1.
TRANSNATIONAL
SOCIAL PROTECTION:
Changing Social Welfare
in a World on the Move
Peggy Levitt (Wellesley College
and The Global (De)Centre, in
collaboration with Erica Dobbs, Ken
Sun, and Ruxandra Paul

2.
Transnational Social Protection
 How do individuals and families protect and provide for
themselves outside the traditional framework of the nation-state?
 How is the contract between state and citizen changing? Who are
the new winners and losers when rights, residence, and
citizenship are decoupled?
 Individuals and families piece together resource environments
from the state, the market, NGOs, and their social networks in
their sending and receiving countries
 What they get access to depends upon four emerging logics
(citizenship, personhood/humanity, the market, and community)

3.
Transnational Social Protection
The New Context of Social Protection
 More and more people live outside their countries of citizenship
for extended periods to work, study, and retire
 The welfare state is in decline. Instead, we see re-
familiarization, deinstitutionalization, privatization, and
marketization.
 Disaggregation of Citizenship and Social Rights
 De-territorialization of Social Protection
 Decentering the State

4.
Transnational Social Protection
The Changing Context of Social Protection (continued)
 Social protection accessed on multiple scales (i.e. sub-
nationally, nationally, regionally, and transnationally). Nation-
states not disappearing but downsizing and supersizing.
 TSP is not a panacea. It creates new inequalities in different
forms. The nation-state is not disappearing but re-purposing
itself, shedding old functions and assuming new ones.
Inequality is redistributed not remediated.

5.
Transnational Social Protection
 The Contrasting Logics of Rights and Their Consequences for
Social Protection
 Social Protections as Constitutional Rights
 Social Protections as Human Rights
 Social Protections as Commodities
 Social Protections as Community

6.
Defining TSP and Resource
Environments as a Response
 A focus on TSP recognizes that individuals may be embedded
in transnational social fields and that multiple state and non-
state actors might protect and provide for them.
 According to OECD, “social protections” include: old age,
disability, health, maternal and child benefits, labor market
training, unemployment, and housing assistance. To this we
add education (i.e.knowledge and skill production, credentials),
labor rights, and community development.
 Four sources of support: state, market, third sector actors, or
individuals’ personal networks. Formal and informal.

7.
Defining TSP (continued)
 TSP is the policies, programs, people, organizations, and
institutions that provide for and protect individuals in these
areas in a transnational manner.
 Includes grounded actors that provide for and protect people
who move transnationally, transnational actors that provide for
and protect grounded individuals, and transnational actors that
provide for and protect transnational individuals
 Resource Environments – the intersection between various
protections available formally and informally from the state,
market, NGO sector, and social networks.

8.
College-Educated, Employed
Female Citizen in Sweden

9.
College-Educated, Employed
Female Citizen in the US

10.
A Woman from Rural Mexico
Working in LA

11.
Implications
 This is not a world of welfare without borders
 We need new policies and institutions that respond to this world
on the move where people live outside their countries of
citizenship for extended periods
 Inequality is reshuffled not eliminated. Enhanced protections for
some mean greater vulnerability for others. Tough questions
about distributive justice
 States must still be held accountable for the welfare of their
citizens (both resident and non-resident). Every human being,
no matter where they live, should be entitled to basic rights and
protections.