Social Protection Policy for Poverty Reduction in Colombia: Conceptual Challenges

Ten years after the "war against poverty," the persistence of poverty and vulnerability in the face of financial and environmental crises, as well as the growing inequality of income and resource access, represent the challenges inherited from the 2000-2010 decade in terms of social protection. These challenges are even more significant when one considers that the concept of 'social risk management,' around which the model of social protection on a global scale was articulated over the past decade, was initiated alongside the promise of transforming risk into a socio-political issue, or, in other words, a topic of planning, prevention, and management and no longer a factor related to uncertainty characteristic of an uncertain and interconnected world. The continuing social effects of similar crises at the end of the 1990s represent a call to reexamine the risk management focus of social protection. This article discusses the legacy of Holzmann and Jorgensen's seminal paper from 1999 on 'social risk management' in the face of newer ideas on social protection emphasizing the centrality of assets and rights. It presents three conceptual challenges: considering how to transform the structure and causes of poverty and exclusion; the failure of conditional cash transfer approaches to sustainably reduce poverty; and the lack of a national policy to guarantee families secure and protected lives. The paper necessarily addresses the concepts of capabilities and of extending the freedom related to "freedom for" (achieve freedom/be free). It also explores the need to develop the concept of "freedom from" (critical events) that implies a deepening of insecurity.