How Social Developmentalism Reframed Social Policy in Brazil

Abstract

How Social Developmentalism Reframed Social Policy in Brazil Lena Lavinas Abstract This paper proposes to critically situate the social-developmentalist current of the last decade within the broader moment of finance-dominated accumulation regime, wherein, crucially, credit and access to financial markets have become the core motifs for the new mass-consumption market society. This structural move is, from our point of view, radically distinct from the very framework which inspired the tenets of early structuralist thought and which prevailed during the Keynesian post-war period. Today, highly segmented credit loans, private insurance, and other new financial products such as payment protection insurance have synthesized into indispensable elements for growth. In this new financialized framework, social policy has been used to underwrite a financial inclusion model that sowed the seeds of its own demise—while it enabled Brazil’s transition into a society of mass consumption, it also deepened the indebtedness of households, partially transforming social insurance and welfare benefits into financial rents.