Exploring the Potential of Interlinking Social and Economic Policies for Structural Transformation: The Case of Botswana

Interlinking social and economic policies holds much promise for inclusive growth and structural transformation in Africa, as several authors have pointed out with regards to foregone eras of developmentalism. Yet, in many countries, social policy is used mainly as a poverty alleviation tool instead of underpinning a process of economic restructuring into higher value activities for more and better employment. This can be at least partly attributed to the strong donor presence in the field of social protection and social policy, who act in silos and/or follow neoliberal scripts of poverty targeted social protection and market-driven economic development.

In my paper, I begin from this observation to explore the social policy in Botswana for its transformative content. Botswana has been singled out in much of 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. This context thus lends itself to studying the possibilities of interlinking social and economic policies under an overall, domestically-driven developmental ideology.

Emerging empirical findings, however, 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 also 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. While acknowledging Botswana’s large post-Independence achievements, the paper thus sheds some doubt on its characterisation as a development state.