detailsonthereport:http://vfm-wash.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/08/OPM-2015-Synthesis-report-of-6-VFM-WASH-studies.pdf

The content of this Global Newsletter may be freely reproduced or cited provided the sourceis acknowledged. The views do not necessarily represent policies of ICSW.
Newsletter Editor: Sergei Zelenev, Executive Director
Address: ICSW, 5700 Arlington Ave., Bronx, New York, 10471 (US Office)Phone: +1 347-526- 4893,
E-mail: szelenev@icsw.org, icsw@icsw.org
Website www.icsw.org;
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