“What the lessons of Venezuela teach us,” says Julia Buxton, professor of comparative politics and associate dean for academic affairs and programs at the School of Public Policy (SPP) at Central European University, “is that the social determinants of health can be prioritized and addressed through innovative strategies that can provide marginalized communities with increased access to quality health services.” This is one of the conclusions that Buxton reports in a detailed study that she has written for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD, Working Paper 2014/16): Social Policy in Venezuela: Bucking Neoliberalism or Unsustainable Clientelism.
The paper is one of a series that UNRISD has commissioned as part of its multi-year project “Towards Universal Social Security in Emerging Economies: Process, Institutions and Actors.” In addition to Venezuela, UNRISD is publishing studies on Brazil, China, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa.
Buxton explains that there is widespread agreement within the development community that universal provision of social security, with a focus on health care and income support, should be a priority for all emerging economies. The goal of the UNRISD project is to provide a comparative analysis of the factors that encourage, and the constraints on, efforts to implement university social security around the world. The project also looks at the implications of these efforts for poverty reduction, equity, growth, and democracy.
Although she acknowledges that Venezuela’s social policy initiatives are “deeply contested,” Buxton concludes that some of its initiatives favoring the poor represent best practice in development theory. Venezuela “provides lessons that can be transferred to other countries where there is an urgent need to rapidly address lack of access to quality health care services and unresponsive state institutions,” she says.
You can read the full text of the UNRISD paper here.