Interlinking Social and Economic Policies for Future-Oriented Structural Transformation: The Case of Botswana

Interlinking social and economic policies holds much promise for inclusive growth and structural transformation in Africa amidst renewed resource competition and the global turn to post-industrialism. Several authors have pointed to the achievements of post-Independence African governments who undertook developmental reforms that aimed for job creation, redistribution, and economic growth all at the same time. Yet, social policy and social protection policies on the continent have come to be reinterpreted from a narrower poverty alleviation angle in the neoliberal era, not least due to the strong donor presence in the field and the need to find common denominators between various different agencies. Especially the poorest countries with high levels of aid dependence have thus come to implement technical, globalised scripts instead of aiming for larger transformations of underlying power asymmetries – global and national. The latter aim, however, becomes ever more pressing in light of the changing world of work – where humans become replaced with technology – and the need for more environmentally sustainable solutions - where old-fashioned industrialisation seems no longer desirable. In my paper, I begin from this observation to explore social policies in Botswana for their transformative content. Botswana has been singled out in the Development Studies literature as an exceptional case in Sub-Saharan Africa; exceptional for its growth trajectory, developmentalism and policy autonomy. In fact, donors do not have much influence on the government’s policy choices, given its fiscal independence as a middle-income country. Meanwhile, the country is coming under increasing pressure to diversify away from diamonds and to find rural employment possibilities where farming is becoming harder due to recurrent extreme droughts. This context thus lends itself to studying the possibilities of interlinking social and economic policies under an overall, domestically-driven and sustainability-oriented, developmental vision. In my paper I present emerging findings, which indicate that social and economic policies exhibit a similar kind of non-transformative character as elsewhere in the region, despite sufficient policy space. Social protection in Botswana is highly poverty-targeted and limited by the wide-spread fear of making poor people “dependent” on the state, while education policies tend to be misaligned to the needs of the labour market. Moreover, economic strategies continue to rely on private investors for the allocation of resources, leaving the country’s economy undiversified and biased towards a few urbanised centres, even though awareness has recently been rising on the need to fundamentally alter this structure. Acknowledging Botswana’s large post-Independence achievements and the autonomy and capacity of its state, the paper discusses the limits and promises of developmental social-economic policy linkages in the country.